Path of Exile's new Mirages "will certainly" boost ground loot, but GGG is "aware of the problem" in the long term

Path of Exile 3.28 is looking spicy, and I'm glad to see that the wider PoE community has responded with a similar level of excitement to my own impressions of the Mirage league and new-look endgame Atlas map. Ahead of the reveal, I sat down to speak across timezones with game director Mark Roberts and game designer Christopher 'Octavian' Laferriere to discuss the best Mirage activities in 3.28, how Grinding Gear Games is expanding the main campaign, and the new update's impact on the eternal ground loot debate.

Last time I spoke to Roberts, he admitted that balancing his time between Path of Exile and PoE 2 was becoming increasingly tough. To help correct for this, some of the first game's workload has been shifted to Octavian and another game designer who asks to be known simply as 'Andrew.' "It's been an absolute savior of my sanity," Roberts admits. "I feel a restoration to my work-life balance has occurred. […] I'm hugely grateful for them, honestly, and it couldn't have come at a better time for these guys taking on this extra responsibility."

Octavian was "relatively involved with PoE 2 for a while" and was jumping back and forth between the two games, something many developers at GGG are doing. With both games now on four-month cycles, he's going "full-on PoE 1" for the foreseeable future. "I love both games, but I don't mind doing it, because I do have 16,000 hours in PoE 1, so I kind of like it. It's a pretty good videogame."

At the center of the new league is the Mirage system, which creates an "imperfect copy" of a section of your current map, including twisted versions of any other league mechanics and objects that happen to be within range. It's a particular favorite of Octavian, who loves aspects that intertwine and modify each other. He estimates that "90% of things do work," although notes that mechanics that take you to a new zone such as Vaal side areas are a notable exception. "You can't, for functional reasons with our game, have a sub area of a sub area."

So which mechanics would Octavian recommend you seek out? His favorite is Blight, which awards a belt you can anoint, "just because I'm an entrenched player with a lot of hours." For someone a little newer to PoE, he recommends seeking out map bosses in Mirages. "They will always be augmented with the astral magic of the Mirage, so they will just have various astral hazards going off around them - and sometimes they will drop a map that has an enchantment on it causing the map to be completely covered in a Mirage."

He also highlights Delirium, which awards a currency that changes the enchantments on cluster jewels. "You end up being able to do these extremely meticulous crafts, where you can craft a cluster jewel into the stat you want it, and then you change the enchantment, and now you can suddenly add a modifier that would not normally be available with the existing modifiers in the jewel. It's the kind of thing that's going to appeal to someone who really wants to min-max their build."

One of the biggest talking points I've seen in the Path of Exile community of late is a topic that never truly goes away - the value of so-called 'ground loot' compared to the drops you find in chests or shops, gain through mechanics such as Kingsmarch shipping and the Genesis tree, or make yourself via crafting. Roberts calls the fluctuation in balancing "a kind of ebb and flow situation."

He reflects on past leagues such as Necropolis and Affliction where "these things get crazy - often we just leave them for the league, or maybe we nerf it a bit, but not all the way, for the league. But it does kind of change people's expectations of what they should be able to get - and people aren't necessarily wrong, it's just that what happens then is often we will look at these extremes and we will nerf them, especially when they go core.

"So it constantly feels like there's this nerfing of loot dropping because of all these extremes that we keep missing because the game is just inherently so complicated, and there are so many levers, and it's hard to find it all. And so it feels a lot like nerf, nerf, nerf. Meanwhile, someone will be like, 'This league's unrewarding,' and those get buffed and buffed, […] and now we're at a tipping point where one of the sides is heavier than the other and now we need to kind of go back in the other direction."

Roberts says Mirage "will certainly" help to make ground loot feel more worthwhile, but he notes that this up and down "has been a consistent [issue] since the dawn of Path of Exile." He emphasizes that the complexity of PoE's item drop model means changes cannot be rushed. "We have to be absolutely confident. Because if you break that, you brick everything. You have a little margin of error, but if you make the wrong decision and tilt something in the wrong place that's really bad, you have a very short time window to correct that. Otherwise you do some irreparable damage.

"Long story short - we're working on it. We're aware of the problem," Roberts concludes. "Yes, we need to work on [improving] ground drops, loot drops, drops from monsters, whatever you want to call it." He adds that player feedback is "mandatory" at all times. "We can't just wake up tomorrow and decide ground drops are good enough. So we just wait to be told about these problems. We listen. It's important to keep listening and then work out a plan and deal with it."

Another addition in Path of Exile 3.28 comes in the campaign, with the addition of around 20 new side rooms to be discovered, each of which will offer a little power boost if you find them. Some will be obvious, others less so. Octavian remarks that they should all be found within a few days: "We're not talking Fromsoft level." It'll be nice to have more reasons to not autopilot my way through the story and push directly into the endgame, and Roberts tells me that he and Octavian have been discussing more additions for the future.

"We want to do a lot more with the campaign and make sure that [updates aren't] just devolving down to endgame change, endgame change, endgame change," Roberts remarks. "We want to make sure we retain a level of importance for the player base who just come back, play through the campaign, and then that's it again. It's not just everyone mapping all the time, and it's really important that those people feel like they have an enhanced experience, whether it's a small one or a major one.

"Obviously the league does wonders to contribute to that, but going a bit beyond that is still very important, and I would want to make sure that we keep doing it," Roberts explains. "We're just getting back into gear of making sure that's part of our league routine, thinking, 'What are the players who are playing to level 10 getting? To 20 getting? To act four, five six - what are they getting out of it?'

"Sometimes the league is enough, especially if it's rich with story, but if it's quite mechanical, like the one we've got now, it's often good to then pair it with a few other things to find in the campaign. Just to keep the world feeling new, feeling fresh, and things not just being too stale," he concludes. "It's a very important element that you often find people not really asking for, but you get this group of people who are quite appreciative of it when they actually get it in their hands."