This doesn’t make The Last of Us Part II better or worse than Path of Exile – it just means our games can’t have it all. To build a team and culture capable of creating The Last of Us Part II almost by definition means excluding people who value systems over narrative. I imagine the opposite is true at studios like Naughty Dog. But the environment that enables the boundary-pushing systems design of PoE may be deadly to everything else. In theory you could have a team that operates perfectly across all design spectrums one that could incorporate the best of systems design, creative and narrative design, and clear, visceral moment-to-moment gameplay in one beautifully polished product. Perhaps it's only possible to build a game like Path of Exile – a game singularly focused on deep systems – in an environment that is tilted so much towards systems design as to be inhospitable to any other designers. The game not only has some of the deepest and interesting crafting and equipment systems out there, but is also pretty successful, raking in ~ $113M in revenue in 2020.

Obviously Grinding Gear Games (the company that makes Path of Exile) employs some talented designers. This is what Path of Exile looks like without a loot filter.

But then… why drop this loot at all? And so on. The vast majority of loot is pointless to pick up, and just slows you down by taking up valuable inventory space, so it’s better to hide it. Why is the experience for new players so bad that you basically can’t learn it on your own? Why do you need multiple pieces of third party software to really play the game? This includes a “loot filter” whose sole purpose is to limit the number of items that are shown on the ground from killing enemies. Sometimes when my friends are together on Discord, we idly wonder why certain things work the way they do in PoE. I wrote about the game Path of Exile (PoE) briefly in my newsletter a few weeks ago, calling it “the collective fever dream of an army of mad systems designers”.

Path of exile inventory space