Path of Exile – Timelines & Retcons and Screenshot Comparison

With Path of Exile being the kind of game that resets its timeline with every new Challenge League, it can be difficult to create any sort of lasting and memorable narrative. However, now that Path of Exile 2 is looming on the horizon, the writers over at Grinding Gear Games have been experimenting more with various ways of telling an evolving story in such an environment.

This announcement on the game’s website talks about those efforts. Check it out:

One of our narrative designers, Matt, has taken a moment to share his insight into some of the challenges we look to overcome when adding new stories to an existing timeline. Here are his thoughts.

I’ve spoken before about our Time Philosophy when constructing Path of Exile’s and Path of Exile 2’s narratives, and I’d like to go in depth a little bit more about that as it relates to the Conquerors of the Atlas and future content going forward. If you’ve read Nick Kolan’s Integrating League Stories into Existing Lore article, you might have already seen our ‘Day Zero’ rule. In short, every time you make a new character, you are washing up on the beach at the same moment in Wraeclast’s history: day zero. The historical timeline before that date always remains the same, but you are now creating a branching path through time.

The new exile you just created is in a parallel timeline from all the other characters you or anyone else has ever made. This is one reason why leagues generally don’t refer to each other: Breach league and Abyss league, for example, happened during the same historical dates on Wraeclast, but in separate timelines. Similarly, later in the game, each time you reach Zana, your exile teams with her for the first time to find the Shaper in the Atlas. This worked fine over the course of many updates so long as we were upgrading the Shaper storyline rather than altering it.

When the Conquerors of the Atlas expansion happened, the War for the Atlas finally ended. The events involving the Shaper, the Elder, and Zana were narratively moved from the character timeline (your exile) and the player timeline (you) to the historical timeline (unchanging and part of Wraeclast’s fabric before your character comes along). Astute observers will notice there is actually a second ‘day zero’ for the start of the Atlas endgame now: not the moment your exile washed up on shore, but the moment your exile walks into the Templar Laboratory and sees the map device explode.

Some of the discussion around this new storyline has referred to this as a ‘retcon.’ Where previously the endgame involved the Shaper and the Elder, now it involves the Conquerors, so there’s some truth to that. In my Storytelling in Path of Exile talk at Exilecon, I said something along the lines of ‘it’s my job to avoid retcons whenever possible.’ In many ways, I act as an advocate for the player experience in the face of business and design realities. As a long-time player myself, I grew attached to the Shaper and the Elder storyline, and I didn’t want to see it go just because it was time for a mechanical overhaul of the endgame. Together, Nick Kolan and I moved the endgame’s ‘day zero’ to a new point in time. As a change in our Time Philosophy, this was something we’d never done before, but it canonized a version of that storyline into Wraeclast’s history so that it would not simply be lost forever.

In doing so, we learned quite a bit about what matters to the emotional core of an ongoing game world. Zana still went through her struggles, just with other exiles, not your specific character. The events that players remember still happened to the characters we care about. In this way, we managed to preserve part of the emotional history of Path of Exile itself.

As a contrast, imagine if we hadn’t done that. You play through the storyline, defeat Kitava once and for all, and then show up to Oriath. You’re greeted by Kirac, but he’s just pursuing random exiles who are raiding the city from out of the Atlas. You enter and proceed to hunt down these new threats, probably feeling like they’re largely random, since they have no buildup before the Epilogue. Zana, the Shaper, and the Elder never existed. You remember whole storylines and timelines that simply never happened. The endgame you played through repeatedly as it grew over the last seven years no longer matters. That probably feels disappointing. In fact, you start distancing yourself from this new story, because you’ve read Design Manifestos and you realize this story will just go away, too, in a couple years when it’s reworked again…

Thankfully, we didn’t do that. This addition of a new day zero worked so well that it might just become a repeated device in our storytelling toolbox. For one example, Path of Exile 2 begins from a new day zero itself, so that we can finally refer to past leagues as things that actually happened. Will the Breachlords become actual participants in the main story? Will the Harbingers finally invade? What do Abyssal monsters have to do with ancient Maraketh culture? Will Alva ever strike it rich? What happens when we fill up the bar in Tane’s lab? What’s the source of the Blight fungus?! What does the Strange Voice want from us!?! Who is It That Fled dating these days?!?!?

Taking a moment to breathe… all these questions might not get answered, but it’s fun to consider the possibility that they might be, thanks to Path of Exile 2’s new starting point.

For another major example of where we might move day zero: when a new endgame is created, I will be pushing to move its day zero up again, such that the Conquerors and Sirus become canonized. When those events are moved from the character and player timelines to the historical one, it’ll again have occurred with an exile that wasn’t you, but at least the events will still have happened. Currently, the last time we see Zana, she is heartbroken and alone after the necessary deaths of her father and every single one of her former friends. We can’t leave things like that!

Let me know in the replies if you think this method of preserving the storyline works for you, what league storylines you want to see continued in Path of Exile 2, and what you think might happen next…

Then, you may also be interested in this announcement that looks back and compares a series of early screenshots of the game with its current iteration.