that we had a slice of the market
that we could explore and double
down on.”
In the years since, Diablo III has
not only survived a disastrous launch
but recovered the series’ reputation.
Yet Grinding Gear has discovered
that life isn’t so bad in the shade cast
by its looming genre mate.
“The effect we noticed was
basically that every time we were
mentioned in the media alongside
Diablo III, it had a large positive
impact on us,” Wilson says. “We’ve
realised that in a genre like this
where there’s a heavyweight able to
get a lot of marketing for its own
games, it’s a rising tide that lifts all
ships. And if Blizzard eventually
announces another product in that
franchise it will probably be good for
all action-RPGs, because it will bring
attention back onto the genre.”
Grinding Gear made Path of Exile
public for a weekend during Diablo
III’s launch to drum up interest – and
in early 2013, they began open beta.
After running the game with a few
thousand paying players, the studio
didn’t know how many would showup on the shores of Wraeclast now
the game was free-to-play. “This was
the scary point,” Wilson says. “We
knew it could be a lot more –
potentially tens of thousands.”
In the event, nearly 80,000 testers
played concurrently. It was the
outcome the studio had hoped for,
and it was horrendous. Support
tickets flooded in as server problems
emerged, fielded by just 20
developers at the time.
“It turned to hard mode
immediately,” Wilson says. “Because
now we’re expected to run a full-on
games-as-a-service thing. Nowadays,
we have dozens of people that handle
all that stuff to make it seamless. But
it’s tricky to decide to expand before
you need it, because that feels like
wasting money at the time.”
Staffing up wasn’t a simple
process. With a lack of experienced
developers in the local area to pull
from, Grinding Gear would have to
make time to train new hires – time it
no longer had. “There were a lot of
sleepless nights and learning the hard
way,” Wilson says, “as you do when
the servers just keep crashing.”REAL-TIME STRATEGISING
The exhaustion is still audible in
Wilson’s voice when he talks about
that period in Path of Exile’s history.
His life felt a little like an RTS – how
could he spend his limited resources
in order to save Grinding Gear HQ
from being overwhelmed? If the team
didn’t develop the game fast enough,
the players would leave. If it crashed
too often, the players would leave. If
support couldn’t reply to customer
tickets fast enough, or there was a
community disaster the team didn’t
address, the players would leave.TOP: Those orbs in
the UI take you
straight back to
Diablo II.DIABLO-NO Action-RPGs for the Blizzard-averse
TITAN QUEST
Still shining under an
ancient sun, after a
remaster that buffed out
the kinks in its helmet.DEMON STONE
A Forgotten Realms riff on
the LotR games, with
cameos from Salvatore’s
most famous characters.TORCHLIGHT II
A pacy take on the classics
that kept loot fans sated
during the fallow years of
the genre.DUNGEON SIEGE III
An unexpected sequel
handled by Obsidian, who
deepened the series’ world
and killed the mule.