During PAX East 2024, we talked with Chris, better known as Octavian, content creator turned Grinding Gears GamesDesigner. Working across the Design and Testing teams, Octavian was on the show floor showcasing Grinding Gear Games’ newest addition to their Path of Exile 2 demo build for press: WASD controls.
Adding WASD controls to Path of Exile 2 is a huge choice. However, for those still looking to point and click, you can choose to change your control scheme at any time. But the addition of WASD controls wasn’t arbitrary, instead, it was to make the animation of Path of Exile 2 more dynamic. And after playing through the demo area with a poison build Ranger, I can see exactly why.
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Octavian explained the choice after we had some hands-on time with the build. He started by explaining that adding the control scheme switch wasn’t easy, “I wish I had Reese here. He’s one of our long-term senior programmers, and he was one of the people who helped to make [WASD controls] even possible. I’m sure he could describe the 70 ways in which it very suddenly broke. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been worth it.”
Why was it worth it? According to Octavian, it’s because of dynamic character attacks while moving and how that impacted the game’s visuals. He continued, “It’s opened up the ability to… have characters that can attack while moving, and we can have much more fluid gameplay as a result. So even though it’s meant going back through and changing the balance of skills, balance of monsters, animation work, and just fundamental life code changes to make the game even work with multiple control schemes, I would say it’s been worth it. And it’s really nice to be able to just swap on the fly as well. And at any point during gameplay, you can choose to swap back over.”
One of the key reasons that the gameplay has a more fluid property is because of the use of “additive animations.” Octavian explained, “Essentially, we have a system that allows different animations to blend together. So that means that your character can be performing the walking or sprinting animation, at the same time is doing things like shooting an arrow or casting [a spell] or even being stunned.
If you’re interrupted out of your skill, if you’re stunned, in [Path of Exile 1], that will just end whatever animation is happening. You’ll go into a brief stun animation, and then you can regain control of your character. So in POE 2, since we have the additive animations, we can differentiate between the light stun and a heavy stun.”
But if you’re wondering if those additive animation nerfed stuns, it didn’t. Octavian added, “We do still have really punishing stuns. If you get hit by the wrong thing, [you’ll] lose control entirely. But then there [are] also ones that’ll just interrupt what you’re doing, and you can keep moving. Your character will physically recoil, but your movement animation will get stopped.”
Octavian also took the chance to show us the new mount system, a first for Path of Exile, in our demo build, which wasn’t available for the show floor. The mount continues to show the importance of the WASD controls in Path of Exile 2, allowing your character to engage in mounted combat. Summoned from a spell slot, the kicker is that when you dismount and still have the mount active, it fights for you.
We asked Octavian why Grinding Gear Games made the choice to add mounted combat to the game, and his answer was simple: “It’s cool.” While his first answer was a little facetious, as he noted himself, there was some truth to it. He said, “[It being cool] was a large part of why I was because it’s, you know, is this power fantasy of mounted archery. And yeah, horses aren’t real, especially Wraeclast. So what can you ride instead? You ride a big dinosaur-bird creature.”
To be honest, I started our demo time with Path of Exile 2 as a WASD naysayer. It’s just not how I have played ARPGs. But in one demo session, where I saw how thoughtfully it had been implemented, Octavian converted me. That said, Octavian also got to talk more about the ways in which the Path of Exile 2 animation team is innovating beyond just additive animations that make the WASD controls sing.
When you move through the demo, the world is layered. Every environment has unique elements that all work together, but you can see they are built on top of one another. When we spoke about this environment design, Octavian brought up how the animation team used subscene space to make each area that has verticality more dynamic as the player make their way through it.
“There are areas that we’ve shown off in some previous stuff where… you’ll have the first floor of the area [where] there are holes [in it] that can show you the lower floors. [What you see], that’s not like pre-rendered stuff; that is actually what is down below… You could go down and fight those monsters that you saw. [In the cracks], you get to see the boss animations on the lowest floor while you’re progressing down to it. So it gives you a much more real sense of space,” Octavian said.
But as the WASD controls for Path of Exile 2, this also wasn’t an easy task. Octavian continued, “That’s another thing that took quite a bit of doing. It was one of those things where before we did it, we were wondering whether we could even do it. I’m sure [our senior programmer], Reese, again, would have a lot more to say. But I can tell you the ways that it broke. [For example], bits of the roof from the lower floor just stick through the upper. That’s all been ironed out.”
Path of Exile has been a PAX staple, and it keeps improving each show. With stellar animations and expert environment design, it’s clear that everything from the new WASD controls to the character design has all pushed the ARPG forward while never losing what made it special.
Path of Exile 2 is scheduled to release in early 2025.
We’ve updated this article to reflect Chris’s choice to identify within the PoE community as Octavian.
