Supporter newsletter 69

Issue
This is a copy of Eternal and Diamond Supporter Newsletter #69, published by Grinding Gear Games.

Hello Supporters,

Most of our developers in the office are working full swing on the 1.2.0 expansion. I am putting the 1.1.5 patch together. Almost all the work needed for it has been done, it just needs to be compiled into something we can deploy and to go through its quality assurance cycle.

This week I am going to present part of an article about the design of Vaal Gems. I’ll cover early plans in this newsletter and later this week you will be able to read the full article which will include Rory talking about the implementation of gems in Sacrifice of the Vaal.

Vaal Gems

Very early on in the ideas phase for Sacrifice of the Vaal, we knew we wanted some kind of big skill type which would be interesting for players. Trigger gems had proven to be very popular, so we wanted to design something that was thematic while also adding supplementary game mechanics.

The very initial seed for the expansion was the Atziri fight. This expanded quickly into the side areas, items and a general sacrifice theme. We didn’t have any plans for the gems at this stage, but knew we wanted them to fit with the idea of Sacrifice.

With the question “what does a Sacrifice Gem look like?”, we first explored support gems. We looked at various ways to to have support gems that traded one thing for another. A major issue here is that this is the design space that support gems already fill.

We discussed the idea of Sacrifice Gems as active skills and decided that they are most interesting as ultimate versions of existing skills. As the Vaal are the oldest civilisation that players have yet encountered, the Vaal elements could be powerful precursors to the skill gems that players already have (which are from the Eternal Empire).

In a similar way, the Vaal Orb is like a precursor to other currency, but more unpredictable and primordial. So, what were the precursors to look like? And how would they fulfil the theme of sacrifice?

We tried a number of variations and implemented an early favourite: the gems gave you stacks of a cumulative penalty when used, and when they hit a certain threshold, they became overpowered in some way. After some initial work, we decided that rather than having a stacked debuff for each gem, they would share the same stack.

We played with various penalties and eventually decided that each cast of a Vaal Skill gives you a Vaal Charge. You lost a percentage of Life and Energy Shield on cast for each Vaal stack you had. As you cast Vaal Skills, the penalty got larger and larger with each cast. However when you cast a Vaal Skill at a specific threshold of these Vaal charges, you consumed them, and instead cast a supercharged version of the skill.

As part of this experimentation, we implemented the penalty and started work on a character effect to represent how many Vaal charges you had.

Testing determined that this was too complicated and too punitive for inexperienced players. We kept the idea of the overpowered skill at a threshold and kept the general idea of stacking charges, but it was changed back to being per gem. We also removed the penalty element. Stacks earned through killing monsters were called souls, which fit the sacrifice theme.

By this stage we were bursting with ideas for ultimate gem abilities and quickly put a list together.

At around the same time, the design of the Vaal Orb, the Atziri fight and the Vaal side areas had evolved so that there was a strong additional theme of corruption. While this was initially intended to only be a mechanical shift, the theme turned out to be very sticky from a story side, and started to seep into every element of the expansion.

We now knew the Vaal Gems had to fit the corruption theme, while also being about sacrifice. We decided the gems would always be corrupted and could either be made by the Vaal Orb or found in corrupted side areas.

The final plan (as the Vaal Gems appear in Sacrifice of the Vaal) was both thematically strong and added a mechanic that we had wanted for a while: ultimate skills.

This article, including a second part written by Rory with more specifics about the final designs, will appear in the news later this week on pathofexile.com.

-Carl

Insider Info

This week we are going to show off one of the images being used for a signed print as a prize for the Two Week Charity Event:

http://i.imgur.com/rtumhg6.jpg

This is a piece of early concept art for Lioneye’s Watch. While very different to the final version, I am sure you can see elements that made it into the game.