Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile 2 has just announced the release of its 0.5 chapter, Return of the Ancients. Bringing a brand-new overhauled endgame and even a build planner to the early access title ahead of its 1.0 release later this year, the update adds a host of new Uniques for players to find.
Heavily influenced by the likes of Diablo 2, we asked game director Jonathan Rogers about his approach to Uniques in his game in the face of Diablo 4’s recent changes. For context, D4’s recent change to the Uniques system essentially makes them, well, not unique with players having to farm variants with different stats. And players have not taken kindly to the change.
In our discussion, Rogers explained that Uniques are not supposed to have an element of randomness to them, for the most part. “Certainly, our philosophy differs, I guess, from there where, for us, a Unique does indeed need to be something that serve a different purpose from rares. Like, rares are supposed to be the ones that are sort of completely randomly generated, and the Uniques are supposed to not be.”
Rogers explained that, even in Path of Exile 2, that rule is broken sometimes. “We do break that rule in various ways sometimes,” he says. “For example, there are some Unqiues here where you can runecraft them and there’s three different versions and things like that. There’s little details like that, and you also do things like corrupting them and stuff.”
However, Rogers, as a lifelong Diablo 2 fan, explains that the purpose of Uniques is that they’re “not just a better rare”. Instead, they’re chase items with specific use cases, and players should feel like they are something special compared to something that’s randomised.
“Fundementally, we believe Uniques should be something that serves a different role than what a rare would do,” he said. “They’re like unlocking a specific new type of build or whatever. And something that you’ll notice with all the Uniques that we showed off is that there’s a lot more going on with them than what we did in POE1.
“Like, pretty much every Unique, not every single one, but mostly these days when you make a Unique, it has to come with a skill. And that’s partly because Uniques effectively represent a way to play the game. Like, each one that that we make needs to be like, okay, if you get this, you’re like, ‘okay, now I can play this in a totally different way than before”.
As a live-service game, Diablo 4 could end up reverting its approach to Uniques in a future patch. After all, the game has seen major changes many times since its launch with revamps to its endgame, changes to itemisation, and much more.
Nevertheless, it’s worth noting exactly what the role of a Unique is in an ARPG. They are, by definition, Unique items that have the potential to change how you play. They are items to be chased, items to craft builds around. And while there is often an element of grinding for them, farming variants changes the relationship players have with Uniques by definition.
