Path of Exile’s upcoming Secrets of the Atlas expansion is shaping up to be one of the most ambitious updates in the game’s long history. Launching with update 3.26, the expansion introduces a new endgame system based on unraveling Zana’s fragmented memories, alongside a newboss-rush challengeleague called “Mercenaries of Trarthus.” With quality-of-life upgrades like map storage panels and a long-requested pause feature, and new tools for crafting, character builds, and Atlas progression, Secrets of the Atlas is undoubtedly a major step forward forPath of Exile.
Game Rant recently interviewedPath of Exilegame director Mark Roberts about the upcoming Secrets of the Atlas expansion launching with update 3.26, asking some of the biggest questions that needed answers. During the interview, Roberts was more than happy to dig into various aspects of the content update, including the new pause feature, storage panels, and the evolution ofPath of Exile’s endgame.
Path of Exile’s New Pause Feature, Storage Panels, and Endgame
Q: The introduction of a pause feature inPath of Exileis a notable change. Could you elaborate on how this system operates, particularly regarding its limitations during pinnacle boss encounters and its behavior in high-latency situations?
A:So, in general, the simple way is, when you press Escape, you pause, just to get through the ultimate basics of it. Same when you open the menu on console. Then you have any full-screenuser interface, in the Passive Tree, and a bunch of ones that we’ve selected. So, when you’re engaging with a mercenary, it flags you as a pause. And when I say “flag you as paused,” it’s because in multiplayer, every player has to have opted in for pausing for it to pause the area that way you may’t disrupt other people while they’re playing. We have this inPoE 2as well. It works the same way, and it works pretty well.
The other thing is, I can’t remember the exact numbers in terms of how much it has to detect, but if the instance stops receiving communication from your client, as in, if you’re having networking issues, it will automatically pause the instance, which will prevent you from dying or anything of the sort happening. As soon as you start lagging and lag is detected, which is effectively just dropped frames, then it will pause the game, and of course that applies to disconnection as well. So, if you disconnect, the soonest moment it can know that you’ve disconnected, it will pause the game. So for hardcore, you have a much, much lower chance of dying.
Now for bosses, it’s not like every boss is immune to pausing; some are. We spoke about them asPath of Exile’s pinnacle bosses, and these are kind of like the ten hardest bosses in the game. Now, the reason we’ve done that is because it obviously does get a little bit exploitative. When that is the case, people can just press escape and then see what the boss' next skill is going to be, or as they’re doing the telegraphing for it, pause and go, “Okay, I’m going to run here,” and then they unpause and attack, and then they pause.
It kind of promotes this kind of gameplay where we don’t want the hardest,most difficult contentin the game to be trivialized by that pausing strategy. Those fights are intended to be hard and are for the elite of the elite, so preventing pausing on them helps. It also helps prevent a lot of, for example, abullet-hell style mechanicis obviously much easier to plan and dodge if you may kind of just constantly pause and unpause.
So, the general easy thing for us to do there was to prevent pausing during those boss fights. Now, we haven’t done that toevery boss fightin the game. It’s only the true tests of difficulty and the ones where you are proving your character’s power and your skill. The rest of the game, you can pause as you wish.
What we have found, of course, is that the majority of people, even when fighting other bosses, don’t do that. Most people are willing to just do the fight the normal way, but when you get toPath of Exile’s endgamewhere things have an economic value, the pinnacle bosses require you to have farmed a thing or earned this thing that has economic value in order to do it. And as soon as you have an economic ticket, people are more inclined to be way more cautious and that involves doing things like pausing to try and verify they succeed at the fight as opposed to using their skill and character power to overcome it.
Q: The new storage panel for maps, scarabs, and fragments aims to streamline endgame mapping. How does this feature enhance the player experience, and are there plans to expand its functionality in future updates?
A:There are a few things we might be able to do, but, for now, it was just simply that a lot of what endgame ends up looking like — I wouldn’t say your average player is going to be dealing with this in endgame. It’s more like once you get very, very high end. What a lot of players like to do is craft many, many, many maps. They’ll doone big crafting sessionand then run many maps back to back. And some people are more like, craft a map, run the map, craft a map, run the map. That’s also fine.
But we have quite a large audience who like to craft many, many maps and then run all of those maps in one go. And so they’ll get, say, their 20 maps, they’ll get their 20 of each type of scarab or fragment they want to use, and then they’ll just run them back to back to back to back to back. After doing all 20, they’ll do another crafting or trading session and then rinse and repeat. And so this is mostly targeted towards helping those players, because they now get to keep all of those maps in that little inventory as well as their scarabs and whatever can fit there. And then they get to do their big mapping session and then, once it’s empty, they get to go back and craft a whole bunch more and refill it.
It’s kind of hitting a specific target audience, and it’s probably more at the top end of people who are reallyfarmingPath of Exile’s endgameas opposed to, you know, just progressing through it. But of course, it’s always nice to just have a little inventory there. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the next three maps I’m going to run.” You just have them there. It’s nice.
You don’t get them lost because, obviously, once you get to the endgame, your stashes can get a little bit chaotic. You get a lot of items, you start having to do a lot of item organization. So, having that separate little inventory is very helpful for just keeping those maps you want to run separate, and you don’t have to lose them in your stash somewhere or keep them in your inventory.
Q: With Orb of Horizons now applicable to Elder and Conqueror Guardian maps, how do you anticipate this change will affect map progression and player strategies in the endgame?
A:It won’t affect general progression, but when it comes to then getting to do the pinnacle bosses, it will help with that. It was already doable with Shaper, and so what you found is that people could reroll the Hydra, the Minotaur, the Phoenix, and the Chimera. That was already doable with these. People were already able to run more Shapers without having to trade with players, or beat the whims of RNGbecause of this. So, we just wanted to kind of normalize that across the other two and allow people to reroll that as well.
Ultimately, what it ends up resulting in is just less need to trade and less frustration of getting the same one or one or two over and over and over again and never getting your fourth piece. It happened pretty frequently, where people have three of each fragment, and they’re missing the fourth fragment, and it’s just like, “Oh my, I just want to do this boss.” Like, they’ve done nine guardians, and they still haven’t been able to do the one pinnacle. So, ultimately, it creates a bit of consistency, less randomly gated, and less need for trading, which I think are all things people would probably appreciate.
Path of Exile’s Atlas Tree Evolution
Q: There are speculations about new constellations or node clusters in the Atlas passive tree. Can you provide insights into any upcoming changes or expansions to the Atlas skill tree in this update?
A:Well, we are adding a number of clusters to do with the new mechanics to do with memory strands and the memory threads, 100%. So, we showed some of them, but like allowing you to target farm specific bosses to some degree and whatnot is very useful. You can increase the amount of items you’re getting, the frequency you’re seeing, the memory threads, and all of that. We like to do all of that, it’s often nice. Some people will spec into that on one tree and then, because you have threepassive Atlas tree loadouts, maybe one of them is for that, one of them’s for another. You know, up to the user.
Obviously, on top of that, we’re adding the stuff for all the settlers to be able to get more oars and thus more things to use for shipping, for your town. And there’s a couple of other little interesting things there. But aside from that, generally it’s just like little bits of tweaks here and there to various nodes that are either too strong or too weak. Not very much, because we’re putting more of our focus into modifying this and updating the scarabs than we are updating the Atlas tree this time around.
So, the Atlas tree gets new things, 100% for the new content, but we’re focusing more on updating the endgame meta strategies for the existing content by focusing more on modifying and updating scarabs as opposed to the Atlas tree this time around. I think there might be a few changes around Betrayal as well, since we gave that a bit of a change, but again, it’s just to make it work and maybe some scarabupdates inPath of Exileas well on that one, but nothing too drastic or too major on that axis.
Q: The addition of two new currency orbs that interact with existing item mechanics has been teased. Could you share details on how these orbs function and their intended impact on crafting and gameplay?
A:So, there are six item influence types in the endgame. You have the four Conquerors, and then you have Shaper and Elder. Shaper and Elder were only from drops, whereas the other four had an exalted orb that could be obtained from boss fights. So, now we’ve also added Shaper and Elders. So, now there are exalted orbs that will add the influence and add an influence modifier to a rare item for each of those slots. Each of them has a custom mod pool that’s extra, and you can’t find a regular item.
The ultimate impact is that I would expect to see people using a bit more Elder and Shaper items because they can exalt their existing items into them as opposed to having to craft them from scratch in order to get them. On top of that, I would expect to see a little bit more of the use of hybrid influences, using the Awakener’s Orb.
And, we are adding some new unique items that I kind of teased that interact with these new influences. I would expect to see that all of these orbs are getting used in the context of using those new unique items, which people will have to wait and find to see because I like those special ones to be found and discovered so people can get excited about that as opposed to us spoiling all of that.
Q: Following the introduction of new ascendancy classes in previous leagues, are there plans to integrate alternative ascendancies into the core game in 3.26, perhaps through unique jewels or other systems?
A:Not currently. What I’ve done is when we’ve been rebalancing theexisting classes inPath of Exile, we’ve been looking at some of those cool alternate properties and seeing what can fit and replacing them, especially some of the things players liked. An example being the whole you gain a random shrine buff every ten seconds. I think it was on the Whisperer, I can’t remember exactly which class it was in Legacy of Phrecia, but we’ve added that now to the Guardian, replacing one of the nodes that people weren’t taking because it was too underpowered or niche.
So, replacing some of those is obviously a nice way that we can get some of the benefit, and we know which of these nodes are already powerful or not, because that league helped us get that answer, Legacy of Phrecia, that is. But I want to do more with that in the future, 100%. I actually want to do more with the ascendancy class changes. One of the issues we’ve had in the past is, of course, when you take away something that people really like, it’s kind of hard, unless you’re replacing it with something equally or more powerful.
But I think I want to try and find a way to be a little bit more, changing the ascendancy classes inPath of Exilea lot more and making it more dynamic, and that will make people feel like they’re getting that new class vibe whenever they’re playing and playing in new leagues. It’s a very easy way for us to do it.
So, even if the class has the same name and the same overall kind of theme, changing a lot of the nodes in more than just a numerical sense, can really achieve a lot in terms of making it feel like there’s awhole new class to play inPath of Exile, and it unlocks dozens and maybe even hundreds of different builds just by doing that.
Q: Are there plans to introduce new socketable modifiers or cluster-style expansions to the Atlas passive tree in 3.26? How might these changes impact endgame customization?
A:Not in 3.26, but I certainly would be keen to explore more. We have a lot of extra layers on the regular passive tree, and I do want them to be separate, but I’ve tried to think of a few systems there, and I have a few in mind that I think can work that will feel different from the regular tree but effectively allow you to better customize your Atlas passive tree and do some kind of crazy stuff. Yes, eventually, not in 3.26.
One thing that is good about 3.26 and the narrative is that, as much as the Zana storyline is additive this time round to the existing endgame, it allows us to set up for a future, for building and extrapolating thatstory inPath of Exileto create a number of more endgame expansions, and I am hoping that we get to do that. We never know because we might pivot and go with a different narrative or something else, but, ultimately, it’s safe to say I am thinking of future endgame expansions, that’s for sure.
And I will definitely be expanding on the Atlas passive tree and a number of other systems while we’re at it. You’ll just have to kind of wait and see how that exactly pans out, but something like some of the features that you find on theregular passive skill treeare not going to be too dissimilar to some of the things you might end up seeing on the Atlas tree as well. Just not identical.
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