Path of Exile 2 Developers Have No Plans to Move Away From Death Penalties in Endgame Content

gamingbolt.com:

Developer Grinding Gear Games has revealed its plans for the first major update that will be coming to Path of Exile 2. As part of the update, Path of Exile 2 will be getting a host of quality-of-life features, including changes to some of the more challenging aspects of endgame content, as well as more variety of maps that players can clear out.

According to PCGamer, in an interview with Twitch streamers Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV after the announcement, director Jonathan Rogers spoke about its decisions with the planned update, including how it will make potentially lethal on-screen effects more visible to players in the chaos of endgame maps. Rogers did, however, reiterate that the studio still wants deaths in the game to be a notable setback.

One of the topics of this discussion is the fact that players only get one chance to clear a map for every Waystone they use. Breaking from the original Path of Exile, which allowed players 6 attempts, a single death in a Path of Exile 2 maps means that players will have to start that map from scratch.

“We did discuss quite a lot about whether we wanted to go back on one portal or not,” said Rogers, referring to the number of portals that open up whenever a player activates a map. “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.”

It is worth noting that one of the big changes in the upcoming update is that one of the Pinnacle bosses in the game, The Arbiter of Ash, will allow players 6 attempts before failing from death. This is due to the fact that accessing Pinnacle boss fights tends to require quite a bit of work in preparation, taking tens of hours to get the keys necessary to unlock the fight to begin with. A single death essentially undoes all of that progress.

“We were talking about the pinnacle boss and the discussion came up ‘should we allow portals everywhere, should we be allowing checkpoints everywhere’ and we