Grinding Gear Games has been working around the clock over the past few months to ensure that they maintain their regularly scheduled Path of Exile update cadence in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic-related development challenges. They claim that the pandemic revealed how vulnerable their development process was to "black swan events," and that they will be altering their update cycle as a result of the revelations.

In his most recent development blog, Producer Chris Wilson admitted that "because of the way we've been developing expansions, we had almost no wiggle room to manage the additional overheads of lockdown."The fact that some expansions were coming in so close to the deadline was unusual even under normal circumstances. A reasonable chance exists that we will experience another lockdown, or some other unforeseen event that will add additional pressure, and we must develop a development plan that provides sufficient breathing room to allow for this possibility."

Wilson also cited feature creep, which refers to the addition of new features on the fly, as a contributing factor to production delays."While Feature Creep can have a negative impact on a development schedule (and, consequently, the overall quality of an expansion at launch), it's also important to ensure that developers have a way to continue to add those special touches that make the game feel like it has an endless buy poe currency amount of content to discover. We believe that this is best accomplished during the planning phase rather than late in the development process, when such changes can negatively impact the quality of the final product," he explained.

Grinding Gear Games launched the limited-time Harvest League for Path of Exile earlier this month, and it has quickly become one of the most popular Leagues to be released for the fantasy MMORPG. Unfortunately, the developers have stated that the mechanics used in the current League will not be implemented into the base game anytime soon.

When designing Harvest, Grinding Gear wanted to experiment with a more deterministic crafting system that would allow players to access powerful items earlier in their character progression, according to the developer."In this regard, we consider the crafting system to have been extremely successful. Harvest, on the other hand, has made it far too easy to obtain extremely powerful items that would have previously required a great deal more effort and investment to obtain in the past. If Path of Exile's item economy is allowed to continue in its current state, this was acceptable for a temporary challenge league, but it poses serious problems for the long-term health of the game."

It doesn't rule out the possibility of bringing the mechanics into the base game; it will just take a significant amount of time and effort to adapt them for the base game's requirements. The time required to implement all of these changes is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming. Harvest is something we would like to be a part of in the future buy poe orbs, but we aren't sure what that would look like just yet. Summary: If you're enjoying Harvest in its current form, make the most of it while you still can.

The team will redesign their development process in light of these findings, and they will put it through its paces over the next three-month development cycle to ensure that it is effective. Initially, the December expansion will consist of nothing more than what is necessary for a large expansion at this time. If everything goes according to plan, the team will not only be able to release the December expansion on schedule, but they will also be able to do so in a very stable and polished state.

Unfortunately, the expansion will be smaller than players are accustomed to and will only include changes that the team believes will be the most significant and have the greatest impact on the game, as opposed to changes that are more minor. In addition, the studio will change how it handles update announcements, revealing more of the expansion's features all at once rather than in small teasers that typically precede its release.