Interesting Development Stories Of The Map System

Do You Know The Stories Of PoE Map System? If you joined Path of Exile in the last half decade, you’re likely familiar with its end-game Map System. Today, we will talk about the history of Path of Exile’s map system.

Before you know Path of Exile’s map system, you should understand that path of exile currency is indispensable in game, currency items are used to pay for items in player trading.

There are two key philosophies that guided developer’s end-game design: Random levels are critical, anywhere can be a functional end-game.

This sounds crazy, but it’s surprisingly true for Action RPGs. Developer had a build of Path of Exile during the internal Alpha that went up to Brutus, and the Alpha community looking for coveted level 12 rares (as Brutus was level 10 then) and trying to be the first to reach level 20.

Path of Exile initially had four difficulty levels while it only had two acts during Beta. To try to avoid the repetition of playing just one highest area over and over, developers made their final difficulty level completely flat in terms of area level, so you could play anywhere you wanted in the game. It was also very challenging in terms of monster difficulty.

Unfortunately, with a completely flat final difficulty, they encountered two problems:

In order to be an end-game that you slowly improve your ability to play, it was very challenging and felt like a wall of difficulty to many players. They were concerned that they weren’t able to kill monsters in it and they died repeatedly.

Those players that could kill monsters quickly worked out the best farming areas that had a combination of weak monster AI and linear layouts. The Ledge was a great example of this.

To address these two issues, developers added a light tapering to Merciless difficulty so that players were encouraged to play in harder areas.

While this improved the boredom issue of people playing the same areas over and over, it created an entirely new problem that developers hadn’t seen before: content difficulty entitlement.

Players would finish the Merciless difficulty level and were excited to play in the Maelstrom of Chaos. Because the areas were connected together, they could easily skip the first ones by running through them to get to the harder content. This was fine when the players were able to handle the harder content, but it failed in reality.

In the 0.9.11 patch, developers replaced the Maelstrom of Chaos with the Map System. It greatly improved all of the above problems and was welcomed by players.