New Consoles and PoE

Hey GGG,

I'm curious what the company is planning for the new consoles getting announced. I'm thinking about my microtransactions. I'm hoping they will carry over to the next gen consoles.

I know no decisions would be set in stone, but what are the hopes for the company regarding this?

Thanks!

They are tied to your Xbox / PSN account, not your console. Everything is stored server side also, so nothing to worry about.

Since consoles are PCs now, we should be able to just continue playing the same games on the next hardware unless Sony/MS are assholes and try to bill us again for the same software. I'd pay a bit for graphics upgrade packages but not if advertised as 20-35€ Reissues without actual additional content.
Another thing we don't have to worry about with PoE though. Free is free. I just hope the low numbers won't lead to them dropping the console support completely. Right now, we feel a bit neglected already.

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trollkind1 wrote:

Since consoles are PCs now, we should be able to just continue playing the same games on the next hardware unless Sony/MS are assholes and try to bill us again for the same software. I'd pay a bit for graphics upgrade packages but not if advertised as 20-35€ Reissues without actual additional content.
Another thing we don't have to worry about with PoE though. Free is free. I just hope the low numbers won't lead to them dropping the console support completely. Right now, we feel a bit neglected already.

Xbox has already stated Project Scarlet will allow you to play all your old titles including the OG Xbox backwards compatible ones.

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Corrison wrote:

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trollkind1 wrote:

Since consoles are PCs now, we should be able to just continue playing the same games on the next hardware unless Sony/MS are assholes and try to bill us again for the same software. I'd pay a bit for graphics upgrade packages but not if advertised as 20-35€ Reissues without actual additional content.
Another thing we don't have to worry about with PoE though. Free is free. I just hope the low numbers won't lead to them dropping the console support completely. Right now, we feel a bit neglected already.

Xbox has already stated Project Scarlet will allow you to play all your old titles including the OG Xbox backwards compatible ones.

PS5 has also been confirmed as being backwards compatible with PS4, so you should be able to continue using existing versions of PoE on those consoles once they release.

This does mean there's little incentive to re-port PoE: it's cheaper for GGG to simply update the existing versions than build new clients that are more native to the new consoles, can tap more of their power and thus generally run better. Developers rarely make native versions of games that can be run via backwards compatibility. But at least it's a guarantee that nothing you purchase will expire when the next-gen consoles come out unless GGG just decide to stop supporting console for their own reasons.

Then I guess what I mean is:

Will PoE make a version of PoE for the new gen consoles with their own realm so they can improve the game more? Will they keep the current PoE for the new consoles making the game only as good as the original Xbox One can handle? Will they stop focusing on the Xbox Ones and only focus on "current gen" consoles?

That's more what I'm getting at.

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Wrecker_of_Days wrote:

Then I guess what I mean is:

Will PoE make a version of PoE for the new gen consoles with their own realm so they can improve the game more? Will they keep the current PoE for the new consoles making the game only as good as the original Xbox One can handle? Will they stop focusing on the Xbox Ones and only focus on "current gen" consoles?

That's more what I'm getting at.

I would not think so. Think of how it is for PC, you got your low end rigs and high end ones. They get the same game, but the higher end rigs can play more smoothly.

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Wrecker_of_Days wrote:

Then I guess what I mean is:

Will PoE make a version of PoE for the new gen consoles with their own realm so they can improve the game more? Will they keep the current PoE for the new consoles making the game only as good as the original Xbox One can handle? Will they stop focusing on the Xbox Ones and only focus on "current gen" consoles?u

That's more what I'm getting at.

Usually a developer would not make a new version. If the existing version of a game is able to be played, albeit while running in some kind of sandbox that prevents the game utilizing the full power of the newer console, making a new version is premature and unneccessary.

This is true for almost every game. Even triple-A developers don't usually remake games that are only a single generation old and can be played under some kind of emulation or backwards compatibility mode unless there's significant reason to do so and the developer has money and time to burn. GGG don't have either, and that restricts the kind of things they can do to essential stuff only.

That said, it kind of depends on how close the new consoles are to the existing ones. It's entirely possible that PoE could be made to run fully natively on the new consoles with minor alterations, just by compiling the existing console version source code on next-gen development kits. But if a lot of work is involved, such a port would not be a priority until maybe a generation later.

Unlike with a game like Diablo 3, there's little financial motivation to go that extra mile to produce fully native cross-gen versions of PoE, because PoE is a free game, supported by MTX that is available on all platforms; while players might pay full price for D3 on PS3, and then pay full price again for a PS4 version, in Path of Exile's case the game itself is free so people having access to a newer version wouldn't necessarily bring in any extra revenue.

Proper support of next-gen hardware wouldn't make the game look significantly better, or make the game less buggy. It would provide a performance boost in situations where the game is currently bottlenecked by the CPU or GPU - mainly framerate problems (which Dynamic Resolution could also solve). But most of the problems people experience are not hardware limitations but the result of errors or issues in communicating with the server. Desync, for example, is solved in PC via lockstep mode but lockstep doesn't suit controller-based control because the small amount of delay that is introduced feels bad. That would be just as true on a next-gen console as a current-gen one.

Ultimately for these reasons I predict there won't be brand new next-gen versions of PoE unless the main PC version changes drastically. If the entire engine is ever fully rebuilt, it would be easier to just do a new port than try to retrofit those changes into old versions of the game. But I can't see PoE evolving fast enough, or significantly enough for that situation to reasonably occur.