Kiwi dev to present action RPG at PAX

After four years of work, Titirangi-based game developer Grinding Gear Games has just unveiled Path of Exile, a Diablo-styled action RPG, and will soon present at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) in Seattle. Never heard of Grinding Gear Games before? According to the team, that’s quite intentional.

“We’re perfectionists,” explains Grinding Gears co-founder Chris Wilson, who has kept the game away from the public eye for the past four years. “We wanted to show people when it’s ready.”

The time has come. Some six years after Wilson founded Grinding Gear along with Jonathan Rogers and Erik Olofsson, Path of Exile is ready for the team to unveil to the world. It’s near complete and polished enough that the team at Grinding Gears has no hesitation in putting it on display amongst the big boys of the game-development world at one of the industry’s biggest expos. Besides, what better event to launch a fantasy-styled action RPG than the gaming event notorious for pulling in equal numbers of video gamers and table-top gamers alike?

I’m sitting with Grinding Gears’ founders at their Titirangi studio of two years where a team of roughly 12 in-house employees work on the game. Although much of the work was done locally, the studio has outsourced some sound and art work to artists from around the world. I’m lucky enough to get an exclusive first look at the game in action before Wilson, Rogers and Olofsson pack their bags for the big presentation in Seattle.

Path of Exile is set in the dark fantasy world of Wraeclast, where players have been banished for “past misdeeds”. “We’re trying to make a very dark game,” says Olofsson, who contends that Path of Exile is a return to the classic style of dark fantasy that hardcore players grew up with (the team at Grinding Gear included). “Our game is about fighting scary demons. We don’t have cute elves or gnomes.”

The boys from Grinding Gear don’t shy away from the Diablo comparisons; the action takes place in real time and is easy to pick up and play. At the same time, there’s plenty of leveling-up and point-allocation for RPG aficionados and a healthy learning curve. The game features randomly generated environments and items for a near limitless replay factor. There will be six character classes available at launch, although Grinding Gear is currently only discussing two of them. First of all, there’s the Marauder, a strong, melee-based warrior class; and the Ranger, a dexterous class that can make use of bows and dual wield single-handed swords. Players can heavily customise their characters not only in appearance, but with respect to their approach to a particular class. “There should be 30 different ways to specialise in swords, for instance,” says Wilson. “It’s good to allow players the flexibility to discover good character builds.”

Best of all, being an online RPG, players can communicate with hundreds of others online to talk strategy, trade equipment or even organise a crew to undertake a quest. Rogers says that players can cooperate with around seven others when attempting quests, although they can interact with many more than that in the non-quest areas.

Interestingly, Path of Exile will adopt a free-to-play model as opposed to going the retail route. “Back when we made that decision it was a relatively new thing. It’s a very good business model for this type of game,” says Wilson, who fervently believes that a considerable community exists for a game such as Path of Exile. Players can purchase equipment and other perks for a small fee, although the items are purely aesthetic (Rogers offered the examples of glowing weaponry or even unique victory animations) and will not give a player an advantage over others.

Now that the game is out in the open, Rogers explains that the plan is to start building a community. “Now we want people that like this kind of game to know that it exists,” he says. “Our intention is to trickle content out over time so that people stay interested.”

The official website for Path of Exile is now live, so you can now peruse all of the available details, sign up for a user account, check out some screens and even watch some gameplay video.