Path of Exile Endgame Flowchart - An Outline Of What's There After You Beat Act 10 (sirgog)

It's curious how PoE's 'endgame' is simultaneously too abstracted and too concrete.

It's abstracted in a story sense: we go from a world with solid locations, 'real' people, lore, history, and so on -- all of which lend themselves to the concept of 'mattering', of worth, of impact -- to a sort of Other realm of parallel existences in which the goals are less about the world of Wraeclast (well, continent, but in the context of PoE they're synonymous) and more about the player, the Exile themselves. This was inevitable though: PoE was never about saving the world, or helping people, or learning the lore, or indeed of doing anything that matters as far as Wraeclast is concerned; those were all just excuses to kill shit, get more shit, get stronger, kill stronger shit, rinse and repeat. Which in a way makes PoE the most honest ARPG ever made.

But then GGG went and made this abstract endgame too concrete in a different way: they tried to make Maps matter (again, pun intended). They created the Atlas, Zana, Shaper, Elder, Sirus, Maven...an endless procession of characters who have no connection to the game's original premise and thus seem tacked on. It's (almost) as though GGG didn't really know where they were going to take their game after Act 3, or Act 4, or now Act 10. What to do with Wraeclast, which remains to this day a largely unexplored physical world in-game. Sure, they peppered hints about Maps throughout the ten acts, but only in terms of 'dreamscape' and 'limitless possibility'. True Lovecraftian otherworldliness. And I think that was where they should have stopped. The Atlas took something deliciously ethereal and intangible and forced it into place. Maybe this helped players visualise it better, but trying to map dreams (pun intended) rarely goes well. Maybe it made it easier for GGG to 'expand' it (heh, there's another one) in that they could just create new areas or shift the 'geography' the same way they shift the meta. Either way, they took something with at least 4 dimensions and anchored it to a 2 dimensional plane. An abstract realm of possibility became an inevitably limited Wraeclast 2.0, effectively.

...Which would be fine if they were done with fleshing out Wraeclast, but they really aren't. Why couldn't they expand their existing world instead of just inventing a new one? In narrative terms, they did a real ass-pull with the Atlas imo. It'd be like reading a series of books about a world and its people, only to have the protagonist-hero transcend said world and people AND THEN KEEP GOING. That's how you end a series, guys. That's not what you did midway...UNLESS you're nothing but a vapid power fantasy of fanfic level wherein the world, its lore and its people are merely set pieces in service of that power fantasy. Gosh, doesn't sound like PoE at all. And if that is true of PoE, then it hardly matters whether you're in Wraeclast or some other realm with absolutely no real consequence. I guess GGG figured that out about their players too. Anyone who cared about Wraeclast has, I reckon, long since moved on to find other worlds to care about -- and about which its developers also care.

Which brings me to an example of how endgame doesn't need to abandon its campaign world: Guild Wars.

The original GW, made by ex-Blizzard staff striking out on their own as ArenaNet, inspired a fair bit of PoE (especially the idea of shared town/instanced everything else), and is beloved by at least one higher-up in the GGG office. Despite GW's 'driving' perspective, its focus on rotating skills, and deck-building style character customisation, it is much closer to an ARPG than an MMO -- small parties negotiate private zones to advance the story and/or simply explore. There's fast travel, something else most MMOS eschewed at the time, and fairly fast combat; again, at the time most MMOs were into grindier, slower fights. Mobs in GW1 often go down quite quickly (and even quicker in GW2, which I'll get to in a bit). Suffice to say, GW1 was not an MMO, and so I feel okay making this comparison.

PoE has Wraeclast, at least for ten acts; GW has Tyria. Both are sprawling locales of diverse biomes and cultural division. Plenty of room for exploration. GW's original campaign is set around a diaspora, in a clever set up where the idyllic goes south early and hard. Its second campaign is an MMO-level move: Asian-flavoured Cantha, a whole other continent with parallel progression. Its third, a similar move with the vast desert of Elona. All three had their own endgame areas but characters from any of them could move freely between them. And then the game's only true expansion created a series of dungeons that built on the rich lore planted throughout. This is pretty standard MMO game world development and growth, but as I said: GW1 isn't an MMO. And if you look at what GGG plan for 'Path of Exile 2', they're basically just copying ArenaNet: a separate campaign with the same endgame point. They're just able to separate it not just with space but with time because PoE's endgame is detached from Wraeclast's concept of 'time'.

In contrast to this comprehensive 2 year expansion of Tyria into Cantha and Elona through three campaigns and an expansion, PoE has spent 10 fucking years doing absolutely nothing more with Wraeclast than crawling up the coast of one small portion of it and briefly visiting an island. Beyond that it's been all Maps. Little wonder so many players don't give a shit about the game's lore; GGG themselves abandoned it long ago. Is Wraeclast truly as dead as it seems? I'd hoped not -- to paraphrase 'Contact': seems like an awful waste of a lot of space. And GGG did go to lengths to give away an actual map of Wraeclast, repeatedly: I'd know, I've got like five of them. They clearly wanted us to see Wraeclast as the game world, and to be awed by its vastness. The closest we ever came to exploring that vastness properly was, again, through Maps. That's not exploring; that's imagining.

And because ANet weren't content with doing it once, they did it *again* with the actual MMO GW2: their 'living world' content absolutely sticks to the fate of Tyria and taps GW1 lore in some very deep, meaningful ways. Characters I never thought I'd see or hear from again don't just pop up for a cameo but are thoroughly fleshed out within the context of a world 250 years past their time. Tyria has existed for 16 years now and ArenaNet never once stopped caring for it. Virtually all of the endgame meta in GW2 is set IN Tyria (they have their version of maps in dimensional 'possibilities' called Fractals, but almost all of those are based on real events in Tyria's history), and thus even at its most abstract, the meta event driven endgame matters. Sure, you know it's one big loop and story-wise whatever boss you're killing is long-dead, but in the moment, it really does feel like you're stopping them, again.

I do wonder at which point GGG stopped really caring about Wraeclast and just went fuck it, players are happy enough power-fantasying their way through Maps. I also wonder if that shift presaged a move from meaningful endgame to this dizzying mess of busywork and more-for-the-sake-of-more time-wasting.

I never really engaged in PoE's endgame despite having the time and resources to do so. I never really cared for it; GGG didn't give me a reason to care. Maybe I was always a poor fit for the game in that regard, because obviously plenty of people do care. I suppose they're here for the numbers and little else...in which case, why waste time making Wraeclast in the first place?

I 100% engage with GW's endgame/meta. Both of them. And GW2 would have more a complicated flowchart than this one, if you were to lay out the post-story 'endgame' content. But because it's all well-integrated and presented, you don't NEED a flowchart for what to do with endgame there.

And, as my final argument, I'd say any game that does need an endgame flowchart has failed to present an enticing, worthy endgame.

All it's done is accumulate pointless shit to do, and thus we arrive yet again at the endless addiction mindset: why do you do it? Because it's what I do. Unspoken: I can't imagine not doing it.

You don't need a fleshed out world for that sort of player. Wraeclast is, in that respect, a relic of the game GGG wanted us to believe they were making. Maybe they even believed it themselves...but if so, they sure don't anymore.

Act 4 alone has enough material for a handful of endgame level content. You can tell they weren't sure if there'd even be an act 5 with how much they crammed into The Awakening. Any named antagonist of act 4 could have benefited from a lot more attention and focus. You have some really interesting characters in there, as touched upon by the graphic novel, and most of them are reduced to shit-to-kill in Act 4. Daresso's the only one who gets the treatment he deserves, and even then it felt like a speed-run of his gladiatorial journey.

And even the devs have acknowledged Act 4 feels...really...long.