Campaign skip options are inherently bad for an ARPG long-term, Path of Exile 2 Director says

GGG keeps stabbing us with no campaign skips, like the Huntress will stab this poor thing (Image via Grinding Gear Games)

Grinding Gear Games is doubling down on its tried and tested decision of making players complete Path of Exile 2's campaign before letting them experience the endgame. Much to the chagrin of a large section of the player base, Game Director Jonathan Rogers reiterated the studio's decision to make the campaign a mandatory part of the seasonal journey.

In a recent media preview event for the upcoming Dawn of the Hunt update, Game Director Jonathan Rogers was asked about a potential campaign skip for Path of Exile 2, to which he said:

"As for skipping campaign, it just isn’t going to happen."

This is a starkly different stance from the other competitors in the ARPG space, namely, Last Epoch and Diablo 4. While Path of Exile has been facing this question for years, Path of Exile 2 is fresh out of the oven. Yet, players are already dreading the prospect of playing the same six acts for future updates, as the game still has years of content ahead of it.

Grinding Gear Games wants you to experience the entirety of Path of Exile 2, no matter how much you have played before

Get comfortable with fighting these guys for the next few years if you survive the patch notes (Grinding Gear Games)

Grinding Gear Games has always been a relatively stubborn studio, even when the playerbase was up in arms over specific nerfs and balance changes. One such decision involves making players trudge through the entire campaign of both Path of Exile and Path of Exile 2. While Path of Exile 2 players will experience their second playthrough of the six acts with the Dawn of the Hunt update, Path of Exile's playerbase has been playing the 10-act-long story for years.

As we mentioned before, in a recent media preview event for the Dawn of the Hunt update, Game Director Jonathan Rogers was asked about letting players skip the campaign or at least have the second or third characters in a challenge league skip the campaign. His reply is as follows:

"I’ve actually talked about this quite a few times in the past, but it’s one of those things where there’s lots of downsides that we see to that, and we think that it overall will make the game worse. And I would even go so far as to say that action RPGs that do allow that, I believe, ultimately will not have as much longevity as ones that don’t."

He followed it up with:

"There’s a lot of reasons for that, but ultimately, that is something that I think is a big mistake for action RPGs to do."

Also Read: Path of Exile 2's 0.2.0 patch notes seemingly make artful acknowledgement of one infamous cheater

Grinding Gear Games' decision to make players slog through the whole campaign is seemingly a design choice. While there have been requests from the player base to reduce the time between playing older content and newer stuff, i.e, the campaign and experiencing the new seasonal mechanics in maps, it hadn't picked up the pace until newer entries in the ARPG scene changed the formula.

Diablo 4 was the first to make this shift, as it offered players direct access to the newer seasonal mechanics by skipping the campaign entirely. Last Epoch, on the other hand, went a completely different route and offered a non-linear campaign. Players can switch between different zones at any point, complete quests as they see fit, finish the campaign, and enter the Monolith of Fate.

There is another side to this story, as many in the aforementioned game's communities would prefer to play the game in its entirety, just like how the developers originally designed it to be, compared to skipping to the endgame directly. And there's certainly merit to the complete experience approach, such as getting new and older players familiarized with new mechanics and letting them test their builds against increasingly challenging situations.

Check out our other PoE2 features and guides:

About the author

Arnab Chakrabarti is an MMO writer at Sportskeeda. After getting his first console and playing Oni, he knew that playing games and writing about them was all he ever wanted. To that end, he gave up his bioscience studies to take the leap into video game coverage - a move that saw him work for such publications as TechARX, XRIG, eSportsportal, and Game Rant, to name a few.

Arnab looks up to popular video game journalists and commentators like John Peter Bain aka TotalBiscuit, Jason Schreier, and SkillUp, and tries to bring the same level of commitment and accuracy to his work.

He was also a part of the team that created the event Nerdmeet, which garnered over 5000 attendees in its final run.

In his spare time, Arnab takes care of animals, learns new languages, and plays his guitar. He is eyeing amateur astronomy soon as his next hobby.

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Edited by Adarsh J Kumar