devtrackers.gg
Surprisingly not a sh*t post; stay with me!
How We Got Here
On May 1, Chris Wilson posted an update on Synthesis league (3.6) and future plans. What’s important is, he ended with this statement: “We can’t wait to announce 3.7.0 in three weeks. Its name is on the list.”
This is “The List”
A few days later, everyone's favorite troll began tweeting using words from the list. Bex was clearly enjoying herself, but was also leaving clues. As she continued to name-drop, it became clear that she wasn't revealing the name of the league; she was eliminating league names to help us out. My guild got super into the hype surrounding the league reveal and began wildly tossing names around. After a bit, we settled in and attempted to crack the code.
The Process Of Elimination
To determine the name of the upcoming league, my guildmates and I used information from several sources:
*The names of previous leagues and PoE mechanics that are on the list.
*Twitter posts from Bex, beginning May 6, which “eliminate” potential names by naming them in her tweets.
*The remaining names on the list were reasoned through and eliminated either with good reason, or because they have been used in another prominent setting.
Let’s get to it.
The List
The easiest cuts are the ones that have been used already. Nemesis, Torment, Prophecy, Legacy, Maelstrom, Decay, Necropolis / Necrosis, Hatred, Tormenter (Tormented Spirits), Tyrant, Desecration / Desecrator, Asylum, Betrayer, and Abyss are all names of previous leagues, skill gems, maps, bosses, or mechanics that exist within current or past iterations of Path of Exile. These cuts require no logic or reasoning; they simply wouldn’t be the name of an upcoming league. 35 names remain.
The next round of cuts come courtesy of Bex on twitter. These are the list names that she has dropped in tweets since May 6: Carnage, Ritual, Conspiracy, Oblivion, Misery, Orion, Necropsy, and Legion. She also mentioned in the comments of her “Ritual” tweet that Tempest league was originally called Eclipse. While this doesn’t eliminate Eclipse, it is a point of consideration. 27 names remain.
Moving on, we eliminate names that refer to very specific settings or stories. Abaddon, Astaroth, Valhalla, Warhead, Demogorgon, and Asgard are specific to other settings and have not had any crossover with the world of Wraeclast or Oriath. 21 names remain.
The fourth round of cuts removes league names that would be considered insensitive or viewed poorly by the general public. Genocide, Dementia, Insanity / Insane, and Odium have generally negative connotations and would be a generally bad idea as a core concept for a league.
As we move into individual eliminations, 16 names remain.
We began to eliminate through reason. We’re looking at historical decisions made by GGG, marketing considerations, themes, and the timelines of 3.7 in relation to previous leagues and the upcoming announcement of Path of Exile patch 4.0 at ExileCon. Let’s dive in.
Obscure:The name just makes no sense in a gaming setting and is a marketing nightmare that would drive people away from the game. Obscure is out.
Entropy: Entropy is disorder. For a game that has struggled with complexity creep on top of the already enormous conceived perplexity of the skill tree, Entropy league would be another marketing disaster. What is the theme? Everything is messed up and disjointed? Atlas connections are random or changing? You get a random boss encounter at the end of each Act? Entropy is out.
Requiem: While this word naturally sounds badass, it’s really specific. It’s either a mass for the dead or a song or chant honoring the dead. Not only does this not fit thematically into the “kill and move on” nature of Path of Exile and ARPGs in general, but the nature of this genre, especially PoE’s constant refresh with new leagues, makes even our boss kills feel common and somewhat throw-away. If we’ve never had a requiem for Bannon or Nessa, it doesn’t make sense to start for some random new character. Don’t get me started on the “can’t die” theme of Betrayal league just 6 months ago. Requiem is out.
Infected: The first thing you do in PoE is kill a zombie. The level 1 beach is littered with zombies. End-game maps are often populated by zombies. Technically, if you play in Softcore, you’re a zombie. There have been hordes and hordes of zombies in this game since day 1. It’s nothing new, and it’s overused. We already have poison and chaos damage in the game, and if the theme were that the player was “infected”, it would come across as having to interact with a league mechanic just to play the game at normal ability. Infected is out.
Sickness: Sickness is a little strange. Path of Exile: Sickness sounds terrible. If there were to be a disease-centered expansion, it would be much more likely that GGG would use the above Infected name. As stated above, you don’t want a league mechanics that makes the player feel like they have to do something extra just to be at regular strength. I don’t want to have to make an antidote just to avoid some kind of debuff that’s never existed before. As a final note, are we really going to be “synthesizing” a cure in the league following Synthesis? Sickness is out.
Epitaph: Rounding out the disease and death themed names, Epitaph is just… weird? There are already so many things in the game with inscriptions that are either game mechanics, like finding crafting recipes in the world, or useless and avoided from a progression perspective, like the inscriptions on the stones spread throughout the zones, or the graffiti in Act 3. If we’re going to be given more things to discover, it won’t take the form of an existing game mechanic. Epitaph is out.
Hellfire: You guys have phones, right? Look up the first expansion to Diablo. Yeah. Diablo’s first expansion was Hellfire, and WoW’s first expansion began on Hellfire Peninsula. I’d like to think GGG would avoid directly ripping off the competition that they’ve spend years demolishing. Additionally, GGG would likely avoid League names that directly push players in a certain play direction (see the next name). Having the name of one of your three element types seems to promote fire over the other elements. Hellfire is out.
Aggressor: We haven’t discussed the 800-lb spinning elephant in the room: The melee rework that’s coming in 3.7. There’s a good reason for that. Remember in patch 3.6, when they re-worked spells and named the league Path of Exile: Casters? Yeah, me neither. While re-working needed game mechanics is awesome, naming the league on theme with the re-work is dangerous. As in 3.6, GGG would want to promote the melee re-work without dictating to the players what they should play. If they re-do melee and name the league something melee-specific, it could really alienate the portion of the playerbase who love playing a spellcaster or ranged character. A name like Aggressor could cause issues with Aurabots, highly defense delvers, trappers/miners, etc. It’s a bad fit. Aggressor is out.
Bloodshed: In the same vein as Aggressor, Bloodshed is an overly melee-specific name. How does Bloodshed work if I’m freezing my enemies to death? If I’m killing them with toxic clouds of poison? How much bloodshed is actually involved when Enki self-casts Arc? Also, blood as a concept is beaten to death in the Path of Exile story. With no research off the top of my head, I can think of four zones in the game that use literal rooms or rivers of blood as their background. We’re incredibly desensitized to blood as an impactful tool in Path of Exile. Bloodshed is out.
Mortuary: First, we have a map called Mausoleum. Second, we have a zone named the Ossuary. Yes, they’re different, but really? We have had leagues in the past that were themed around entering a specific place to do something; Incursion and Delve. They weren’t named “PoE: Temple” or “PoE: Azurite Mine”. The logic here is similar to the logic for Infected or Sickness. What’s the idea? We fight people raised from the dead? You mean the same thing we’ve been doing for 6 years? Anything in the zombie or dead humanoid vein is a little played out at the moment. Mortuary is out.
Monolith: Monolith can be two things. First, it can be… a block of stone. Hard pass for exciting league content. It can also refer to an organization that is typically impersonal or obscured, with a common goal. Read as: Syndicate. We’ve been there, and we’ve done that. Monolith it out.
Leviathan: This one is easy and short. Leviathan is specifically a sea monster. We already kill a sea monster in Act 6, and there is no game mechanics for swimming, going underwater, or fighting in the ocean/sea. The only times we embark on a ship, the screen goes black and we instantly arrive at our destination. Leviathan is out.
The Final Four
Eclipse, Armageddon, Revenge, and Overload. The guild believes that all four of these names have the most merit, and I could see any of the four being used. That being said, there are issues with three of them, and I believe there is a clear choice.
Armageddon: This name has the most glaring issue of the final four: It’s not patch 4.0. Given the fact that GGG is throwing an entire convention centered around the 4.0 announcement, 3.7 is extraordinarily unlikely to be a total geographical or core content shakeup. If anything, Armageddon is a great potential name for the 4.0 expansion. Given the unlikeliness of a major map/quest change in a mid-expansion patch, Armageddon is out.
Eclipse: I’ve already mentioned above that Bex has stated Eclipse was a scrapped name for Tempest league. Even if we don’t consider it eliminated by mention on twitter, as we have for the other eight names she’s mentioned, we’ve already seen an “eclipse” in the game. We blot out the sun in Act 2 for all of a third of an Act. On top of that, the most likely tie-in for Eclipse would be something related to Solaris / Lunaris. As they are currently super dead, it would likely wait until after some sort of shake-up to core content (4.0 Armageddon?!) for this to happen. You really don’t want to change core content if there’s even a chance the league won’t go core itself. Eclipse is out.
Revenge: I’ll be honest; on our first pass-through, Revenge was the clear winner. I’m not sure why we dismissed the final name so quickly; our chat history only shows a few mentioned that were tossed in while discarding other options. We landed on Revenge and were pretty happy with our choice. Then we did another pass and realized the following:
*We remembered the Vengeance skill gem. Not a deal-breaker by any means, but it’s something.
*There is no previous history of separate leagues tying into one another thematically. While Revenge league sounds AWESOME as a followup to Betrayal, this hasn’t happened before. That’s not to say that it can’t happen, but 5+ years of no similar occurrences is nothing to sneeze at.
*I tweeted at Bex with our old theory yesterday. Her half-approving response had the effect that I’m sure she desired, which was to make us rethink everything. Acknowledging the connection between Revenge and Betrayal so blatantly on Twitter seems right in line with the elimination method she has been employing throughout this process. We were sad, but Revenge seems out.
The Next League
We arrive at OVERLOAD. Our original reason for eliminating this as an option was the Elemental Overload keystone. On further reasoning, the Overload part of the name is the least important and could even be changed to accommodate the league name if necessary. (Elemental Surge, Elemental Burst, etc).
We simply cannot come up with a reason why Overload can’t be the new league name. Overload could be a multitude of themes, from the elements overloading to a newly discovered volcano-esque set piece. It could be a reference to emotions spilling over, or a massive tomb/prison/palace spilling its contents into the land for our exiles to deal with. There are a lot of possibilities with Overload, and this is where we’ve ended up.
I can’t wait to be wrong.
See you in 3.7 Exiles!
External link →