Flux interviews Chris Wilson, lead designer of Path of Exile, on that upcoming F2P action RPG’s innovative features and the start of its beta test.

• Listen and subscribe through iTunes.
• Watch the video versions of the podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The thirtieth episode of The Diablo Podcast is now online for your listening pleasure. In this episode we take a break from Diablo III to focus on another game, the free to play dark fantasy MMORPG, Path of Exile. PoE’s lead developer Chris Wilson joins Flux for an indepth conversation about the game’s innovative features, their financial plans to fund development through “ethical microtransactions,” the game’s impending beta test, and much more about what it’s like developing an Action-RPG, after years of playing them and itching to see if they could do it better.

The beta key giveaway discussed in the show has already taken place; 25 keys were given out to Site Pals via their private forum and to interested testers in our Path of Exile forum. We’ll have more to pass out in the immediate future.

We recorded this last weekend with a plan to post it on Wednesday, when the PoE beta test began. Technical difficulties delayed that, but they gave us a chance to get an update on the start of the beta from Chris. His words:

We entered Beta this week, and it has been an awesome experience. Right now, the game servers are bustling with players who seem to be having a great time and are writing up some useful notes with their impressions and feedback. The game itself hasn’t run into any major technical issues, but we’ve ironically been struggling to keep the website up. Daily traffic has ramped up to 20 times our previous average now that we have tens of thousands of fans eager to play.

We wanted to avoid swamping the game/patching servers by inviting users in waves, so we decided to trickle users in at a controllable rate. Our solution was to add a countdown timer to the Path of Exile site which invites a new user every (currently, but has been lower) 15 minutes. It shows who the last/next users to be invited are. Many fans seem to spend much of the day watching it count down to each new user. This “beta troll device” created a lot of controversy. Many people applauded the the novel approach, but a lot of fans really hated to see dozens of relatively quiet users get invited to the Beta for each prominent community member. After a lot of discussion with the community, we settled on having a second timer, which invites “veteran” community members who signed up before the recent Beta rush and actually posted on the forums.

All in all, it’s really exciting as developers to see our game getting played. We really look forward to adding content, revamping systems and generally improving the game over the next few months!

More information about the history and production of The Diablo Podcast, as well as an episode guide and cast of characters, can be seen on The Diablo Wiki.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 45:54 — 42.0MB)