Exploring Path of Exile2: Pay for Convenience & Comfort

Speaker 1 The stack size, it says 40, but it's pretty much unlimited. Yeah, so I can now have 5,000 of these or whatever.
Stuff like that. Shit,

Speaker 1 shit stacks.

Speaker 1 Then,

Speaker 1 what they basically did that at some point it started to be like a pattern that every league they added a sheet ton of new currencies that would be around the deed, like for instance, essence, and they would add an essence tab.

Speaker 1 So, you want to interact with the newly currency, like kind kind of, you know, in order and properly, buy a new stash tab that's kind of

Speaker 1 specifically custom designed for that currency.

Speaker 2 This is a no bullshit gaming show where we talk about games and their revenue in great detail, powered by our ad monetization, game design,

Speaker 2 and user acquisition triple threat expertise.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the two and a half gamers, the unfiltered truth, served with a side of giggles.

Speaker 2 Let's not forget this is a 4 a.m. conference discussion vibe, so let's not take it too seriously.
Tune in now and stay two and a half steps ahead of the gaming industry.

Speaker 1 And hello, hello.

Speaker 1 This is Two and a Half Gamers. Happy New Year's.

Speaker 1 My name is Matiel Ancheric. And I'm Jakubremir.

Speaker 1 And we are your hosts. I have a disco ball.

Speaker 1 Jakub has a Christmas tree.

Speaker 1 So we are covered. We don't have Felix though.
He's on Seoul. And you're going to be in Seoul in a few days as well because we have an interesting event happening with Molocco,

Speaker 1 Sensor Tower, and Airbridge.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 what are we talking about today?

Speaker 1 PC game. PC game.
Okay, good.

Speaker 1 Because before we go there,

Speaker 1 I mean, it's not really relevant to PC.

Speaker 1 I just want to announce we partnered with PVX partners.

Speaker 1 They're becoming a sponsor of our podcast because they're dear friends.

Speaker 1 I'm an investor in the company as well. And they're good guys.
And what they do is basically they

Speaker 1 they want to be known as the folks that can help you access the most effective form of growth capital once your game have the metrics to back it out actually

Speaker 1 so it's non-dilutive

Speaker 1 and the simplest and most effective credit line for marketing so you don't really need to sell your

Speaker 1 soul and sell your shares actually scale your game which is great and uh you know we

Speaker 1 there are

Speaker 1 payments, repay as you get paid. You can get term sheet in within 24 hours.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 you know, you can work with a team that's entirely made up of ex-gaming operators and investors, and some gaming folks as well. And they take the risk with you,

Speaker 1 and you know, you can scale fast, but you need to have the game to back it up. So, you know, if they don't give money to

Speaker 1 everyone, they actually pick their battles. So that's, you know,

Speaker 1 they're looking into the metrics as well. So

Speaker 1 these are the guys that can help fund your UA. Yeah.
So me, me screaming at people that are telling me they have like insane metrics and I'm telling them, why don't you get the mortgage?

Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 This is the mortgage.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 go to pvxpartners.com. It's going to be in the show notes as well.
Don't get the mortgage, but get the funding from PVX partners rather than just the mortgage. So yeah, but this is exactly it.

Speaker 1 This is exactly it. I'm actually

Speaker 1 investing in a few other companies and one of the comp that company

Speaker 1 is signing with PVX Partners. And I just kind of found out about it.
So I didn't

Speaker 1 put any words behind. Yeah, but the worlds collide.
I mean, it makes sense because

Speaker 1 it's a great game with great metrics and this

Speaker 1 seems like a good match. Of course, and they didn't get the mortgage.
Indeed, they get the mortgage. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Anyway. Anyway, thanks thank you very much, PVX partners, for partnering up with us.
And it's gonna be a lot of a lot of fun and great ride.

Speaker 1 Back to the episode. So PC.

Speaker 1 PC, as usual, everybody knows what I want to talk about.

Speaker 1 Of course, for some months. And yeah, and now we're gonna finally talk about because,

Speaker 1 because one very interesting thing happened, which is quite important. I finally got to the end game.

Speaker 1 You end game, okay. Yes, so we're talking about Pedo Excel 2.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Mate.

Speaker 1 Mate's noises.

Speaker 1 I fell asleep. Ah, sorry.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ, now this

Speaker 1 looks like Diablo.

Speaker 1 I would say it's much, much much darker, especially with the two submarines rotating around my character. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Oh, submarine. Nice.
Look. So I I

Speaker 1 I think I s I download no, I think I downloaded the dark and darker first and then I'm gonna but I already bought Pedo XL to the the first uh early access uh or whatever noob

Speaker 1 version for thirty dollars for thirty dollars. No two hundred or whatever was there.
Yeah, we're gonna talk about it more definitely as it kind of unfolds.

Speaker 1 But uh yeah, to give people a little bit of uh

Speaker 1 background here or or like I'm going to do a little bit of history episode because I think a lot of times when people are talking about this game, they just don't understand the context of what these guys achieved and how they got here.

Speaker 1 So we're going to go to the memory lane and at some point I'm going to log in even Pad of Excel one. Oh,

Speaker 1 show some important things here.

Speaker 1 Before we start, I want to stress this is not a game for everyone. It's super, super hardcore.

Speaker 1 That's what I think. But it's very popular.
It is. It's very popular.
It is. It is.

Speaker 1 Heads off. Yeah, it's like it's definitely popular.
And

Speaker 1 I want to find time to play this, but that's the thing.

Speaker 1 If this is as complex as Pet of Exile 1,

Speaker 1 I'm just not going to. I would say like 10% less complex.

Speaker 1 You were pitching this as a very streamlined version. Like, this is going to be super easy.
And I was like, oh,

Speaker 1 they just shave off like 10% of complexity. That's it.

Speaker 1 Okay, well, in that case, they can do it. In that case, I just threw $30 out of the window.
Okay, thank you very much.

Speaker 1 I should just put this after the episode, not before the episode.

Speaker 1 Ah, okay, so guys, yeah, the listeners, this should.

Speaker 1 Why are we even talking about this? So we're talking about this because of this, of course,

Speaker 1 which is the Steam Charts graph of Ped of Exile 2. So if you look at it,

Speaker 1 the early access started December 6th, if I understand correctly, or 7th, I don't know. And from there, where it hit this kind of all-time peak of 578K players online.

Speaker 1 It went a little bit on decline, but that's normal in Pet of Exile lifecycle, so that's nothing new here. But especially because this is early access, and I'm going to talk about it a little bit more.

Speaker 1 The important thing when you're looking at these numbers that you need to keep in mind that this is just team numbers.

Speaker 1 The company is,

Speaker 1 I would say,

Speaker 1 not pretty big. It's not like

Speaker 1 thousands of people, it's still hundreds of people. Guys are based from New Zealand.

Speaker 1 And I remember playing beta for Pedro Vexelan when it launched in 2013, actually.

Speaker 1 So it's very, very kind of old and crafty. And what they're doing here is that it's one of those like

Speaker 1 we're mastered the category, mastered the genre, mastered the game, and you just see the end result of it.

Speaker 1 Similar to what we've seen with Helldiver, similar to what we've seen with Baldur's Gate 3, so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 If we look at the charts actually of Fed of XL1, and this is even more interesting here,

Speaker 1 you can see that they pretty much hit their all-time peak in July this year

Speaker 1 after being online for literally 11 years.

Speaker 1 And they were still going up.

Speaker 1 Because Pad of Exile and their RPG system lives in these three-month cycles that they kind of invented here, where each three months there's a new league which resets the whole economy.

Speaker 1 of the current game if you're playing the like the the new league you can still play in standard where there's like economy is completely fucked but

Speaker 1 nobody cares about that, to be honest.

Speaker 1 Everybody starts from fresh because like three months league goes on, everybody needs to build their new character, so on and so forth. And there's usually like new mechanic.

Speaker 1 You can only play the mechanic in the league. You cannot play in the standard.
It gets put into standard if it's good later down the line after the league. Sometimes it doesn't because it's shit.
Tax.

Speaker 1 Could be shit. Yeah, they killed some of these mechanics.
It's like, you know, they're not geniuses. Sister didn't say that.
Like, they're very good, but sometimes they can do mistakes.

Speaker 1 But what this thing does, as you see, these peaks, so it's what I don't think so. They always try this thing because from beta, I remember we were doing like

Speaker 1 act one to act three in three difficulties for like two years or three years. I don't know how much.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, just like my head was blown off by running the same content all over again back then in the dog runs.

Speaker 1 But the game got built up. That happened to us with Diablo Diablo 4 because we played beta and that was amazing.
And then we step when I played the real game, I was like, fucking hell.

Speaker 1 You mean Diablo 3?

Speaker 1 No, Diablo 4. Diablo 4.
We, both of us.

Speaker 1 We played the beta. Yeah, we played the beta for like the like all like both weekends and it's like oh this is great and then the game came out like fuck this is terrible.

Speaker 1 The content is not yeah it's bad.

Speaker 1 Yeah

Speaker 1 same happened with Diablo 3 by the way. The beta was great The content was definitely not that good.

Speaker 1 Yeah, anyway, so just saying that this model kind of works very well and keep in mind they are free to play. Ped of Excel 1 is free to play.
Ped of XL 2 will be free to play.

Speaker 1 It's not free to play yet.

Speaker 1 I mean

Speaker 1 it's f i it is free to play. You can you know you can wait until it's

Speaker 1 yeah, you can wait until it's free to play, but it it's not free to play now, just like stating the obvious here.

Speaker 1 You need to buy into it through the you know, the packages on the website, which are, we can go over those by the way here. So, if we go literally into the shop and then like buy packs,

Speaker 1 then

Speaker 1 yeah,

Speaker 1 you see that you can buy these like access packs and stuff like that. That's me, $30.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so just the base $30 kind of pack can give you access. and of course you get still the points that you can use for microtransactions and we cover those.

Speaker 1 But this can go all the way into something like

Speaker 1 if I just zoom here. Yeah, what's that? No, there's a previous extension.
Yeah, here we go.

Speaker 1 It's like 500 something. Yeah, 450, which gives you also a t-shirt, hoodie, a book, and I don't know what, basically.

Speaker 1 It used to be like you could design a unique item with the team and stuff like that. So a lot of kind of perks basically so but back to the numbers so

Speaker 1 these guys pretty much developed this system

Speaker 1 in their very specific unique version of free to play and they'll been running it for many many years now and

Speaker 1 what they achieved also and you need to kind of keep this in mind is that they've been building content and so much content because each three months they basically release a Diablo like expansion onto the game with like new stuff new skills new content new bosses new everything new mechanics then it gets tested for three months they fine-tune it then they decide if it was good or bad usually the community sentiment is pretty strong about this if it's good or bad and then they put it into the main game and it upgrades the main game and then the cycle repeats so what happened with pedo exile 2

Speaker 1 is there's shit ton of content already because it was taken from pedoxyl 1 which they already tested and know that it's very good.

Speaker 1 So, if you look at the structure of the game, actually, what happened here, and this was talking in their video,

Speaker 1 is that

Speaker 1 they know that the campaign and like the initial, let's say, single-player experience, the story, and everything.

Speaker 1 Like, currently, for instance, act one to act three takes like 25 hours, and they know the end game takes like hundreds of hours, and everybody just wants to play that.

Speaker 1 And they had this very, very smart decision with the team that for early access,

Speaker 1 instead of fully developing the campaign, they rather fleshed out the end game

Speaker 1 or talk about the end game. And they just said, okay, we won't build Act 4, 5, 6 for the early access.
We'll build it only for the release.

Speaker 1 We rather put you through Act 1, 2, and 3 again on just a higher difficulty. And that's it, because, you know, you fly through it anyway.

Speaker 1 And rather focus on the endgame, which I think is a very good to do.

Speaker 1 That is because you want to play the end game, which should be

Speaker 1 the most time you spend afterwards because you've run through the campaign. This happened to be Diablo 4.
Exactly, which didn't have any end game. Yeah, there's no end game.

Speaker 1 Traditionally, exactly the opposite directions Diablo 4 was doing basically.

Speaker 1 Now they're fixing the endgame. Before it was just broken.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so we have this. And

Speaker 1 yeah, let's talk about the game actually. So So about the end game, we can look through it.
Now they have this kind of very, very nice world fleshed out in these kind of nice maps.

Speaker 1 So you start in Act 1.

Speaker 1 There are these... Don't want to spoil the story that much.
I think the story is pretty good, but it's much more, it's much more boss-driven these times. So there's many, many, many, many more bosses.

Speaker 1 The game, as everybody is talking about it, is like the Dark Souls or ARPGs, which isn't really the

Speaker 1 best comparison, but it is, let's say,

Speaker 1 if you want to have like a surface-level understanding of this, yes, it can be said like that.

Speaker 1 So, it's kind of hard, and you need to, because there was this one mechanic added, which is the dodge roll thing, which is very, very

Speaker 1 kind of iconic for these souls games where your character just like needs to dodge a lot of attacks, which can one-shot you and like insta-kill you during the boss fights.

Speaker 1 That's how they're balanced around. So,

Speaker 1 this game isn't balanced like Pedo XL1, where you just like face tank the laser beams and whatever and stuff, like because I have so much armor and whatever.

Speaker 1 Here, it's like if you stand and shit, you'll die. If you wait for somebody to swing a giant hammer on you, you'll die.
It's very simple.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 yeah, it's not, I would say, it's not that hard as the usual kind of muscle core crowd, the masochistic core version of Dark Souls, where it's like you really like the pain of you dying all the time non-stop until you learn completely perfect pulse mechanics and everything and you can kind of get that like eldering stuff but it's still much more harder it's much more punishing definitely much more punishing uh we'll talk about that later but uh yeah and people like it by the way that's why also why people like the dark souls games and why dark souls is like even the eldering game is one of the most kind of popular games in there is it's hard it's hard exactly it's hard people like difficulty if it's done properly people like difficulty they don't really like steamroll through content yeah where did we where did we see that?

Speaker 1 Oh, wait a second. We are warriors.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Same thing.
Same type of thing.

Speaker 1 It's hard and it's challenging, and I just want to play and get better just until I figure it out.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Challenging stuff interpretably is very important to do.
And it's popular. It's not that like, as you see there, it's 400.
It's about like.

Speaker 1 Top 10 was it on Steam?

Speaker 1 What was it on Steam? I think we will have EU numbers, which is like lower because America is sleeping. But yeah, even now, it's like top top three on Steam currently.
After those.

Speaker 1 America is sleeping. It's middle of the day for you as

Speaker 1 well.

Speaker 1 Well, dear listeners, this is a night show, late night show.

Speaker 1 Yeah, foreign discussion wipe. It's definitely not like America is sleeping.

Speaker 1 But it's still like top three game on Steam. And as I said,

Speaker 1 even counting the Steam numbers, I still think they're like less than half of what the actual numbers are because there's consoles and there's a native client that people are used to play this game through native client not steam so still uh and also epic client epic yeah i bought it through epic yeah yeah so i'm guessing like i think they said already that during launch they were more than one million ccu so definitely the the numbers are just much higher yeah anyway

Speaker 1 Moving on and why this game even makes money and what's the free-to-play part of it and why are we talking about this?

Speaker 1 So disregarding the difficulty, we can like finish the mechanics a little bit so we play through these act one act two which is a desert area act three which is a jungle area they're kind of continuing their nice um kind of theme from the first game where you have these like wall civilizations which are these like corrupted uh whatever like basically maya team stuff

Speaker 1 um then corrupted whatever sounds really good because it's all about this kind of corruption thing and then you're chasing these beasts of corruption, whatever.

Speaker 1 So you have then after you after you play through it, you see Act 1 is pretty much through the cruel difficulty, which is the big one, and all these things will be basically removed.

Speaker 1 So you will be have like Act 1 to Act 7, and then you hit the end game. And this is really important.
Jesus, looks like a Forex map.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Fucking hell. Yeah, like Forex map of Heroes of Mind and Magic, basically.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So, what's happening here? That guys really fleshed out their end game, and I mean, like, really fleshed out. I think it's much more interesting, at least.
What do you do here? What do you have to do

Speaker 1 here in the previous game?

Speaker 1 The game would end up in the end game, which would be the atlas of maps.

Speaker 1 And it's a mechanic where you want to run through content all the time, and there needs to be some kind of additional progressions.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 because they have, by the way, they have their own skill tree, as usual, the player skill tree, which is this, our favorite skill tree.

Speaker 1 It by the way got simplified a little bit. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I'm not joking.

Speaker 1 Life got removed from it, so it's much more simpler, but yeah,

Speaker 1 not for the usual player. But why not? There's also a skill tree for the Atlas.

Speaker 1 So what's happening here that also your Atlas has a skill tree, which is much, much less

Speaker 1 complex, but still.

Speaker 1 So, Atlas is this endgame,

Speaker 1 it's basically this: Atlas of maps, which is this end game area. So, it's the

Speaker 1 it's what you play with the end game, yeah.

Speaker 1 So, your questline ends basically here, and the guy tells you, like, run maps and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 And this is how you pretty much get to the endgame boss fights, the final content of the game, and like the hardest part of the game, whatever you can get there. Yeah, so how do you run this thing?

Speaker 1 Is basically you start here in your Ziggurd refuge, which is basically the end of campaign. The story kind of switches into whatever.

Speaker 1 And then you have these maps around you. So, let's say I completed this one, I completed this one, and you can see that I can only go to connecting ones.
So, from this one, I can go here, here, here.

Speaker 1 I cannot go here because I need to complete this map. So, you need to pretty much eat your way through it.
So, for instance,

Speaker 1 I see here there's a boss here

Speaker 1 in some, which I can

Speaker 1 find through. So I go here, I pick, let's say, I don't know, tier two wainstones here.
I go to map device, and here

Speaker 1 I insert it, and I could go into the map. And pretty much area has plus one to level monsters, area contains a deadly map boss.

Speaker 1 And now you start to see that, like, some of these maps are different than the others.

Speaker 1 Because, let's say, the map here has boss, the map here has Illyrium, the map here has nothing, and so on and so forth. There are these like bigger fortresses.

Speaker 1 Let's say the lost towers are the ones that you, if I understand correctly, you

Speaker 1 complete the map and it reveals an area around it, literally, like in Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Like,

Speaker 1 looks exactly the same.

Speaker 1 And then you have these special buildings which are containing keys to the big bosses and stuff like that. For instance, here I have the Realm Gate.

Speaker 1 If I would have the keys, I can go to big bosses from there. And you can have whatever kind of different things spawn these maps.
The important part is it's infinite. This goes infinite.

Speaker 1 So, if I go, for instance, here at the end of the screen, you see this goes infinite.

Speaker 1 What? Yes, how? How

Speaker 1 why?

Speaker 1 Because you have all these different modifiers, and if you, let's say, if I but I don't have the life to complete this game, you don't complete it ever. Okay, yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much for listening, guys. This is it.
Yeah, you don't have to do it. It's very simple.

Speaker 1 But the thing is that they have different rewards to kind of complete your character.

Speaker 1 That's maybe the thing. Because my character, for instance, is level 69 Infernalist.

Speaker 1 You hit a level 100 kind of level ceiling. That's it.
You can go over level 100. But it gets very, very hard afterwards because

Speaker 1 if you die in this game, you lose experience, actually.

Speaker 1 So if you keep dying, you stop leveling, which means the content will be just always stronger than you. And, you know, you need to change your build, get better items, blah blah blah, stuff like that.

Speaker 1 But the system is just great because and that's why I'm talking about this, because there are these mechanics like Breach,

Speaker 1 like um Delirium, like bosses, like uh what's that? Precursor tablets or whatever that you see here, the simulacrum.

Speaker 1 What I'm saying is that each of these different mechanics that they built are previous leaks from Pedro Excel one.

Speaker 1 So this is three months of content, three months of content, three months of content, three months of content, three months of content, three months of content already

Speaker 1 that they translated into this game that they worked into. And there's also the Ultimatum and Sanctum league.
So, they basically took like content from something like 10 leaks, which is like

Speaker 1 30 months of work, basically, I would say. And then the base game, of course.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So, this game has a giant head start against everybody else basically in the ARPG genre because it took like everything good from Pet of Excel 1 and put it into Pet of Excel 2.

Speaker 1 That's what's happening. It's not perfect.

Speaker 1 There are giant problems which still are, I mean, like community-wise, giant, like not that like people are kind of freaking over, but endgame players are freaking over.

Speaker 1 I'm also freaking over because armor is kind of useless here and completely useless. And everybody is now switching to energy shield.

Speaker 1 And yeah, don't really want to get into specifics, but everybody thought that they could play their character with life and armor-based builds. No, they can't because armor is shit.

Speaker 1 And everybody is now switching to energy shield, which literally, like, this one armor here that I have in my thing, which is like cost nothing, can just give me instantly like 1,000 energy shield, which is just much more.

Speaker 1 more efficient. If I would have spagh into energy shot, I'm like 6,000 basically.
So why bother with armor at least? Like, whatever.

Speaker 1 If you want more, go watch Crip's videos, basically. He explains stuff here.
So that's one big problem. The other big problem is magic find

Speaker 1 stat on gear, like rarity, basically. So everybody is now speccing into rarity, which means that you have stuff like increased rarity of items, which concerns the currencies, and you can get

Speaker 1 observed levels of these, like 500% increase on your gear, which means that somebody is basically playing a piñata simulator and you are doing like

Speaker 1 desert. Like, where's the loot? Where's the loot? Yeah, where's the loot?

Speaker 1 And yeah, people are doing absurd levels and the economy is kind of being inflated very heavily now. Like, if you go to currency exchange now, just to kind of give you an example,

Speaker 1 the divine orbs are the currency to trade to

Speaker 1 these days.

Speaker 1 And they cost 126 for like exalted orbs to get one divine orb. When I started the league and like kind of looking, it was 60.
It was like seven days ago.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 That that tells you about the speed of inflation. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So everybody is basically waiting for the developers to return after holiday break and they'll like nerf stuff heavily. So that's that's probably going to happen.

Speaker 1 It says early access for a reason. For a reason.

Speaker 1 What would you expect to work?

Speaker 1 I mean, I'm really surprised sometimes when I read the reviews in early access or beta, it's like, oh, this doesn't work. Like, oh, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 But that's the thing that in the current age, if you early access on Steam, that's your global release date, basically.

Speaker 1 And everybody take it as that. Like, that's how it works.
Yeah, okay, fair. The number of impressions you get from Steam, the hype, and everything, like, that's it.
I know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's how unfortunately it works. But the good thing is that these guys still have...

Speaker 1 A lot of content, so you won't get, they are definitely not content starved.

Speaker 1 Because because even if even if you look this uh

Speaker 1 they still have like half of the classes in there will be like two times more classes two times more sentences i don't know how many more skills basically like if i go into skills

Speaker 1 you could see

Speaker 1 yeah that that for instance here that all of these skills for instance like x skills sword skills uh spear skills dadger skills like basically half of the skills are not even here so they're still like have shit ton of stuff to add in so content's not a problem.

Speaker 1 They will be adding loads of content. The game will be, by the way, going into free to play global release next this year.

Speaker 1 They said basically between six to twelve months of early access. So it could be somewhere between June and December, which my guess will be December.
Most probably before

Speaker 1 you don't want to rush these things and you know they you can fine-tune forever.

Speaker 1 They just got some in interesting money from the early access, I'm very I'm pretty sure. Yeah, they got very very interesting money from the early access

Speaker 1 based on the concurrent users. Yeah, so in my opinion, the game's great, still, it's very great for normal players.

Speaker 1 Like, a lot of people are playing this in this kind of solo cell phone mode, where basically it disables trading, so you cannot trade with other players, you can only use up what you find.

Speaker 1 It's still a very enjoyable experience, and like people.

Speaker 1 I want to play this as like a single player. I don't really want to play it.

Speaker 1 Actually, like, if you go and

Speaker 1 let me show you. So in the character creation screen, you can literally create a new character

Speaker 1 and you see like solo cell phone.

Speaker 1 So hardcore is only one dead for characters. Yeah, yeah.
Don't do that.

Speaker 1 No, I that's but if you click solo cell phone, this option disables trade and party play for this character. So you literally like make this game single player.

Speaker 1 They have this option for people like this.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 even streamers are playing this like this. Yeah, this is absolutely me.
I don't want to play with anyone else. I started playing Ped of Excel one and there was like always like a shit ton of people.

Speaker 1 Guys, get rid of my

Speaker 1 fair, yeah. So they they have this option here that it's not not a problem.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 uh let's let let's talk about the microtransaction, how this actually works, and I can showcase like how and why it actually works. So

Speaker 1 I think we go to the first first game, we can say you actually spend money because you had to buy.

Speaker 1 This

Speaker 1 you had to buy. What do you mean on microtransaction? Yeah, of course.
I have really hundred dollars here. Something.
Oh, really? Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So you actually spend money, it's just not on mobile. It's just like I choose what I spend on, man.
That's it.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 Research purposes. Yeah, research purposes.
Research purposes. Whatever.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So if we go to the cosmetic screen, basically, and this is the very important thing that a lot of people don't get because, on the surface, it looks like, oh, this game is just pure cosmetics only.

Speaker 1 It's not. And it's definitely not.
It's done very, very

Speaker 1 smartly, cleverly, and they know what they're doing. Now, after all those 11 years, they very well know what they're doing.
And it's definitely not cosmetics only.

Speaker 1 I know what you mentioned on the previous podcast that pay for comfort and just extending the stash.

Speaker 1 but not not only that there's like two major things that you can do which gives you utility that the game can support through microtransactions so cosmetics is just cosmetics uh

Speaker 1 they are by the way that they are by the way the i i would call them the masters of like the skin economy because what pedov excel did is basically in the beginning when my character was just this

Speaker 1 they would just like double the inventory uh maybe i can yeah let me give me a second. I can load Impedo Excel one.
I'll show you. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1 Because what they did, they started the game with like the same cosmetic slots as your normal game.

Speaker 1 So if we have,

Speaker 1 yeah, it's loading. If you have our normal character here,

Speaker 1 of course, you can change like where we are. Yeah.
So you can change your whatever head, shield, whatever, stuff like that. So it started like that.
And then this is the cosmetic screen now.

Speaker 1 So there's skins for stuff you don't even know it exists.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 this started as the originally this thing, and then it ended up in this monster. Just check how many slots there are.

Speaker 1 And this is the main number one problem with cosmetic economies, that when you have limited amount of slots, you can only add so much cosmetics into one slot that it makes any impact.

Speaker 1 Because if I have, let's say, an armor skin or whatever, a helmet skin, and I will have now 300 helmet skins, does it make any sense? It does. Like, why should I?

Speaker 1 If I have like five or three that are like my favorite. But if you add another slot, suddenly I'll need to put something there and I'm going to buy it.
So that's what they're doing, basically.

Speaker 1 So they don't have just the basic inventory things. They have like weapon effects.
which is literally like particle effects. They have

Speaker 1 like

Speaker 1 charred skin, whatever. Footprints, literally, like the footprints you leave behind.

Speaker 1 They have hip attachment, character effects, literally like stuff just flowing around you. That's it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Then they have flask skins, so literally these flasks will have different colors. They have like so much pets.

Speaker 1 Like where we are. Yeah, let's say my wetas here.
There we go. You have pets.
You have even your cursor has a skin, literally.

Speaker 1 Of course, that's your your portrait your frame your belt your i don't know what basically i even have apparition

Speaker 1 which is this thing that literally if you stand in place for a while it can like this kind of a ghost goes from you which i think should be triggered basically in a second yeah there we go

Speaker 1 see so so they're literally creating these slots as they go and they're like you never heard of these and they have like so many of these this is one of the main strength of their cosmetic economy, by the way.

Speaker 1 Also, that they have just so many slots that you didn't even heard of, and you need to have something for them because it makes sense.

Speaker 1 And also, this is the other important thing: each one of the skill effects that are in the game have their own skins, of course.

Speaker 1 Like, you can have, like, I don't know, instead of fireballs, you can throw cats and stuff like that. They literally have a skin for you.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 used to have it. And yeah, it's just like done very, very cleverly.

Speaker 1 After like 11 years, you get wild ideas and you need to get them because you run out of space so that's seller number one seller number two is the convenience part

Speaker 1 so if you look here and we go to the

Speaker 1 where we are

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 to the not the featured but let's say

Speaker 1 yeah the shop so there are stash tabs and this is the convenience part so there's gem stash tab, flask stash tab, currency stash tab, premium stash tab, whatever stash tab. It's also

Speaker 1 structured like in different stash tabs.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. So if you look at it, this is, for instance, the currency stash tab.
If I wouldn't have this,

Speaker 1 I can demonstrate right now.

Speaker 1 Like this thing.

Speaker 1 Oh, it doesn't even let me put into different apps. So you see, it's like stacks by 40.

Speaker 1 So if I would want to pull this, I can't

Speaker 1 on top of each other. Because in the normal free-to-play ship tabs, the max stack size is 40.

Speaker 1 If I go to currency tab,

Speaker 1 the stack size, it says 40, but it's pretty much unlimited. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So I can now have 5,000 of these or whatever. Stuff like that.

Speaker 1 Shit stabs.

Speaker 1 Then

Speaker 1 they what they basically did that at some point it started to be like a pattern that every league they added a sheet ton of new currencies that would be around the deed like for instance essence and they would add an essence tab so you want to interact with the newly currency like kind of you know in order and properly by a new stash tab that's kind of specifically custom designed for that currency yeah even not a lot all of these are here basically and they have like a lot of them like i think like just few of them are here translated into Pedo Exile 2, but I think there's like 15 of these basically in the main game.

Speaker 1 There are also these, like, where is it? Quad tab is basically the tab and the size of four tabs in one.

Speaker 1 These guys are super creative at this.

Speaker 1 That's there.

Speaker 1 And then, so you see the utility here. Like, it's just much, much more better and to do everything basically.

Speaker 1 Way better. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And now comes the kicker.

Speaker 1 There are these premium tabs why premium because if i click here you see you can still sort some stuff or like do things here but you cannot do this which is public

Speaker 1 so what i can do is basically i can put items here and sell them to other players

Speaker 1 so if i go here

Speaker 1 Let's say on pedo exile trade and I search for an item

Speaker 1 I can pretty much directly whisper to a player to kind of get an item, get this item from him. Like, I want to buy your item for this price because it's basically an auction house.

Speaker 1 And for me to be able to list items here, I would need to buy this premium stashed apps.

Speaker 1 And this is a big difference where Diablo 3 basically failed horribly when they're trying to add auction house into the economy, where these guys are basically locking the functionality.

Speaker 1 of you selling, not buying. Anybody can go there and buy it.

Speaker 1 Even if I'm free to play, I can just go there.

Speaker 1 but you can't sell but you can't sell you can go on forms and discord and sell manually basically yeah but everybody knows how well that goes yeah or you can buy premium stash traps and then you can then index your items here and pretty much like as you said like exact price negotiatable don't blah blah blah and you you know pick the price of it that's it and then in in like 10 seconds it pretty much the api takes it and it's it's on the side on the auction house

Speaker 1 because auction houses kind of destroy the ARPG loop in a way that you just go and buy the items, and then what do you do? So, and by the way, everything's tradable in Pedroxa.

Speaker 1 There's nothing that's not tradable. Like in Diablo, like nothing's tradable.
In Pedro Excel, everything's tradable. Because the whole game is basically based a lot around the economy and trading.
So

Speaker 1 still, a lot of people just don't trade at all. And I mean, like, a lot.

Speaker 1 But there's this, the power players and like the top top end of the players, engage a lot with the economy even with these like inflation cycles and stuff like that usually uh currently it's not done for pet of exile uh one oh sorry pet of exile two basically but there's this site that we would always use where you have like

Speaker 1 where you would see like what's the basically like it's like a stock trading index basically where you would see which item cost how much in the league and you can see for instance let's me pick like whatever divine orb,

Speaker 1 and you see how it inflates. You see,

Speaker 1 yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's how it goes basically.

Speaker 1 In the beginning of the league, because there's scarcity, it's nobody has anything, and then, like, as the currency accumulates in the economy, it inflates away, and so on, so forth.

Speaker 1 That's why they're resetting the economy every three months. That's why it's

Speaker 1 if we go here again, same thing.

Speaker 1 Yeah, in three months, it's enough time to actually play and then get

Speaker 1 usually complete all the goals that they do set up within these progressions because they have usually like some kind of like uh skin progression that you can kind of unlock through the three-month period, like kill these bosses, even some kind of like achievements, like kill it without whatever dying, kill it without using any potions, blah blah blah, stuff like that.

Speaker 1 So, they have it here, but as you saw here, uh, trading is like an important part of the game.

Speaker 1 Uh, if you play the trade league, if you don't play the trade league, of course, if you don't, but for big players and like the ones, especially the ones on the ladder, they are.

Speaker 1 So if we go to ladder, for instance,

Speaker 1 so these are the people you see that are pretty much on the ladder, like the top

Speaker 1 top of the top. So there's one guy in the whole game that's basically level 100.
And there's like a lot of other guys

Speaker 1 level 99 behind me, but only one guy on level 100

Speaker 1 in the whole game, basically, and trade.

Speaker 1 Okay. That's how hard it is.
Yeah, by the way. Like these are

Speaker 1 more hardcore than streamer level

Speaker 1 guys. These are people that are literally

Speaker 1 playing grand character,

Speaker 1 one plays while the other sleeps, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 That is normal.

Speaker 1 If you're going for like world first 100, like you do this cycle,

Speaker 1 one guy is sleeping, the other guy is playing.

Speaker 1 Of course. You don't have

Speaker 1 to. Competition doesn't have to be.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Waste time.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 So that that's what you do.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so that's basically like how these guys kind of make the systems here and why they they have this kind of currency and everything it's like how it works great for them uh because also every currency i think this is the first time they introduced gold like this kind of a soft currency in pedoxel 2 in pedoxel 1 there's nothing like it because all these currencies are basically consumable and they help you to craft like items here for instance if i would let's say would they were put something here and like put this item it would add one more rare modifier into it because it can have six mods so on and so forth, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 So, all of these things you would pretty much slam into the items and craft them.

Speaker 1 The big differences, of course, between Pedov XL1 and 2 is the skill system.

Speaker 1 As you saw on the previous image, when I log in Pedov XL1, my skills are no longer on the gear, and I don't need to match their colors and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 This is the 10% traffic of XT.

Speaker 1 Thank you,

Speaker 1 which I think is great from a design standpoint because it unlocks more build diversity and more kind of easier kind of of building your gear.

Speaker 1 So you don't need to kind of be stressed about like, I'm going to break my character because I cannot use my skills properly now. So the skills are now here and all of them can be six linked.

Speaker 1 You just need to find the currency for it. But yeah, as I said.
Okay, so you still need to find the currency. Yeah, but even previously you would need to, but it's just like easier.

Speaker 1 But the skill tree is a little bit streamlined. The Atlas skill tree is definitely streamlined, it's like one-third of it, basically on skills.
So that's there. But still,

Speaker 1 i think the

Speaker 1 where we are the end game system like these like this thing is is just genius because it's just base version of it i can imagine what they will do when they like kind of get league mechanics into it because i remember when atlas was first time devising pedov excel one it was literally at some point later down the line it was this fight between these two entities shaper and the elder so you would literally need to like join forces with one against the other or whatever to kind of stone it.

Speaker 1 So you would have like, I don't know how many mathematical combinations of like running this map or that map, or really do this. And it's like super engaging.

Speaker 1 And so this is their pretty much metagame layer they put on top of running the maps or running dungeons basically.

Speaker 1 Because in Diablo, you have just like you're running the dungeons, you get some points, whatever stuff like that, you unlock something in this

Speaker 1 progression. This is much more complex.
And as you saw, like, this is years of content locked behind these.

Speaker 1 All of these, like the breach mechanic here, the hand that you see here, the boosters, the corruption, the delirium mechanic, the expedition mechanic, the ritual mechanic, all of these have their own kind of like setups, own currency, own progression.

Speaker 1 There's like 10 or 15 progressions basically that you're pretty much going on at one time.

Speaker 1 So that works perfectly. And I think once like all of these things will get patched and addressed, and they will, because they already started doing patches like day two, day three of early access.

Speaker 1 To kind of you have to, yeah, you have to, you have to, especially with this giant DAU.

Speaker 1 But I'm guessing that somewhere close, like middle of January, when the team returns from holidays, there will be a massive patch.

Speaker 1 Mid-January, when the team returns from holiday, what are you talking about? What do you mean?

Speaker 1 You need to work hard as fuck. I know, but you need to return from holiday first, and then you need to work on it.
And then, yeah,

Speaker 1 I'm just

Speaker 1 the studio is owned by Tencent, but it's not Chinese.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's what I exactly. That's what that was my point.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so in my opinion, they just don't have currently a competition in ARPG genre from a design standpoint. And yeah, my guess is this is still bigger DAU than Diablo 4 itself.

Speaker 1 Like Steam numbers, Diablo 4 is like, what, like 15, 20k DAU or something? But most of their numbers is on BattleNet. It's not on Steam.
That's not their platform. Exactly.

Speaker 1 So it's not that low, of course, but my guess is it's still lower than Pad of Exile. Everybody's pitching about it, honestly, and like dropping like flies, basically, right after.
There wasn't

Speaker 1 any update that's

Speaker 1 worth playing or returning back to the Apple 4. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And the thing is that this DAU,

Speaker 1 as I said, this DAU is... If somebody tells you, oh, this is dropping,

Speaker 1 it won't.

Speaker 1 Pad of Exile players are pretty much trained that they will go, play the content for like one to two months and then they return back when the new league hits.

Speaker 1 And this has been happening for 15, oh sorry, 11 years in Pad of Exile 1. And it hits all-time high just this summer.
So last summer, I mean. So it's not that like, oh, it's no, it's not going down.

Speaker 1 It's just taking on more people, actually.

Speaker 1 Because in this game, you're not rushed to kind of play all the time live ops-wise, you need P years.

Speaker 1 It's like much more closer to something like World of Tanks, World of Battleships.

Speaker 1 Even the ball is still the complexity.

Speaker 1 You actually, yeah, you don't need to play, but you need to read all the fucking builds and everything on the internet, which takes a lot of time.

Speaker 1 You should need to read the build, but you will fail hard then. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 What you say. So come on.

Speaker 1 They actually made it a little bit better here. If I go here and show you.
So

Speaker 1 let's say you're here, and like these are, let's say, the these are the recommended skills. I can go to all gems and like these are all the skills but if let's say i'm going uh whatever

Speaker 1 which character yeah these are the recommended skills for you at each level so okay so then at least yeah yeah putting some

Speaker 1 guardrails here my guess is that they will put more and more but this is not the main problem for the game they need to solve so because you know there's like more than 500k daily people playing it so they're solving much bigger problems which are systemic problems within the design of the rpg as i said the arm problem the the the the eternal problem of melee characters being worse than caster and range characters because they just need to get to the mops which means they hit much more often by the mops than the other characters so a lot of these other issues you have the dodge so you need to dodge yeah dodge the attacks then you die

Speaker 1 if you don't yeah yeah so yeah a lot lot of things and i'm really looking forward how how they will kind of move from this because my guess is they will need to probably ramp up the team a little bit to kind of run all the things because there are two teams actually because originally by the way last history piece here originally this was meant to be upgrade of pedal of exile one pedal of exile one was supposed to cease to exist

Speaker 1 is this this was supposed to be the clash of clans

Speaker 1 counter strike counter strike okay counter strike counter-strike is counter-strike and everything else was pretty much just patched out and there's the new counter-strike okay

Speaker 1 it was supposed to be like it, it's not. And I think, in the end, it was a very, very good decision because a lot of time

Speaker 1 this is not for everyone.

Speaker 1 And because they slowed the game so much with this kind of Dark Souls rolling and everything mechanic, and people were used to Ped of Excel 1 gameplay of Zoom-Zoom, where you would literally do 30 seconds and then you would kill the whole map.

Speaker 1 That's how fast it can get. It can get super fast.
So, people are used to it, and people like this play style, so they can stay and play Pedal Excel 1 still, which is still supported.

Speaker 1 That's what I wanted to ask.

Speaker 1 Are you going to play both or one game?

Speaker 1 Of course I'm going to play two. I'm just going to play two.
No, no, no.

Speaker 1 The second one. Okay, the second one.
I just played the first one for like 10 years and I'm like...

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's enough. It's enough.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I want to play the upgrade because I know that.

Speaker 1 This one eventually will get better.

Speaker 1 Like the thing that I really like about the second one now is that it doesn't have actually 11 years of content in it that I need to care about because at some point Pet of XL1 have so much content in it that it literally, as I said, it turned from university to PhD actually now.

Speaker 1 You need to kind of like just learn what you need to progress and where. Nowhere for me to enter.
Yeah, exactly. So now it's Pet of XL2 is actually streamlined for me.

Speaker 1 For you, it's still like shaving or just 10%.

Speaker 1 But for me, it's easy because I I don't need to care about that much stuff. I can just care about the mechanics that I have now in the Atlas tree.
I'm really looking forward to how they're gonna

Speaker 1 run the line live ops for this, the leaks and everything. Even the root boxes, you can see that, like, most of my micro.

Speaker 1 By the way, another important thing they said is that all of these cosmetics you see here are from PedovXL 1. So, whatever you bought in PedovXL 1, it transferred to PedoXL 2.

Speaker 1 Everything, one-to-one.

Speaker 1 So, all my things, like you see here,

Speaker 1 is still not yet available because it's not implemented in the game, but it will be. It will be.
So, all of your skins, everything translates into this one-to-one. For instance, footprints.

Speaker 1 Now, I have like these submarines. I don't know why they're.
I have it from, I don't know, which league was this.

Speaker 1 So, they're there.

Speaker 1 So, everything translates. It's very nice of them.
So,

Speaker 1 it really helps.

Speaker 1 So much invested time. Interoperability.
There you go.

Speaker 1 That's your interoperability. Finally.
Finally.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there you go. Shit.
It doesn't need to be Web3 game.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Nice.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, I'm looking forward to how this will end up because it's definitely not saying it's going to be easy, right? It's going to be very rough, especially on the system side.

Speaker 1 It's going to be rough on cannibalization front if they were going to cannibalize one and two and stuff like that uh competition wise there's not that much competition

Speaker 1 there always is competition always isn't it's not even diablo it's like last episode and like all these other like the RPG games that are catching on that they like saw what Pedo Exile was doing from throughout the years and they like you're tying a new spin on it why not like that's great competition is always great

Speaker 1 but yeah they they need to step up a little bit I would say after like this kind of hype thing runs down and people start to see the problems that are starting to be very obvious now and just patch them out because they know what they're doing.

Speaker 1 For instance, the rarity problem that we talk about, they actually completely removed it from the first game.

Speaker 1 I don't even know why they put it into the second game because it's like,

Speaker 1 you like rarity? We got the same shit again for you.

Speaker 1 And people are bitching about it already. Like, it's like everything is being inflated away.
Like, it's mandatory to have it on your gear, otherwise you're not effective, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 So, and they explicitly said that they don't want to have stuff that's mandatory on your gear so we'll see yeah but for me uh

Speaker 1 i think now finally after all these years people will take notice and people will now start to kind of at least i mean take iterating

Speaker 1 no no i'm talking about the free-to-play model and the uniqueness of it

Speaker 1 like at some point i think people will start to think about this maybe even on mobile mod only on pc that there are different ways how to to do free-to-play, and you can even have big spenders in this game, like the spend that the skin economy and the utility economy still have a lot of spend up.

Speaker 1 Like, just if you just take how much, let's just do a simple example here for last thing.

Speaker 1 So, let's say never simple example in petroxyl.

Speaker 1 Let's see. So, points, 100 points is $10.

Speaker 1 200 points is $20, whatever.

Speaker 1 So, if we go here and let's say the currency tab, the currency tab is 75 points. So it's $10

Speaker 1 just for the one tab.

Speaker 1 Just saying. If you want the quad tab, it's double that.

Speaker 1 Easy. So spend depth for this game isn't that low as it could seem.
That it's just, oh, it's just cosmetics. No, it's not.

Speaker 1 So you can do pay for comfort free to play kind of for PC because this is every every PC player accepts this. There's no power selling, nothing.

Speaker 1 Even though we locked auction house and utility behind the paywall, it's still very acceptable. So you can do free-to-play also in this sense.
That's not a problem.

Speaker 1 Nice. Okay, that's it.
We'll return it to it definitely later when an expansion or some major stuff is. Oh, when I start playing, and then

Speaker 1 we can talk about it a little bit more now. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
It's going to be in the future. Thank you very much for listening and watching this on YouTube.

Speaker 1 Please join our select channel so we can uh we can discuss this um there as well and uh you're up to date on all of our

Speaker 1 our

Speaker 1 interesting stuff that we are preparing

Speaker 1 and since uh felix is not here we still

Speaker 1 need to do the the subtitle salesperson

Speaker 1 uh but it's in the end thank you for watching this yeah without subtitles now you know that you could have watched this with subtitles subtitles

Speaker 1 Jokes on you.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much again.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, see you next time. Please leave a comment on the YouTube and

Speaker 1 join the Slack channel. Thank you.
Bye.