[2023] Upcoming new Path of Champions content, from Dan Felder's interview with TheSkilledRoy

Soooo Reddit went down RIGHT as we were going to start picking through questions. We literally couldn't view them at all. So we had to do it live with in-stream twitch comments.

This meant I couldn't confirm any information ahead of time with other members of the team if it touched on someone else's work, and naturally plans can change without me being aware of them if it's not specifically something I'm working on.

We didn't want to risk giving inaccurate information so we made the on-the-fly call to just stick to stuff I could talk about fully on my own (since I'm the lead features designer and was fully aware of anything and everything happening with Path specifically right now).

We'll definitely do balance adjustments in the future. The point I was making is that balance exists to create a satisfying gameplay experience. One reason to balance champions, among many other reasons that are based on satisfying challenge and player fun, is to ensure that players can feel good about collecting and playing all champions.

By creating modes like the Monthly Challenge, we have good reasons to collect and play champions; meaning we can take more risks with champions and explore more cool ideas. This doesn't mean balancing is suddenly irrelevant, there's lots of other reasons to balance champions to make gameplay feel better, make stars feel worth the upgrade, etc. It just means we can focus balancing decisions on THOSE experience-oriented goals, rather than running into conflicting goals.

It's similar to how designing a roguelike mode means that it's okay if not every run is equally powerful. If you could fully choose all the power combinations every time, we'd have to worry about a single "dominant" build removing all the fun variety. By making it a roguelike mode, where players choose from random options each time, getting the exciting god-combos are part of the fun rather than a balance problem.

The right system incentives can open a lot of opportunity to make more fun and varied content, and this is one of the reasons I'm really excited about the Monthly Challenge.

Yup, well said. I expect we'll want to increase the variation in the mutators and adventure structures in the future (we stuck to a set 2 node layouts for now and mostly reusing existing mutators, changing as few variables as possible while still testing the feature for our early experiments). I might be wrong though, some of my favorite PvE cardgame modes have been playing single bosses without any roguelike components. The point of releasing this mode in its beta state is to gather feedback from players and see how we should evolve it. There are a lot of cool ways we could improve or expand the feature if it proves exciting, and folks want it more than other stuff we could be doing with that time. :)

Yeah, originally only the first half was going to be monthly challenger focused and the rest was going to be all topics - we had to pivot at the last moment. Otherwise definitely would have just said it was Path focused. Glad you enjoyed it anyway.

For the Reputation question, it’s mostly a technical issue. Setting costs weirdly has some fewer technical issues with items as far as I’m aware. I mostly just trust what I’m told when it comes to tech things (it’s not my strong suit) unless something actively isn’t working.

Thanks. We did initial testing before building these micro-adventure challenges by grabbing existing champions and skipping to the mini-boss or final boss on existing weekly and world adventures, without taking any upgrades at all. It was already pretty cool and challenging. :)

Why not both?

Fun fact - that doesn't happen in the monthly challenge mode (as it's only there to prevent infinitely surrendering to get a perfect starting power, and youc an't infinitely surrender in the monthly challenge mode).

Understandable, but luckily the resources to make new champions and the resources to make new features use different people. :)

New Features are heavy on engineering. New Champions are heavy on design.