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I’ve been playing Path of Exile for almost ten years and have put a ton of hours into PoE2 since it entered early access, and in all that time there’s one feature that I’ve wished for more than any other. More than stash tabs, more than fancy microtransactions, even more than finally finding a mirror in the wild.
What I want more than anything is a death recap: a way to finally have some idea why my turbo powerful character that’s blasting through a map went pop. At an interview at ExileCon this weekend, game director Jonathan Rogers confirmed that it’s finally coming to Path of Exile 2.
I don’t know whether Grinding Gear intended to announce the feature this weekend, but during the keynote’s live demo of new content, Mark Roberts’ character died. And there before our eyes, live and in person, was a death recap screen. After we all got done cheering, Rogers laughed and confirmed that the feature was present and would be included in the full 1.0 release coming up on December 11.
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“I was really worried that it wasn’t going to be useful enough or accurate enough, but we got it to a place that I’m fairly happy with,” Rogers said when I asked him to confirm that the feature would be present at launch.
“The thing that’s not quite good is the damage over time tracking,” he added. “We do tell you that you took it but we don’t know where it came from.”
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Thankfully, it’s a bit easier to parse taking damage over time in the game already, and he assured us that they’re working on getting that sorted out as well.
One of the reasons that the death recap is such an important feature is that it can be incredibly hard to parse exactly what you should be focusing on with your character once you get to the endgame. A lot of times you’ve maxed your resistances, have a decent life pool, and a good amount of either armour, evasion, or energy shield, but still something comes along and explodes you. And since there are often many monsters on the screen, to say nothing of all the explosions or arrows or minions or ice comets that you yourself are spamming, it can be almost impossible to figure out what happened.
“The most important thing to be was like… here’s the damage you took and how much of it was mitigated,” says Rogers. “My goal was to drive you toward ‘what is the thing I need to fix about my character to have avoided this.'” A big physical hit? Maybe some more evasion or life. Cold damage? Maybe grab a couple jewels with + to max cold res.
Sometimes though, the problem isn’t with you. Sometimes you get a killer crab that kills hundreds of thousands of players due to a typo. He thinks the death recap will help here, too.
“This may sound a bit funny, but I think it’ll actually give our players an avenue to complain about the correct things. Sometimes we just have monsters that have wrong balance values, it happens, and in the heat of battle you don’t know what it was. Now you’ll be able to say this particular monster is the one that has the damage that’s off the hook and then it allows them to direct us to that.”
Despite having their own internal systems to monitor monster behavior, nothing beats the urgency and immediacy of a legion of players crying out at once on the internet about killer crabs.
Mark Roberts went on to say that he anticipates that the feature “will 100% be asked for en masse” by Path of Exile 1 players, and if it is, they’ll port that functionality over as soon as they can.
As for me, the death recap is but one of many amazing features I’m looking forward to in Path of Exile 2’s full release. It will be available on December 11th.