Path of Exile devs won't add a campaign skip — and one designer says it 'feels very wrong'

Grinding Gear Games is rethinking a lot of Path of Exile's long-standing systems, but one thing remains firmly off the table for now: letting players skip the campaign at the start of each new league.

The PoE campaign runs 10 acts and takes most players around 20 hours to complete — veterans can push it down to five or six, but newcomers rarely get close to that. Every league, players have to clear it again before touching the endgame, and the demand for a skip option has been a constant complaint for years. Game designer Christopher "Octavian" Laferriere told PCGamesN he'd want to give the idea serious thought, but added that personally "it feels very wrong to me." Game director Mark Roberts went further, saying that skipping the campaign leaves you with "a lot less care for your character" — he knows because the dev team uses internal tools to bypass it, and in his words it "just genuinely makes the game worse — the work to get there is the satisfaction." Roberts also warned that treating the campaign as optional would make PoE "lose its quality quite fast."

GGG has shown it can kill sacred cows when it wants to — this week the studio is removing the multi-colored socket system that had defined gear customization for over a decade, after enough developers agreed it wasn't adding meaningful depth. The campaign, though, seems to have stronger internal defenders. Path of Exile 2 game director Jonathan Rogers has previously signaled the skip will essentially never happen on his watch, and the PoE 2 campaign is widely considered one of the stronger parts of that game, which makes the argument easier to hold.

Roberts' stated alternative is to keep freshening up the campaign each league so it stays relevant rather than feeling like mandatory busywork. Whether that satisfies the large chunk of the playerbase who just want to get to the endgame is another question — but for now, GGG isn't moving.