‘We can go as far as we damn well please’: Path of Exile director on adding city-building to a decade-old ARPG

Path of Exile usually pushes the boat out with creative features, but the upcoming expansion takes things to another level. In Settlers of Kalguur, releasing on July 26, you can build and manage your own city—an impressive addition to a 10-year-old game.

“It was kind of like, why haven’t we done this already?” Path of Exile game director Mark Roberts tells Dot Esports. Roberts says Settlers of Kalguur’s city-building feature “pushes the X-factor boundary,” and he wants every new League to be better than the last. “It shouldn’t just be: ‘You’re playing the same way [as before].’ I always want it to be: ‘You’re playing a slightly different way—an enhanced way.’”

You start by gathering Path of Exile’s new currency, Gold, then use it to hire workers and build your first structures. Kingsmarch starts humble, with nothing but a tavern and field, but eventually blossoms into a bustling hotspot for trade and commerce—if you manage it well.

“You’re still killing monsters, you’re still picking up items, then you do some epic city-building on the side—ideally trying to automate the highest amount of rewards coming in,” Roberts explains. He says there’s “a bit of Palworld, in terms of the base-building and automated operation,” and with enough Gold, you can even keep your city running when you’re offline.

By playing “a few hours on Saturday, a few hours on Sunday,” you can comfortably run your city for a couple of days plus a day or two after, according to Roberts. It sounds like even casual players like me can build a thriving city, which is great news.

You can build a Farm, Mining Station, Smelter, Disenchanter, and many other buildings that provide useful services—or keep your city running. You can even build a Harbor and establish shipping routes between ports around Wraeclast.

“Whatever limits we have, we change those limits.”

With so many ambitious new features, I wondered whether the developer might be reaching the limits of Path of Exile’s decade-old engine, but Roberts emphatically says the team isn’t constrained. “Whatever limits we have, we change those limits. I mean, there are obviously hardware limits to some degree, but we can go as far as we damn well please, really. It’s ultra-rare for us to ever touch gameplay instead of just making the engine work.”

Even with PoE’s sequel on the horizon, we’re excited to see the developer still so committed to the first game. Alongside Settlers of Kalguur’s city-building system, Path of Exile 3.25 makes tons of quality-of-life changes and sweeping balance changes and even adds new features from Path of Exile 2. It looks like Path of Exile isn’t going anywhere, and Settlers of Kalguur could be the perfect opportunity to jump in.