Aaron
http://wasdweekly.com/2011/10/path-of-exile-beta-key-contest/#comment-653

Hey, I absolutely /love/ Path of Exile from what I’ve seen, so here are a few questions…
Does GGG have another in-house game that they’re also developing?

Thanks for your questions Aaron.  I’d say that the biggest milestone in development was getting the first playable version of Path of Exile up on our Alpha realms.   After almost three years of development and a ton of uncertainty, it was immensely gratifying to have a real, working game out there for people to play.  The game was still very rough, and it has changed in countless ways since the first Alpha, but getting it up and running was our first and greatest milestone.  I think the only thing that could be bigger is the actual release!

At the moment, Path of Exile is the only title that Grinding Gear Games is development.  The game takes up the full time of more than 15 developers, so there is no thought at all right now for other projects.  We have assembled a great team, and we do plan to do different things in the future.

Callum Smith
http://wasdweekly.com/2011/10/path-of-exile-beta-key-contest/#comment-664

So what exactly do you feel your major inspirations for the path of exile to be, excluding the obvious diablo series of course, and as a team do you generally enjoy any other dungeon crawling games?

Hey Callum, thank you for the questions.  Path of Exile’s vision is drawn from a huge variety of games that all the core developers have enjoyed over the last 15 years or so.   The game borrows elements from the Final Fantasy series, from Diablo 1 and 2, as well as Guild Wars, Dungeon Siege and a few other titles.   Everyone on the development team is a huge fan of action RPG, dungeon crawl style games, and if you’ve ever played it, we’ve probably played it as well.  

FX Guy
http://wasdweekly.com/2011/10/path-of-exile-beta-key-contest/#comment-685

Hi! Is there multiple difficulties like in Diablo where you play with the same character to battle harder mobs (A king of new game+)? If yes, how many and what differences between them can we expect?

Great question “FX Guy”!  At launch, Path of Exile will contain four tiers of difficulty for the players to tackle.  The starting difficulty, currently called “normal”, is designed to slowly acclimate players to the POE experience, and it doesn’t get challenging until about midway through Act 1.  The second tier of difficulty, called “Cruel”, becomes available as soon as you complete the game on Normal, and it marks a pretty large ramp up in challenge.

When you complete Cruel, you unlock “Ruthless” difficulty, which is designed to challenge the most-skilled players.  And if you’re good and geared enough to conquer Ruthless, you’ll get a final challenge in “Merciless” difficulty.  Merciless is truly a challenge to any player, with enhanced monster AI, enhanced monster speed, and in general a faster pace with more aggression.  Of course, the best loot awards await the player who can handle Merciless difficulty, so the rewards match the challenge.  As a player progresses through the game, they’ll find that the monsters become more dangerous and intelligent, and the same tactics that worked on earlier difficulties will completely fail later on.  We want Path of Exile to have tremendous replayable value, so we’ll make sure that there are hundreds of hours of entertainment available before you’ve really finished polishing and gearing just one character.

MoRm
http://wasdweekly.com/2011/10/path-of-exile-beta-key-contest/#comment-665

The primary question I want to ask, is about the F2P setup. MAny free to play games feel deliberately tedious at times, or have other sneaky limitations to entice people to pay for them. Often at inflated prices for things with minimal impact in gameplay.So my question is:

How are the developers going to balance the paying aspects and integrate them into the gameplay without it being neither offensive to players nor making you feel you’re playing an incomplete game if you go free, but at the same time earn enough money to keep them going?

This is a great question MoRm, and a very viable concern.  I have personally experienced the kind of “free to play” grind you’re describing, where the game is “free” in name, but a player is basically forced to purchase items/potions/perks to advance in any meaningful way.  Everyone in the GGG development team feels that this is a sleazy and dishonest way to host a “free to play” product, and we’re going to be completely different.

Path of Exile has been designed from day one to be completely playable and enjoyable without a single dollar invested.  We have purposefully made the game NOT grindy, and I don’t think anyone would describe Path of Exile as tedious.  Loot is frequent and exciting, and the player feels powerful in nearly all stages of the game.

We’ve structured our micro-transactions so that they integrate seamlessly into the game, and they do nothing but enhance a player’s aesthetic game experience.  Under NO circumstances will we allow players to purchase an in-game advantage over each other.  Our hope is that our free to play model, and our “ethical” micro-transaction stance, combined with the overall graphical/game play qualities of Path of Exile will entice many hundreds of thousands of players to try the game.  Some number of those players will opt in to our micro-transactions model, and hopefully enough of them will do that to support all our ambitions for the game.

Orcworm
http://wasdweekly.com/2011/10/path-of-exile-beta-key-contest/#comment-697

How did that mahoosive skills tree list come to be? Was it just a moment of madness or had you always planned for such an expansive set of skills?

Haha, it is massive, isn’t it!  We’ve honestly always planned for our Passive skill tree to be enormous, and it’s actually going to be even bigger when the game is released!   One of our primary design goals with Path of Exile was customization, and our massive Passive Skill Tree is the consequence of that goal.  We also wanted to make the process of allocating attributes (strength, dexterity, intelligence, etc) more engaging and interesting than it traditionally is in action RPG games.  Many of the nodes in the passive tree are attributes, so a player accumulates important stats while gaining customization.  It’s a neat, elegant system that grants almost infinite variety to character builds.

I tell you my feelings about the previous game not to bore you with personal details, but just as a way of letting you know the kinds of expectations I had for Arkham City coming in. So when I tell you that Arkham City exceeded those expectations at nearly every turn, it’s saying something. In every regard, Arkham City is a worthy followup to its now legendary predecessor, proving once again that these Rocksteady cats really seem to know what they’re doing.

The core things you loved about Asylum still largely ring true. Rather than divert too much from their established mechanics, they’ve instead polished them to a sheen. The combat flows as smoothly as ever, but tiny improvements like the ability to counter multiple enemies at once and the refined quick-gadget system help you string together combos with much greater ease. Whereas stealth in the first game was largely a matter of swooping down from gargoyles and picking off foes one by one, the new A.I. routines give you less slack, forcing you to vary up your approaches to keep hidden. The Metroid-esque exploration and progression mechanics take another step forward, making the wise decision to give you most of your Asylum gear from the get-go, and then fill that lineup in with new gadgets over the course of the game.

On top of these familiar mechanics, however, is the real meat of Arkham City: the city itself. Yes, Arkham City takes place in the titular prison, a walled off section of Gotham City that serves as a holding pen for every criminal in Gotham, run by the scheming warden Hugo Strange. Thrown in by Strange at the beginning of the game, Batman must journey through the depths of Arkham City, along the way dealing with familiar villains like Joker (looking a tad bit worse for wear…), Two-Face, The Penguin, and Mr. Freeze, to name a few. To give too much about the plot away would do the game a great disservice, for while it starts a little slowly, things quickly escalate to frenzied levels of suspense, and the game’s ending very nearly left me speechless.

The city itself functions as something of an open world, though don’t come to the game expecting an Oblivion-sized world. The game world is large, but not unmanageably so, and getting from one side of the city to another isn’t a particularly huge chore. This is partially thanks to the new gliding controls and mechanics that Arkham City adds to allow you to get around more easily. The finer details of these mechanics can be a bit overwhelming at first, but the game does a remarkably good job at showing you how to use its systems, and after a mid-game sequence that served as a belated tutorial for the gliding, I was swooping around Arkham with ease (similarly, a boss fight that requires you to incapacitate your foe in five different ways helps show you the different options you have in the stealth sequences).

But what fills this city then, you may be asking? Side-quests, of course! There’s a ton of peripheral stuff to accomplish in Arkham City, be it completing gliding challenges, breaking up street fights, or taking on individual side-missions that frequently revolve around you interacting with notable Gotham villains. And then there’s the Riddler challenges, returning from Asylum but greatly expanded to take advantage of the scope of the city. With 400 challenges scattered around the city, there’s no shortage of little things to look for in every area, from smashing various thematic items, to solving riddles in the environment, or completing interaction-based puzzles that force you to use Batman’s arsenal to the fullest to unlock Riddler trophies. With hours upon hours of of side content to complete, and absolutely no chance you’ll get everything on your first playthrough, the campaign in Batman: Arkham City is loaded with replayability. Add to that an ever further extended version of the Predator and Combat challenges of Arkham Asylum, and an additional string of Catwomen-centric missions in the free DLC (for the record, Catwomen’s easily the weakest part of the game, but that’s not saying much considering how amazing this game is), you’re getting plenty of value out of Arkham City any way you slice it.

As you can probably tell, there’s a ton of things to talk about with this game, and that doesn’t even cover the dozens of small but incredibly well thought-out changes and details that pepper Arkham City. Yes, you probably could have plopped a half-eaten burrito in front of me with BATNAM AKCRAM CITY written on it with Sharpie, and I would have given it at least a 6. Yet I don’t think you’ll find anyone who will tell you not to play Batman: Arkham City after having played it. It truly is a first-class gaming experience from top to bottom, one that every gamer owes it to themselves to try.

Rating: 5 pummeled Riddler informants out of 5.

Orcs Must Die! is a nice hybrid of tower defense and FPS with a hint of RPG. What I enjoyed about Orcs Must Die! was that you will need to find your own balance between tower defense and FPS. You could not just rely on tower defense aspect or FPS aspect of the game to fully enjoy the game. I think you could try to focus on one aspect later one but it’ll be rather challenging to do so.

There weren’t that much to storyline. I think there was some creepy voice talking during the rounds but the voice was mostly drowned by the sound of orcs dying constantly (burned, stabbed, shot, corroded, smashed, etc), but when you buy a game called Orcs Must Die! I think it’s fair to say that you aren’t really looking for a solid story line.

I have been playing Orcs Must Die! for about 10 hours now since I got the game last week. It only took about 5 hours to beat the game in regular difficulty but you can revisit each maps and have a completely different experience by getting creative with various combination of traps and spells. The game does have hard mode that you can play after beating the game and is actually quite hard to beat without letting any orcs pass. I think once you get through to the game, it’ll be more about who makes the weirdest/funkiest ways to kill orcs.

Also, there is a skill tree that you can invest on for each round, so that you won’t be stuck with one skill tree for rest of the game. You can choose from 3 different types of specialized skill trees. You can also upgrade traps to be more effective but these upgrades were permanent and I had to do well to earn points every round to keep upgrading my traps. There are 25 traps/spells/units you can use in the game (I noticed that there was 5 empty spots when I was choosing my traps and stuff, so maybe hidden traps/spells? or DLC?) and you get to choose which traps/spells/units you want to use at the start of each map.

There were couple of glitches in the game. Nothing major that will break the game. Pressing shift at the beginning of the game opened my steam overlay. The AI in the game was pretty good. The orcs never got stuck in a place or ran around in circle. The units you can summon to help you were pretty helpful and didn’t acted like a statue that can only attack things in only one direction. The control of the game was simple and easy to get used to (WASD + point and clink, the regular way to play a game).

I do wish that the game would come with a co-op mode or multi-player mode with map editor. Playing some of classic starcraft tower defense on this game would be fantastic.

Overall, it thought it was a pretty neat game and it’s worth a try if you have the time and $15.00 to spare (or just buy it when it gets on sale during Christmas).

p.s. THERE!!! I DID A REVIEW MATT :p

In what Sergey Grigorovich of GSC Game World has announced regarding Stalkers piracy protection, he’s notified gamer’s that the game will require a constant internet connection.

In further addition to this He has been seen to quote that “Part of the content will be located on the server and downloaded as the game progresses. Text information, code and quests will be loaded through that connection.” in a unparalleled use of DRM. (To most consumers disdain.)

How To Enter

Entering is easy! All you have to do is comment on this post with a question that you would like to ask the Developers of Path of Exile.

On October 16th at Midnight PST submissions will closes. The WASD Weekly staff will then vote on our favorite questions and our 5 favorite questioners will get Beta keys emailed to them that week!

After that we will be talking to the Path of Exile developers and posting the answers to our 5 favorite questions!

Edit: Looks like there is a demo available! You can grab it over at Fileplanet