Horadric.ru - Interview with Chris Wilson

Chris Wilson, game director of Path of Exile, kindly agreed to answer some of the questions often asked by Path of Exile community on Horadric.ru.

We asked many questions: some of them are more interesting for russian players (localization, payment methods) and some of them may be interesting for any PoE player. We also asked a very important question: where are our character's pants?

Right now the maximum party size is 6 and you aren't gonna change that. But is there going to be a way for party leader to set maximum party size from 2 to 6?

We could add an option for that in the future if there's demand for it, but currently they need to either make the party non-public (so that new people can't join) or to kick out whichever players the party feels are above their preferred cap.

You've already stated that Path of Exile is going to be released in additional languages on release. Which languages do you plan to implement in the game? Is russian version going to be released at the same time as the others or sometime later?

We're currently looking at localisation for many different territories, with Russia as one of the most important. I don't know what order they'll be released in, but it's certainly a priority.

It's quite difficult to identify gems of different color (like blue, green and red) for people with color blindness. Are there going to be some sort of additional tooltips to help people with these kind of problems?

This is an important issue that we've tried to address and I think we can probably improve it a lot. We receive plenty of good feedback and are gradually trying to get the colours and visual feedback correct for everyone.

Lately you've added Paysafecard as one of the payment methods in your shop. Most of russian people are used to the payment service called Webmoney and would to use to buy stuff in your shop. Is it possible to make Webmoney one of the available payment methods in the future?

I definitely believe we'll have an expanded range of payment options for not only Russia but many Asian territories in the future.

You've got tons of nice alternative special effects in your shop, but some of them (like Dragon Fireball Effect) are quite difficult for some computers to handle and cause FPS drops. Is it going to be possible to disable other players' alternative special effects?

There are many areas of game performance that we're looking to improve - so we'd prefer to solve those rather than turn off effects.

Are you going to add item level to the item tooltip? It is possible to use /itemlevel, but it's kinda annoying to do this for every single item.

We're looking at other solutions, actually. I agree the information needs to be easily available, but it's confusing to new players if the item level (which is different than the required level) is listed on the item.

You've begun adding more crafting recipes, but are you going to add more currency items? Are there going to be special PvP currency items?

Yes, we're adding new currency items over time. The Eternal Orb is in development as we write this. The only PvP-specific currency item we planned was one that allowed you to downlevel your character (for the cases where you are too high level for a specific PVP bracket).

Are you going to add extra interface panel with some sort of character statistics? Something like total deaths, monsters killed, boss kills, etc.

We'd like to, but it's not the highest priority. It'd be very cool.

What do you think about binding items to player account? Are we going to see something like that in Path of Exile?

It's very unlikely. We'd like everything to be tradeable!

In lots of online games it's possible to customize UI. Is there going to be a similar feature in Path of Exile? Are there going to be some sort of interface addons like in World of Warcraft?

We don't have any short-term plans for UI customisation or add-ons at this stage. It's a lot of work to support it and we're trying hard to put all our resources towards the core game at the moment.

In many other ARPGs in order to unlock waypoint you just need to walk over it. Can we hope to see something like that in Path of Exile?

Yes, we are likely to make that change. We have some effects made that can appear on the waypoints when they are unlocked.

You've said many times that it would be possible to select character gender in future. Is this feature going to be available for everyone? And what about people who have already created a character? Are they going to be able to change their character's gender?

We're very likely to add alternate character skins to the microtransaction store (based on popular request). I believe it'll be possible to apply these to characters that have already been created.

In one of the interviews you said that there are no people in your team to make cinematics. Are you going to hire some people for that?

As much as we I love cinematics, I feel it'd be better for the game if we spent all our resources on adding more features and content to the core game for some time. Maybe we'll get cinematics in the future, but for now all the money is being spent on core development.

During closed beta test there were some pretty cool art contests with closed beta keys as rewards. Are you going to hold similar contests after game's release? Maybe with something a bit more interesting as prizes.

I'm definitely very excited about running more contests. I expect we'll see several in the coming months. We can certainly do prizes that are more interesting than beta keys!

Most important question from our users: "Where is pants, GGG?" - every second question about pants :D

I believe that many of the armours are being modified over time to have pants.