{
"post": {
"title": "Interview with GGG Alexander (Russian)",
"selftext": "",
"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFO-5c07etE"
},
"comments": [
{
"body": "I am not the original source for this. This comes from Montee Poke on Discord who summarized the points in the talk. If Montee Poke makes his own post, I will delete my own.\n\n>Interesting points from first hour of podcast \nEverything below is Alexander's opinion, not GGG's \nEnglish isn't my first language so bear with me\n\nHour 1:\n\n>Alexander's friend suggested him to apply to GGG while they were playing PoE1, Alexander took it as a joke at first\n\n>Online courses aren't enough to become graphics programmer\n\n>Alexander's interviewers were Chris and Jonathan, it was his first interview and it was held remotely with Skype\n\n>GGG is very horizontal, no manager hierarchy, everyone is at the same level\n\n>GGG is looking for engine, graphics and gameplay programmers (https://nz.linkedin.com/in/alexander-sannikov-9964aa188?trk=people-guest\\_people\\_search-card for graphics programmers, https://www.grindinggear.com/?page=careers)\n\n>Chris Wilson is a legend, you can talk with him about pretty much anything and he'll have something to say\n\n>New Zealand universities are pretty bad, Russian universities are pretty good compared to other countries\n\n>\n\n>Alexander's job is to create new interesting looking effects (Synthesis)\n\n>One of the first things Alexander created was new minimap\n\n>Alexander did fog of war and cockroaches for Affliction\n\n>Both fog of war and cockroaches are both GPU rendered\n\n>GPU particle renderer was originally made for PoE2, Alexander thinks it shouldn't have been ported to PoE1 until PoE2 release, currently it is still Work in Progress, it is too late to go back to CPU renderer|\n\n>Old assets were ported with flaws, GGG is working on better process\n\n>Thing Alexander thinks which are done well and don't need overhaul: Affliction, Heist\n\n>Everything else is outdated, especially first acts which is the first things new players see\n\n>PoE1 gameplay is also painful to look at compared to PoE2 (Alexander is a gameplay first, graphics second guy)\n\n>Alexander still plays PoE1, skipping leagues sometimes, he creates a lot of characters up to lvl 85 to check which builds work\n\n>Doesn't play hardcore, but doesn't because PoE is a multiplayer game\n\n>Being a multiplayer game helps PoE with longevity cause you can see your character growth compared to other players and other player can't cheat due to server authority\n\n>Alexander made Jonathan play Elden Ring\n\n>Alt-F4 Get Out of Jail Free is bad, PoE2 solution is much better\n\n>Last Epoch minimaps looks suspiciously similar to PoE's\n\n>Last Epoch tried to hire Alexander\n\n>80% of GGG staff played D4\n\n>Alexander didn't like D4 character progress",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Reddit refuses to let me to add all this in 1 comment so it will be multiple.\n\nHour 2:\n\n>If he sees something he doesn't understand (render wise) he closes the game and reads render docs, he needs to know how each pixel is rendered\n\n>D4 has great artists\n\n>Interviewer's note: PoE2 is translated to Baby/Crumb 2 by Text to Speech AI\n\n>Graphics stagnation is due to NVidia promoting RTX (also because of console generations)\n\n>Graphics quality being tide to RTX improvements is logical, easy to sell, easy to promote, but hard to get good result from\n\n>People need a few years to understand that RTX isn't optimal to make good graphics\n\n>Ray tracing \\~ bubble sort (obvious but VERY slow array sorting algorithm)\n\n>To make it fast NVidia made hardware which can calculate rays on hardware level (RTX)\n\n>Before RTX there were a lot of intersting render papers\n\n>DLSS/FSR are considered but they have caveats\n\n>To use DLLS you need motion vectors which require processing powers (1-2 ms out of 16ms, 10% less fps) even if you don't use DLSS\n\n>Alexander haven't heard about PoE Smoother which disables effects and boosts FPS (potato mode)\n\n>Alexander knows about game crashing when pressing Alt on MF characters, it is a problem, but so is amount of loot\n\n>\"Did they even test it\" - they did\n\n>There is no position for \"League idea generator\", everyone can suggest league ideas, you can go straight to Jonathan and discuss it, no meetings\n\n>Changing base skill visual effect is very dangerous, requires lots of tests\n\n>There are stress tests\n\n>Sometimes there is not time to fix things (e.g. league start is soon)",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Hour 2 continued:\n\n>Some people stay at office for 24h, they are not forced to\n\n>Crunches are illegal in New Zealand\n\n>Vulkan is faster on RTX20XX+ than DX11, but DX11 is more mature\n\n>When upgrading PC you should focus on SSD, GPU next\n\n>Alexander takes no part in PoE mobile\n\n>There people who port PoE to consoles, they don't affect PoE development\n\n>Alexander glad he isn't responsible for visual and loot clutter\n\n>He doesn't play PoE2 much, but he observes how other staff members play\n\n>Before Exilecon whole office was playing PoE2\n\n>Alexander was very pro WASD for years and was very upset that the Exilecon 2023 demo was shipped without it\n\n>Alexander player D2 in university\n\n>Alexander glad he doesn't have to explain Well in PoE2\n\n>Neural Radiance Fields and Gaussian Splatting are interesting, probably will be used in the feature, but without \"Neural\" part\n\n>GPU particle render is industry standard, there are problems with they realization, not concept in general, Unreal Engine uses it\n\n>How much math do you need to be graphics programmer - yes (all of it)",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Hour 3:\n\n>Loading time fixes are coming (already implemented in 3.23.1?)\n\n>NVidia pipeline cache was running out of 1 GB space, pipeline were compiling instead of loading from cache\n\n>If you're having FPS problems press F1 and look at what takes a lot of frame time\n\n>GGG has crash stats\n\n>It's easier to add features to both games because they have same engine\n\n>\n\n>Plumbers have high salary\n\n>New Zealand has bad internet, pricey mobile internet\n\n>Russian internet (mobile + at home) costs 8 cartons of milk, same as New Zealand, but milk prices in NZ are x6 compared to Russian\n\n>Salary isn't much higher compared to how it was in Moscow (compared to cost of living in NZ)\n\n>Alexander watches Mathil, he plays it the same way Alexander does\n\n>Alexander likes to experiment with his own builds",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Hour 3 continued:\n\n>It will very different to PoE1 hence separate games\n\n>Jonathan has final word, but his decision can be changed\n\n>Rhoa are Stygian Dolls(D2) of PoE\n\n>Templar's left handedness is a cause of a lot of problems for effects\n\n>\"Guns\" were added after WASD to show pros of WASD\n\n>\"I recommend you look up how much costs 1 second of Blizzard cinematics, we will impress you\"\n\n>Gameplay first in ARPG, historically GGG looks for solutions which have same results as cinematics without paying that much\n\n>PoE player would like gameplay trailers more than cinematics\n\n>Most of GGG staff player Elden Ring, Monster Hunter World, Hades\n\n>GGG isn't interested in VR\n\n>There are a few interesting features to showcase\n\n>Understanding what damage some of bosses do is a problem (Shaper/Catarina)\n\n>Questions currently discussed at GGG:\n\n>Do we keep resistances? Will we have block chance in poe2? Will bosses deal elemental damage?\n\n>Ultrawide screens- not enought resources\n\n>New UI artists was hired, centered UI?\n\n>Alexander is not sure when they will be able to fine tune content before start of Beta\n\n>No dirt sticking to clothes when rolling, idea was suggested by a viewer\n\n>Alexander goes to bed at 6AM\n\n>Weather - BIG maybe\n\n>More interactions like burning grass\n\nMontee Poke:\n\n>I'll do last one and a half hours tomorrow",
"replies": [
{
"body": "3:00 - 3:30\n\n>PoE2 puts more emphasis on skill interactions (oil grenade + fire)\n\n>Old MTX most likely won't be updated\n\n>No preview how character would look like \"with all the uniques and lvl 99\" (China clients?)\n\n>Good resource to start working with shaders [https://www.shadertoy.com](https://www.shadertoy.com) and transition to VFX\n\n>Next try Unreal or Unity VFX\n\n>Alexander is using his youtube channel as a log on what he was working on (https://www.youtube.com/@Alexander\\_Sannikov)\n\n>Yes to MTX preview\n\n>No new damage types due to amount of changes required\n\n>Will there be demon form? -It's doable\n\n>No open world in base game\n\n>League idea with terrain generating around player on the fly, hard to do\n\n>What do you think about action house? -I started asking GGG to add SSF from the first day on the job\n\n>Royal was hard to maintain: hosting, engine\n\n>Zoom in level can change\n\n>There are a few statements in this interview which in retrospective will make you say \"That's what he was talking about\"\n\n>Jonathan discusses minion a lot right now\n\n>Alexander associates 12 character select to fighting games, \"Choose you pokemon\"\n\n>Character creator screen? -I can't speak about what wasn't disclosed publicly \n\n>Favorite mechanic in PoE1 - ascendancy\n\n>Alexander played Grim Dawn before Constellations",
"replies": [
{
"body": "3:30-4:00\n\n>Content which doesn't go core is sad, but in reality in 3 months Alexander will create more content which he will be proud of\n\n>Metamorph development had problems, Alexander doesn't miss it, Metamorph reincarnation is shapeshifting in PoE2, it uses same but improved technology\n\n>Favorite games: Factorio, Oxygen not included, Monster Hunter series, roguelikes, Caves of Qud, Baldur'ss Gate 1-2 (didn't like 3rd, DnD starts getting good at lvl 13, no prestige classes), Divinity Original Sin, Pathfinder, Elden Ring\n\n>A few thousands of play time in PoE\n\n>Helped in development of Tales of Maj'Eyal\n\n>PoE2mechanicss are made with power creep in mind\n\n>Power creep is needed, but killing ubers is seconds is a sign of a design problem\n\n>Favorite boss in PoE1 is Dominus, Dominus has great sound design, campaign PoE bosses lost their personality after 3.0, or is it nostalgia?\n\n>Block chance stacking is a problem, same as resistances, to get great effect you need to be close to cap\n\n>Same happened with reservation, aoe, energy shield cooldown\n\n>Flat decrease is also bad\n\n>Making res working like damage/(100%+res%) is hard to explain to player",
"replies": [
{
"body": "4:00-4:30\n\n>Armour working better against weak hits isn't explained and misleading\n\n>Evasion is worse\n\n>PoE2 is in a state when alternative solutions are broad up\n\n>Last Epoch isn't visually interesting, but has interesting crafting\n\n>Hades has interesting gameplay loop and meta progression, but no interesting builds\n\n>Trading Card Game is posible, no plans tho\n\n>No layoffs incoming\n\n>Alexander rarely stays at his office, he's always talking to VFX artists, Jonathan, etc\n\n>Engine is written in C++, C++ won't be replaced by other languages in the industry\n\n>Tools are also written in C++\n\n>PoE2 is coming to MacOS (don't tell anyone)\n\n>China client is separate to GGG, no plans for merging",
"replies": [
{
"body": "you are mvp, thanks mate"
}
]
},
{
"body": "His favorite games are all 10/10. Legendary taste.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Old school roguelikes! Him being involved in ToME is wild"
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"body": "Finished translating in discord (￣ー￣)ｂ"
},
{
"body": "Thanks for posting that transcript here"
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"body": "> he creates a lot of characters up to lvl 85 to check which builds work\n\ni got to 85 before realizing mine didn't :/"
}
]
},
{
"body": "I have someone awesome sending me translations in my Discord. Expect a breakdown this tomorrow/Friday on my channel!\n\nSounds like a juicy one for GGG info :)",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Legend"
}
]
},
{
"body": "At the end of the interview he says GGG is debating what to do with resistances. It's sometimes not clear what damage type a boss is dealing, like Shaper. Do they remove resistances outright? Just remove them for boss attacks? \n\nThey're also considering whether to keep block chance.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Don't know russian, so I can't speak to exactly what was said. But given his role I'm gonna assume he's more talking about indicators for damage typing rather than removal of resistances. Many boss attacks in PoE are rather unclear what their damage type is, so with a fresh slate GGG can try to redesign a consistent language of colors and effects to clearly indicate what is going on.\n\nI wish the auto-transcript/translate features of youtube were easier to work with.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "It's one of those things you don't notice, until you play a game like Last Epoch. In it, purple attacks are Void, green is Necrotic, red/orange is Fire, blue is either Cold or Lightning but the style is usually distinct (level theme or character design add a layer of context). Anything ambiguous is likely just Physical.\n\nEven as early as Act 1, the unique Rhoa has a Chaos DOT aura that has no visual cues. Many newbies get caught unaware that an enemy could be painful just to stand next to them. Hell, I'm pretty sure some veterans forget and end up with their first death right there (if the other Rhoas haven't already steamrolled them).",
"replies": [
{
"body": "The rhoa has some green smoke particles around it, but it's hard to notice."
},
{
"body": "Cold in LE is usually white."
}
]
},
{
"body": "He did say that they're trying to figure out whether they should keep resistances as actual stats and all the other stats that rely on flat % increases like block chance, spell supression etc or rework them in a way that doesn't make capping them mandatory.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Oh, if that's the case I'm very interested in what else he had to say. Resistances feel so core to itemization that I'm having a hard time imagining items without it. Dude is super fucking smart as evident by what he's cooked up on the graphics side, so I hope a fully translated transcript ends up getting posted."
}
]
}
]
},
{
"body": "I can totally see why they're thinking of removing block chance. Max block quadruples your effective HP, and the only downside is it doesn't protect against one-shots. We know that one-shots will be far less common, and will be well-telegraphed, because they're moving to a more attrition-based combat style. That means that unless they lower the block cap, block can easily become the best most OP defensive option.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Later in podcast he futher explains the problem \nBlock chance has the same behavior as old Reservation meaning that low investments provide small boost to ehp, buth each increase is more effective than the last \nSame happens with resitances, if you aren't capped you taking much more damage than you would otherwise \n70% res takes 20% more damage compared to 75%",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Good to hear they're taking that problem seriously. The simple solution is to change base resistances to -100%, and max resistances to 0%. There's still increasing returns, but to only a minor degree.\n\nYou could also change resistances to \"\\[element\\] damage divisor +x%\", then present resistances as, say, \"/4.0\" with a tooltip saying \"Fire damage taken divided by 4 (reduced to 25%)\". That way you have linear returns.\n\nFor Block Chance, you could cap it at a much lower number.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "He also mentioned that a possible solution could simply be \"100 fire reistance rating reduces fire damage you take by 50%\" and make it a stat that you could stack infinitely if you really wanted to."
}
]
}
]
},
{
"body": "They should just make a less powerful version of glancing blows baseline."
}
]
},
{
"body": "Make the damage clear"
},
{
"body": "I think if they cap block chance at 50 that would be fine, it does feel really cool to block big attacks so just for that I'd like it to stay \n\nMaybe instead it could be an input that gives you block frames but has a long cooldown, like how I imagine they intended steelskin to be used",
"replies": [
{
"body": "I feel like they would just make block always work with glancing blows, you would get damage through block, but block chance will be easier to access",
"replies": [
{
"body": "yes. Torchlight infinite does this and it's a nice solution. It also makes sources of max block less of a big deal, meaning you can set the cap a bit lower than current."
}
]
}
]
},
{
"body": "Res is such a huge part of making gear progression feel good. Them talking about removing it is a massive red flag to me. It is a clear problem you have to solve. Getting that 1 piece of gear with T1 res rolls that lets you add 2 or 3 more damage mods to your other pieces is so much better than just putting on whatever gear has highest damage."
}
]
},
{
"body": "Was alexander the guy who was talking about the global illumination thing at exilecon? His english was good, he should do interviews in english sometime!",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Yeap, same guy. He has his own youtube channel too!"
},
{
"body": "I'd argue they specifically wanted him as an interview partner to push the game for audience in Russia and eastern europe",
"replies": [
{
"body": "I mean, he was available and they just asked him to do an interview, why does it always have to be a conspiracy lmao",
"replies": [
{
"body": "It isn't a conspiracy. Alex is Russian so it's just logical to invite one of the few russian speaking devs of PoE2 to an interview with a major russian gaming news outlet. There is no conspiracy just the fact that there is no language barrier in that constellation",
"replies": [
{
"body": "It's not a major news outlet, it's a niche PoE streamer. A PoE streamer doesn't need to push PoE to his audience.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Okay. Then I misunderstood. Nonetheless it's a news source for the russian speaking audience of PoE2. The interviews of Kripp, DM, Ziggy or Ziz aren't only watched by the core audience of their channels, but also by a bunch of interested people outside of their reach and outside of the core PoE bubble"
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"body": "Waiting for some good person to sub this"
},
{
"body": "I speak russian and watched the full interview, if anyone has questions about a specific part of it, I can translate it for you.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "What possible solutions is GGG thinking of for block and resistances?",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Alexander only talked about his own grievances with defence layers in PoE. He said that in PoE there are a lot of mechanics that are near useless at the beginning of your progression and become OP towards the end of the progression and that every mechanic that involves stacking flat % reductions is going to be broken in the long-term. He provides an example of a better way of scaling with \"every 100 points towards fire resistance reduces incoming fire damage by 50%\" and it works exponentially and allows you to stack it infinitely. He adds that he spoke to the designers about it, but the issue is that it's hard to explain how it would work to the player. Current mechanics seem simple at a glance, but are extremely unintuitive in reality, this solution would present an opposite problem. The design team is currently at the stage where questions about how basic mechanics like Armor or Evasion should work need to be asked and Alexander is hopeful that they will be able to come up with elegant answers.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "So basically how reservation efficiency and cooldown reduction works. I'm not sure an explanation is even needed. Pretty much for all defenses players tend figure that stuff out anyways. Even with the current poe implementation, it may be the most intuitive resistance calculation, but you kind of have to figure out that the game is balanced around you having the maximum 75% resistance and even being 5% off of max you are taking a lot more damage. It's an intuitive calculation, but that doesn't translate to easy explanation. Instead, a system that may have a more difficult calculation but is less punishing for being a few % off of some threshold is going to be easier for new players to understand. As for providing some explanation, that is easily done by simply giving the Damage reduction number when hovering over your resist value. Pretty sure this is how some other games do defenses.\n\nWhat is more important for explanation is when some mechanic has some weird interaction or caveat. Like armor being better for smaller hits. That needs to be explained. But everyone knows that X resistance reduces X damage taken. Nothing really needs to be explained there.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "In my opinion, it's very important to have a stat that you always need to have a certain amount of, like resistances, so that you're forced to roll it on gear and there's an obvious downside to wearing uniques.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "I don't think that is taken away though. The game would be balanced around some damage reduction number still. The game tells you this value in poe1 by setting it to the max resistance obtainable. Which is kind of unintuitive. Many people ask why is the game balanced around the maximum value. It really doesn't make sense. It turns resists into a check mark stat with the only saving grace + to max resists. You could still balance the game around people having 135 resists, which would be 58 damage reduction under a system that works like CDR. It's less punishing the closer you get to 135 and isn't crazy powerful by just being overcapped by a bit. The only question is how to communicate to the player what resist value the game is balanced around, and I don't think this needs to be communicated at all. No other game does this. PoE is the only game community I've seen that seems like they have this expectation to be told all the inner calculations of the game. Things like how much DR a player needs is usually found out by playing the game. Not the game explicitly communicating that to you. It wouldn't take long to data mine that stuff though. All the monster abilities and their damage will be known. It wouldn't take much effort to figure out a minimum resistance value you want to reach with that info no matter what calculation they use for resistances."
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"body": "What is the problem with ultra wide monitors?",
"replies": [
{
"body": "UI. It's very far away from your character",
"replies": [
{
"body": "That is how I play now (21:9) and think it is fine. There is an option in POE 1 to move it more towards the middle and I do not like it at all.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "21:9 is widescreen but they are talking about real wide screens like 34:9. And I think a centered UI as an option would be good",
"replies": [
{
"body": "21:9 is ultra wide\n\n32:9 is super ultra wide\n\nSince I have 21:9 I assumed the translation applied to me and wanted to verify what problem they have as POE 1 has the \"solution\" already.",
"replies": [
{
"body": "Even if it did, you could still play like you're used to as they think of that as an option to turn on and not it replacing the current UI"
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
]
},
{
"body": "i hope we get a new UI, more centered\n\n\"it's painfull to look ate poe 1 compared to poe 2\" - YES, it is an improvement"
}
]
}