A few days ago, the number of people online on Steam broke through a new peak, reaching 39,205,447. Among them, there are two games that have contributed greatly to this data, one is NetEase Games' "Marvel Brawl", and the other is "Path of Exile 2". We've talked about Marvel Brawl before, so let's talk about Path of Exile 2 this time.

The developer of Path of Exile 2 is Grinding Gear Games (GGG), but in 2018, Tencent acquired nearly 80% of GGG's shares, and GGG became one of Tencent's subsidiaries.

At the time, GGG wrote in a Q&A post on the forum: "We will remain an independent company and there will be no major changes to the way we operate." We want to assure the community that this acquisition will not impact the development or operation of Path of Exile. "Tencent is the world's largest game publisher and has a reputation for respecting the creative independence of its portfolio companies."

Indeed, after so many years, GGG's "Path of Exile 2" this time still maintains a superb level, and the highest number of concurrent users of "Path of Exile 2" on Steam is 578,000, which is more than double the all-time record of the previous game. At the same time, the game also topped the Steam best-selling chart and continued to dominate the chart for 5 days, with a peak audience of 1.23 million on Twitch, surpassing Diablo 4's record of 940,000.

Before the Early Access version went live, the team posted an early warning on social media: "We just reached 1 million people in Early Access and players may have to queue up to enter. ”

Today's popularity is worthy of their 8 years of hard work, they noticed many of the shortcomings of the first generation, and improved them in the second generation, the addition of new mechanics and the reinforcement of the action system, so that this new POE (Path of Exile) work has gone to a new future, and may even push this category to a new peak.

Beyond Blizzard? Tencent also did it

Dark like games, in terms of gameplay and framework, can indeed be summed up simply by the three words "brush, brush, brush". The core gameplay of this type of game revolves around equipment acquisition, character growth, and monster challenges, which can form a relatively simple gameplay loop.

But it's from such a simple framework,GGG has done it to the extreme,POE's skill system has always been the best game in the same genre,Depth、Fun and diversification,Not to mention a hundred flowers blooming every season,At least it won't enter the dark next door to the kind of "painful barbarians"。 In addition, each season change can provide enough valuable new content for players to brush, for example, "Season of the Center" introduces the first maze type map that is almost infinitely generated, allowing players to explore the BD strength infinitely; "Manor Season" allows players to plant monsters and fight monsters, and then use the life force provided by the monster fighting to make outfits, rather than forcing players to gamble on a piece of equipment throughout the whole process.

It is this mentality of "one road to the dark" that was called the road to graduate school when it was exiled in the first generation, and the content that has been precipitated for nearly 11 years makes the game extremely expensive to learn, resulting in "Path of Exile" Although it is famous, most players are just discouraged. Officials are obviously aware of this, and in recent seasons, they have taken care of newbies, such as the S25 season, which allows players to "prostitute" equipment more fairly, but unfortunately there are still many novices who have been dissuaded before they reach the "other world".

Therefore, if you ask old players about POE's pit entry advice now, then they will most likely reply to you: "Run", or wait for 2 generations.

In fact, "Path of Exile 2" was unveiled as early as 5 years ago, but it was very sporadically announced some news, and even jumped tickets many times, which whetted the appetite of many players. In this update of "Path of Exile 2", the old players with a large base are rushing to test the water with the mentality of inheriting skins and warehouses, and many new players who used to wait and see are rushing to the reshuffle of the POE environment, and it is not surprising that the number of players has surged.

The second generation inherits the characteristics of the first generation, first of all, in terms of talent BD, this game still uses a huge chart to show the talent trees of each class. Although it looks scary, however, compared to the previous generation, the area around the development direction of each class in this game is more distinct. This means that when choosing a single class, players tend to focus only on the talent points related to the direction of that class, and have little interest in other areas. For warriors only, you can charge into battle like a traditional warrior, you can also release fire magic long-range attacks, and you can inject skills into the totem in advance to have a positional battle, at this time there is only one "field expansion" in my mind. For example, there's a talent that allows you to equip a two-handed weapon with one hand, which allows you to pull out two two-handed hammers while fighting.

In this game, the game's dual talent system gives players more BD space, which can merge two completely different genres at the same time on a single character to achieve a true two-eat-in-one fish. In the past, in many loot RPGs, players had to make trade-offs in addition points to meet the needs of different equipment if they wanted to try out a variety of weapon routines. For example, in Diablo 2, although the ability to switch between two weapons is designed, due to the limitations of the dot system, players are often unable to flexibly switch between multiple weapon types, making this design useless.

Even Path of Exile Gen 1 has a talent system built around a single type of weapon. If a player wants to equip both far and melee weapons, this is almost impossible due to the design of the talent system. Eventually, players' build builds will still revert to revolving around a single weapon type.

In F2, players can bind a portion of their talents to two sets of weapons, and in battle, they will be able to choose which skills to use automatically, so that as a mage, you can achieve both Ice and Lightning Specializations, and even if you use the skills of both elements back and forth, it will adapt to your build.

The biggest change is that Path of Exile 2 extends the action of the game. Musk, a core player who has entered the top 20 of "Diablo 4", commented on X that "Path of Exile 2" is like a combination of "Elden Ring" and "Diablo". Many people may think of the dark horse "Malicious Instinence" in the first half of this year, but the core of Path of Exile is still a brush game after all, and it is impossible to adjust the value too low, so it actually operates more like a 3D version of "Hades".

As for whether Path of Exile 2 is necessary to make this shift, we might as well look at it from multiple dimensions.

On the one hand, this transformation has brought a certain degree of circle expansion effect to the game. Jonathan, the producer of Path of Exile 2, has mentioned that he wants to revolutionize the brush game with beautiful graphics and more action-packed operations. Obviously, the Path of Exile generation has reached the pinnacle in looting BD (construction), and the second generation ensures that players spend more time in battle than they do to pick up garbage, giving players a completely different experience, and in today's market where action games still dominate the market, enhancing the sense of impact and action is obviously a big selling point.

On the other hand, will the change in the underlying operation logic make old players buy it? For example, when the operation mode of League of Legends changes from mouse click to WASD control, there will be many veteran players who are not used to it. The same is true for Path of Exile 2, where an increase in APM (actions per minute) can also exacerbate the frustration of many action game sufferers.

In this test, many players reported that the difficulty of the game is too high, especially the map of the dreadnought, which almost requires players to clear the level with one life, but the narrow map design makes it impossible for players to roll, and once surrounded, it can be said that there is almost no possibility of resistance.

As you can tell from a recent official update, they are still in a quest for balance, such as a new respawn point in the middle of the Dreadnought map, and some smaller monsters that can be pushed down while dodging rolls.

From the general direction, combined with the already top-notch BD design, the addition of action makes "Path of Exile 2" have the possibility of creating new categories, and if you put the BD depth of POE into action games such as "Black Myth", "God of War" and "Old Man's Ring", you must not dare to imagine how fun the game will be. As for some shortcomings, the game is still in the EA stage, and the generation can operate for nearly 10 years, which is inseparable from the team's long-term thinking and close connection with the community, and the short-term shortcomings are not a shortcoming.

Tencent's multi-point flowering investment is another city

Tencent's motivation for acquiring Grinding Gear Games (GGG) can be understood from many angles, the most direct of which is "spending money to buy word of mouth".

Since its launch in 2013, Path of Exile has quickly attracted and gathered a loyal player base around the world thanks to its deep and complex skill tree system, rich and diverse equipment system, and fair play model without a store. Its unique game design and operation philosophy have made Path of Exile hailed by the majority of players and media as a "true sequel to the dark spirit", and its influence in the game industry is increasing day by day.

In terms of specific results, Path of Exile quickly attracted 1.5 million players after the game was launched. Subsequently, its influence in the game industry reached a new height, winning the Best PC Game Award from the foreign media GameSpot, you must know that it was a strong opponent of "Dota 2" that competed with it back then. IGN also gave Path of Exile a whopping 8.8 points, which is even 0.5 points higher than the classic Diablo 2, which is enough to show its excellent game quality and player recognition. At a time when the credibility of the Western media had not yet collapsed, such an evaluation was still very valuable.

After the acquisition of GGG, Tencent also showed its consistent "angel investor" style. Tencent did not interfere with the normal production and development process of the game, but gave GGG full autonomy. On the other hand, Tencent has also provided strong support for GGG in terms of marketing and marketing through Level Infinite, an overseas publishing brand that is one of the Tencent Games Internationalization Team (IEGG). For example, in this "Path of Exile 2", producer Jonathan mentioned that Level Infinite planned and organized related offline exhibition activities, clearing some unnecessary obstacles.

Nowadays, IEGG is committed to promoting the globalization process of Tencent games, and has established close ties with excellent game studios around the world. For example, in the first half of this year, "Last Era" surpassed "Path of Exile" with a peak of 264,000 simultaneous Steam online, and its studio Eleventh Hours received investment from Tencent in 2022.

More specifically, it is to participate in the TGIF program that Ma Xiaoyi has proposed within Tencent, which aims to help start-up teams successfully run products. During the development of the game, its leader, Juno Shin, also publicly stated that the team has in-depth cooperation with IEGG's VentureLab, including strategic planning, market analysis, resource integration, etc. It was with this help that "The Last Era" eventually achieved millions of sales and won wide recognition in the market.

With the precedent of "POE" and "The Last Era", Tencent can leverage its reputation as an "angel investor" to bring more excellent category studios under its command, and at the same time, accumulate more technical reserves and experience for Tencent to develop related products on its own.

The PC market is on the road to "rise".

I don't know if you remember this year's Cologne exhibition, Tencent came up with 15 games, of which more than 10 are PC games. Regarding the importance of the PC market, Ma Xiaoyi once concluded: PC users are more active, its market is relatively more defensive, and the fault tolerance of the PC operation depth is also the highest among all platforms, which can present better gameplay and creativity.

By August, the success of Black Myth had once again pushed the boundaries of the gaming PC market, making more and more gamers inclined to immerse themselves in these high-quality gaming experiences. "Forced" domestic game giants to come up with higher-level products in the PC game market to meet this rapidly changing market.

Overseas analyst Ahmad shared the market overview in early December, not only Tencent, NetEase, and Paperstack have all turned back to target the PC market, and have also come up with brilliant results.

Looking back, such as Lingyoufang's "Shadow Blade Zero", Paperfold's "Late Ming Dynasty: The Feather of the Abyss", Xishanju's "Limit Solving Machine", and NetEase's "Outbounds Frenzy" are all on the way, making full preparations for further winning the PC share. Perhaps, in the near future, we will be able to hear foreign players exclaiming: "The moon in China is rounder." "This is not only an affirmation of the achievements of the development of China's game industry, but also a strong proof of the improvement of China's cultural soft power.

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