At this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this March, Chris will present a talk entitled "Designing Path of Exile to be Played Forever". While the scheduled date and time for the talk has yet to be locked down, this post describes what the talk covers in case you're attending GDC and want to attend!

Talk Description:
Since its release in 2013, the player base of 'Path of Exile' has grown from hundreds of thousands to millions of active players by having a plan for sustainable long-term development.

In this session, Chris Wilson will describe how 'Path of Exile' has been designed to retain and grow its community for the very long term. He will cover how to structure releases into seasons with predictable release dates and scope, how to re-use content for rapid development, how to use procedural generation to keep content from feeling stale, how to employ multiple overlapping axes of randomness for additional replayability, how to design deep gameplay systems that keep players engaged and how to grow a community over a long period of time.

Takeaway
Attendees will gain understanding of how to design online games for maximum replayability as well as how to foster a community for long-term growth.

Intended Audience
Anyone working on a games-as-a-service game title.

The page in the GDC Session Scheduler for this talk is here.