You gotta hand it to the brave few who willingly risk it all playing an early access game like Path of Exile 2 on hardcore difficulty, where a single death permanently ends your character. If you’re not getting squashed by a giant monkey boss, you’re taking your chances with whatever unfinished parts of the game could be your end.
Path of Exile streamer Zizaran didn’t know that it wasn’t actually his fault when his hardcore character inexplicably and suddenly died in a mundane combat encounter several days ago. The real culprit was revealed during a recent interview with the two lead developers on the game who regretfully informed him that his killer was one accidentally deadly crab.
While answering a question about surviving bosses as a hardcore player, co-game director Jonathan Rogers told Zizaran that the team had looked into how he died. Rogers explained that it was one specific crab enemy that can unleash a volley of projectiles if it dies mid-attack, and there was a bug that caused them to all fall immediately, like a shotgun blast.
“If you’re standing on that monster when it dies while it’s using that skill you just die instantly,” co-game director Mark Roberts said.
According to Roberts, out of all the monsters, that specific crab climbed up the ranks to claim the third highest player kill count in the game.
I imagine that’s because it’s a common monster that appears when you activate a Remnant encounter in the latest league, or season. A large group of enemies spawn around you in a circle and you have to clear them out to get the reward, which means it’s very easy to be right on top of them when they die.
Rogers brought up the crab to make a point about how bugs like that can make it seem like certain monsters are deadlier than others. He recalled a spider that was “accidentally doing 100 projectiles over 100 milliseconds for a total of 200K damage.” The crab, he said, is just one of many small kinks they need to iron out for deaths to be more fair in PoE 2.
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“I did watch the clip and I was like, should I have done something different here?” Zizaran said.
“No, you did get screwed there, for sure,” Rogers laughed.
“In the case of some of these, they’re literal typos. You can see that someone just typed a number in the wrong column,” he said of the many instances of monsters misbehaving during PoE 2’s development.
It probably stings a little bit to hear that you lost hours of progress to what could’ve been someone pressing the wrong number on their keyboard, but that’s the risk you take with an early access game. Zizaran, a veteran hardcore player in Path of Exile 1, just smiled while listening to the developers explain how unlucky he was.
Who’s stronger, the hardcore player who takes the most unfair death in the game on the chin or a crab who spent the last week blasting unsuspecting players with a shotgun? Sadly, I don’t think we’ll ever get to see a rematch.
It’s not as flashy as sacrificing your character to buff everyone in the game, but Zizaran’s untimely loss will at least save the lives of all the exiles who come after.
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