According to Path of Exile 2 game director Jonathan Rogers the game has a wealth of inspirations from across the video game landscape, including Elden Ring and the wider action genre for its boss fights, and Civilization V for its end-game map.
Revealed during an end game presentation, and elaborated on in a press roundtable, the topic first popped up following a story boss fight in which the player character faces off against a massive construct with over a dozen unique attacks and various phases. When asked about wider inspirations in a roubtable press interview following the presentation, Rogers stated the following.
“Honestly it would be very hard for me to come up with just one game, becauase we get inspired [a lot] and there are random influences everywhere. The in-game map, right? The thing I said to the artists is that I want it to look like Civiliation V! These are things you wouldn’t usually expect to influence an ARPG. We take inspiration from everywhere, and it’s hard to even nail down the list.”
“Obviously, recent action games because it was approaching the combat stuff that we were doing, stuff like Elden Ring. I kind of play jsut about every type of genre of video game, I’m not locked into just ARPGs. But I think probably, strangely enough single player action games are probably my favourite genre.”
“It’s really what I love, so those types of games are what I take a lot of inspiration from in terms of boss design and stuff like that. We really want the bosses in PoE 2 are world class as far as action games go. There’s lots of interesting mechanics, a lot of abilties, and it takes a lot of work to make a boss like that. In PoE 2 we also have to take into consideration dodge rolling right? So there are more action game type considerations you have to make. We have to be an action game and a stat game at the same time, which is quite tricky.”
We noted the merit behind PoE 2’s boss design in our preview of the game, which you can read in full here. Path of Exile 2 is set to launch on December 6, on PC and console.
