Path of Exile 2 devs know endgame is brutal but don’t plan to change it

Path of Exile 2 players have made their voices heard about its punishing endgame but devs aren’t ready to sacrifice the game’s identity to change it.

Path of Exile 2 is basking in some early access success after garnering a respectable player count and managing to hold interest. The game is about to get its first major patch of 2025 it’s bringing some much-needed quality-of-life improvements to the endgame.

One thing it won’t be changing is the game’s brutal difficulty, but that’s by design. Co-directors Mark Roberts and Jonathan Rogers sat down with content creators Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV to discuss the coming Patch 0.1.1 in an extensive interview.

In these talks, the devs revealed that they’d been following the discussion about the Path of Exile 2’s risk/reward systems and how they impact the endgame. While they recognize the validity of certain complaints, they’re hesitant to make sweeping changes to the core experience.

Path of Exile 2’s difficulty is too integral to the experience to set aside

Path of Exile 2 does encourage a more active and methodical style of play than competitors like Diablo 4. This is especially true of the endgame Atlas maps which ask a lot of players.

A death here means losing any EXP earned, and any loot that hasn’t been collected. On top of that, you’re removed from the map and all your modifiers are reset. You’ll also be required to expend to reenter the Atlas.

While it creates a real sense of tension and risk, it’s easy to see how some may feel frustrated losing time and resources in this way. Despite complaints about this, Path of Exile 2’s dev team isn’t ready to throw the concepts out.

“We did discuss quite a lot about whether we wanted to go back on one portal or not,” Rogers explained in the above interview. “I think it comes down to the fact that it would just not feel the same. The whole ‘death actually mattering’ thing is actually important. You have to have some level of failure being possible.”

This extends to the loss of EXP upon death in an Atlas run. “It’s keeping you in the place where you’re supposed to be, as in if you’re dying all the time then you’re probably not ready to keep going up the power curve,” he elaborated.

Grinding Gear Games

Path of Exile 2 has been compared to Dark Souls thanks to its high-risk play.

Roberts did admit that may be “the wrong way of looking at things” and Rogers weighed in on the topic of endgame difficulty as well. In his assessment, he admitted that there were a number of moving parts and that the team was working hard to identify which of these were necessary to the experience of Path of Exile 2.

“There’s a few axes (of difficulty) and I think they’re just a bit too severe when all combined together,” Rogers allowed. “I need to think about it certainly a lot more and get a little bit more analytics on it as well and actually see what the actual problems are.”

For this reason, the team at Grinding Gear Games isn’t quite ready to start tweaking the risk factors in Path of Exile 2. Fortunately, Patch 0.1.1 is going to increase the reward with changes to drop rates for rarer gear and materials. Perhaps this will help strike more of a balance between the two.