[Suggestion] - Keep this in mind for the next expansion / content update !

Hello guys ! It's me again...!

Today I saw a post saying that was planned removing cruel difficulty when the Awakening was announced.
I don't really know the reasoning behind that... But...

That gave me an idea for the future expansions of Path of Exile:


I call that the Multi-verse Questing

• So, how does that works ?

When a player starts the game, he'll be at the Normal difficulty (Obviously).

Then he'll follow a line of quests that will take him to an event at the end of the final act proposed by the game.

Let's create a simple story-line to exemplify this:

Normal Difficulty Story-line:


So that was an example of a random story-line at the NORMAL difficulty of the game.

So what i'm proposing is to change the story-line slightly on each difficulty to change the experience the player will have through the content.

For example, we know that the MAIN story-line is basically:

- Recover a sword from a group of bandits, use it to open a passage to a tunnel that leads you to a evil world ruled by a evil king, and your mission is to kill it and bring peace to the world.

Now, here's how it would be like in Cruel difficulty:

Cruel Difficulty Story-line:


See ? One slightly change on the main story-line added a bit more content to the core game.

And of course, with the Merciless difficulty more changes would come, and THIS story-line would be considered the "main" story-line now. Because it's the COMPLETE version of the WHOLE journey of our hero/protagonist.

What i'm proposing here is to give the player a 4/10 Main Quest at Normal difficulty, then 6/10 at Cruel Difficulty, and finally 10/10 at Merciless Difficulty.

This means that not only the enemies get harder while the player progress through the game, but he'll always have a new content for each difficulty that he plays, and the story-line wouldn't be the same every time.

The changes may implicit:

- New areas
- New enemies
- New side quests
- MORE rewards
- Smooth the progression curve
- Increase the play-time
- MORE content for End-game
- Etc ! There's always enough space for creativity here.

A nice thing to keep in mind too, is to program a way of "randomize" the "extra events" that may occur in the story-line. Increasing even further the replay value of the game.

For example, at act 1 in cruel difficulty, the bandits DON'T set up a trap. But instead, at act 2 the forest is destroyed by a group of occultists that brings the pedestal to some sort of underground caves or something like that, then the player have to go there to put the sword into the pedestal.

Actually BOTH could happen at certain chance, and the player would have a lot more to explore. The new area to get the sword, AND the underground caves.

There's a lot of possibilities behind this idea, and this is why i wanted to share with the community and GGG.

And as always, this is not polished. Of course this would implicit on Development Cost, balancing, and maybe overhauling the entire game... But they did that a bit with the Awakening expansion, so why not do it in the future ?

Let me know what you guys think of it, and your suggestions are really welcome !


Thanks a lot, and don't forget to see my other suggestion posts please !


- Have a nice day you all !