In Path of Exile: Echoes of the Atlas, we introduced The Maven, an eldritch entity who has entered the Atlas and seeks to witness your suffering. One of our narrative designers, Matt Dymerski has written an overview of creating the Maven from a lore perspective.
How do we move forward from the perfect Lovecraftian monster? The Elder was inexplicable, implacable, and unstoppable. There was no chance of communication, appeasement, or understanding. We were nothing to it, and the only way to resist it was through the use of arcane technology that took a father and daughter team a combined lifetime to build, risking madness and oblivion on a gamble. Even then, the Elder was not defeated, merely sealed, and the fundamental force it represented, Decay, was in no way hindered or diminished. It would be very hard to top this kind of dark and ominous threat if we tried the same thing with a new threat.
Cosmic horror’s tales of hopelessness and despair in a vast uncaring universe offer a ton of grimdark enjoyment. The key here, as I’ve espoused in my role as Narrative Designer, is that Path of Exile uses many grimdark colors in its creative paints—but it is not wholly grimdark, because we do in fact have a sliver of hope in the form of our player character. The Exile is a power fantasy. The Exile is you. The narrative space Path of Exile actually occupies is equal parts Sword and Sorcery, Magical Realism, Dark Fantasy, and Antiheroic. Our Exile goes on an Epic Journey, specifically and repeatedly.
Ultimately, those distinctions mean that the Elder can actually be outdone as a villain within Path of Exile’s set of experiences. In fact, we can do better than villains: we can have antagonists instead. E.g. Dominus was a villain, but Piety was an antagonist. One was far more endearing than the other.
The Maven is our first encounter with the sea of madness beyond Wraeclast that so terrified men like Venarius in the past. As an antagonist rather than a villain, the Maven has motivations that often put her in conflict with us, but those same motivations can also sometimes align us as well. In any given encounter, she may try to kill our Exile, or she may offer power to entice us to do what she wants.
She also learns.
I let that statement linger because of how impactful that idea will be going forward. There’s something oddly comforting in an enemy like the Elder: it is what it is. It moves in specific ways. You can probably guess how the story will go, because when the destruction of the world is on the line, well of course the antiheroes win in the end, right? But an entity like the Maven has much more complexity.
The first step in conveying that complexity was creating a dialogue structure to handle the massively long series of experiences that is the Atlas. The glowering titan to overcome here was what I affectionately call the ‘Cassia’s singing’ monster. Cassia’s songs are hilarious and fun the first hundred times. By the thousandth repetition, we’re laughing maniacally when Zana asks us if we’re still sane. I can still hear every single nuance of those songs in my head, even though Blight league is at least ten years gone at this point (judging by how long 2020 felt). Given the fact that the Maven can be summoned to every single map, there had to be something more to her character than any previous opponent. So, over the course of your mapping, I designed her so that she grows with you. As you advance, so does she, and her dialogue and attitude both change.
Being an entity from outside our realm, she doesn’t know our language when she first arrives, so she communicates in base emotions. More than that, she doesn’t even initially understand our modes of thought. She enters the Atlas as a being of pure moment-to-moment emotions that drive her with only barely more consciousness than the Elder. She often just exclaims excitedly, espousing her current feelings without any context or added intent.
As your time spent with the Maven grows, she begins to understand the concepts of ‘orders’ as they relate to her wants. She orders you to do things in the second tier of dialogue, rather than simply expressing a base emotion without a clear action attached. She goes from witnessing events as an excited observer to realizing she can influence those events with her communications. For example, in the first tier, she might just say ‘Boredom…’ because she is bored. Here, she begins to say ‘Boring. Kill.’ because she has realized that giving an order makes things more likely to happen.
In the third tier of dialogue, the Maven transcends the Bischof-Köhler hypothesis, a real-world concept that posits nonhuman animals are controlled only by current motivational states. She was formerly motivated only by the desires of the moment, but she now begins expressing an awareness of future mental states. Rather than just giving orders for what she wants, she starts communicating why she wants those things to happen. ‘Remove boredom. Kill.’ is an example of her communicating that she understands she can reach a non-boredom mental state through the fun of witnessing a kill.
The fourth tier of dialogue might make the observant Exile wary. After enough time spent together, the Maven begins recognizing the concept of self. Prior to this, she has never used the words ‘I’ or ‘my’ or ‘me.’ With the understanding of the existence of the self, her immature selfishness takes center stage. The same line from before becomes ‘Relieve my boredom. Kill for me.’ She makes it clear that her orders, intended to reach a future mental state, are specifically relating to her inner self and her desires. At no time does she ever consider the Exile’s personal autonomy.
The fifth tier of dialogue brings the Maven to full fluency in communication, if not in emotion. Her words are flowery and specific, though still selfish in intent. Here, regarding the ‘Cassia’s singing’ monster, we recorded a massive heap of extra lines to increase variety. This is the tier endgame players might spend the most time on, since it is the last, so the more lines the better.
Finally, the Maven has an encounter in which the player can do battle with her personally. This is not a battle for the fate of the world, because, as I discussed earlier, there’s only one narrative direction that can go. Rather, this is the inevitable crossroads at the end of the Maven’s character arc, where her selfishness and emotional immaturity bring her and the Exile into direct brutal conflict. Observant Exiles will notice that, if they win, the Maven will use certain words and express certain emotions that she never has before. She has learned. That leaves many ominous open-ended questions for future expansions, especially when we finally gain some insight about the scope of the cosmic threat through this conversation.
To make these interactions feel more genuine, I had the Maven react to as many specific situations as possible given the constraints of budget and time. She comments based on what the Exile is doing, rather than saying mysterious lines about the map itself like the Shaper. She has unique lines for certain notable map bosses, like Kitava or the Tier 16 Vaal Temple, as well as rare encounters like the Shaper or the Elder. Also, every single written line has multiple emotional and tonal variations, ranging from grumpy, to bored, to excited, to happy, and often demanding. Hopefully, this results in the Maven feeling more present in the world, a capricious entity with a clear personality rather than just a repetitive game mechanic.
In all, the Maven ended up with about 2,000 lines of dialogue, increasing Path of Exile’s total lines by roughly 25%. This required the creation of new tables just to handle her immense tree of possibilities. I’m honestly not sure this would have been possible without the sheer talent of Elisabeth Easther, the Maven’s VA, who slammed out every line with multiple fantastic variations in record time. Even then, we underestimated the sheer length of the script and had to schedule a second session to get it all done. On top of that, Nick Kolan’s direction in the studio helped dial in on a great tone for the Maven’s personality.
Since this was the first endgame boss whose character and arc I truly got to design—and since this is being written three days before the expansion actually launches—it’ll be interesting to see how players feel about this type of personality and storyline. If it goes over well, this kind of ambitious scope for an antagonist is definitely something I hope to pursue in future expansions. I’m definitely aware of the difference between Sirus’ written intent and what actually went in after mechanical changes—a whole article could be written just about that—but here, thanks to our new scoping and improved process, the Maven’s arc fully survived and went into the game as intended… unless you all hate it, in which case you’ll just have to trust me that there were a ton of cut parts that were ‘totally awesome’ and you would have ‘definitely loved it.’ Just wait for the Director’s Cut!
