Path of Exile - Recording Heist From Level 3

Posted: 29 Sep 2020 03:59 PM PDT

During the development of the Heist expansion, just when we were about to record voice lines for the league, New Zealand went into a second lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Nick, one of our narrative designers, has written an article about the process of recording the Heist voice acting from Level 3 lockdown.

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Earlier this year, New Zealand, like much of the world, went into mandatory lockdown to stop the spread of the coronavirus -- right in the middle of development for Harvest. Thankfully, Harvest was relatively light on narrative, and we were able to record Oshabi's dialogue after restrictions had been eased. Harvest's simpler story let us put more effort into Heist, which was intended to be much more story- and character-driven.

I'd started concepting characters a month or two before development began in earnest, and had run through more narrative ideas than I can actually remember. From the outset, this looked like it would give Betrayal -- the previous dialogue heavyweight -- a run for its money, but at least we were on track.

Then, on August 11, it was announced that Auckland, where GGG operates, would be put in lockdown again.

Uh oh.

At that stage, we had maybe two out of thirteen scripts complete, but we'd luckily already cast the majority of characters, and writing can thankfully be done basically anywhere there's a steady supply of coffee and snacks. But recording the characters, well, that can't be done from home.

...Usually.

The first character we were to record was Kurai, voiced by Miriama Smith. She was, at the time, in managed isolation (AKA quarantine) as she'd just returned from a shoot in Australia. The team at Native Audio went to her hotel and handed off a home-recording kit, and the bulk of Heist's story framework was recorded in her hotel room, with us listening in from our homes.

It was a trial by fire, and a necessary one, because it turns out that was how we'd be recording nearly all of Heist's characters. Many of the people we'd cast had home studios -- some even lived in, and recorded from the UK -- and the ones that didn't either got a home kit temporarily or went into the Native Audio studios under very rigorous hygiene restrictions.

The end result isn't perfect. One of the main reasons to consistently use the same studio is to ensure all characters have the same quality to the voice, and in Heist, there are a few characters that distinctly sound a bit different when heard in isolation. But we had to record dialogue earlier for Heist than most leagues so we could implement them into our new conversation system.

Given the circumstances and challenges we faced, the end result is honestly pretty stellar.

We implemented a new system for handling conversations for Heist. This system lets us rank dialogue by priority, with higher priority dialogue cutting off lower priority dialogue and preventing any new lower priority dialogue from playing. We did this specifically to avoid the Betrayal issue of characters yelling over each other in an unintelligible mess. Then we made our poor programmer Josh make a bazillion exceptions to this so I could intentionally have characters talk over each other. Making Huck and Tullina awkwardly and repeatedly talk over each other is probably the greatest abuse of my power I've achieved while working at GGG, and hearing it brings me endless joy.

In a future post we'll talk about how we build out some of the lore for this league, and some interesting facts and connections you might not know about, so keep an eye out for that!

What We're Working On: Heist Week 2

Posted: 29 Sep 2020 12:00 AM PDT

We're now in the second week of the Heist league and the team is continuing to monitor your feedback and reported issues. In this news post we'd like to give you an update about some recently reported issues and to provide a general indication of what we're working on. Please note that a lot of the plans here are early and may change as they undergo development and internal testing.

Experience from Monsters in Heists

While there's currently no experience penalty on Heist monsters, we agree that in actual gameplay, they don't grant enough experience. We plan to significantly increase the experience that Heist monsters grant, with a focus on monsters encountered during Lockdown.

Heist Areas (in maps) are too long

We're going to standardise the size of Heists so that once you hit maps, they don't get any larger than the current Tier 1 size. You'll find a greater density of reward rooms in the higher-tier ones, of course.

Opening Job Doors in Heists

We have reduced the number of Heist Job doors along the direct path to the primary objective which need to be opened prior to Lockdown. We have also increased the speed at which Karst and Tullina complete the Agility Job.

There are some Heist Jobs that currently can't be sped up, but we're investigating the possibility of allowing this. In addition, some of the Heist doors have timing values that we'd like to make faster.

Observer Totems

Observer Totems, which can be found in Heists that require the Perception Job, increase Alert Level when you are close to them. One of the core issues is that it isn't necessarily obvious when you are approaching these totems or when you are in range of their Alert Level aura. We will be improving their visibility in a future update (both where they are and indicating when your Rogue specialising in Perception has made them vulnerable to damage).

Currently when a totem uses its Alert Level generation skill on you, your Alert Level goes up unless you kill it before it finishes using the skill. We will be changing it so that the skill essentially travels out in a wave that you can run away from or avoid. It will only increase the Alert Level if you are hit by it.

New Heist Bosses/Quests

We plan to enable two new boss encounters (and their accompanying questline) in an upcoming patch this week. Following that, we are aiming to enable another boss encounter (and questline) next week!

Heist Rewards

We have completed a large pass on Heist rewards. Our current plan is to increase the value of various reward types, such as Generic, Talismans, Metamorph and Harbinger. We want to provide further incentive to prioritising Reward Room Chests, therefore we will be moving some of the special rewards from Main Path Chests into Reward Room Chests.

Various Reward Room Chests will have a chance to drop Scarabs which match their respective rewards. We will be reducing the frequency at which Generic Reward Room Chests appear in Heists as well.

We have increased the Rogue Marker value of Heist objectives by up to 40% (based on the Tier of the Contract).

We have reduced the revealing cost for high-tier Blueprints by up to 15%. Alongside the increased Rogue Markers generated by running Heist Contracts, we expect that you should feel less strained by Blueprint revealing costs.

Additionally, we plan to change Blueprints to display all of the Reward Rooms that the Wings contain, rather than just the Reward Rooms that can be revealed. This way, you'll be able to see all of the potential rewards in a given Wing, giving you more information to decide whether you'd like to reveal a given Wing.

We are also considering some changes to how much you can extend the lockdown timer, such that it's still an effective strategy, but not one that trivialises opening all reward chests.

Portals back to The Rogue Harbour

There's a problem where returning to the Rogue Harbour can put you into the wrong Harbour, preventing you from returning to your Heist. We attempted to fix it last week but ran into some big problems and had to revert the fix. We have another plan for fixing it which we hope to deploy later this week.

Client and Instance Crashes

We aim to fix crashes as soon as possible, prioritising crashes based on how frequently they're occurring and how many players they're affecting. On Saturday, we fixed the most common client crash. We will continue to fix crashes as quickly as possible in our upcoming patches.

PlayStation 4 Crashes

The common client crash on this platform has the full attention of our engine development team at the moment.

Stash Tab Folders and Stash Tab Affinities

Stash Tab Folders are nearing completion. We will then be doing extensive internal testing. As soon as they're ready to go, we will be patching them in.

Stash Tab Affinities will take a little bit more time to complete, but we don't want to delay Stash Tab Folders. We're aiming to have Stash Tab Affinities released within the next few weeks.

It's critical that both of these features are implemented very safely and tested thoroughly, due to their nature.

Official macOS release

Since our unofficial release of an experimental macOS client[www.pathofexile.com] immediately before the Heist release, we have been working on fixing commonly-reported issues. There are still a few important issues remaining, so we don't have a release date locked down yet. We'd like it to ideally be next week though.

The following commonly-reported issues are fixed and are awaiting testing/deployment:

Fixed a bug where Tullina could fail to open a Heist door in the Underbelly.
Fixed a bug where some Prophecies would trigger and be consumed in Heists.
Fixed a bug where Elemental Overload would not show its buff timer.
Fixed a bug which caused Grand Heists to sometimes fail to spawn an entrance to a Wing.
And many more - we'll post a preview of patch notes once we have them tested and assembled into a patch.

Thanks for making it through this long post! We'll continue to monitor feedback as these changes are deployed. We're likely to make additional improvements, and we'll keep you updated about those too.