Path of Exile 2 speedrunner dominates official race with the game's 'worst' class - Related to factory?, gets, chat, exile, nest

How do you turn an ant nest into a factory? A chat with the makers of Microtopia

Last weekend, as Monster Hunter Wilds bore down on us like a stampeding wildebeest, my eye was caught by furtive movements in the leaves underfoot. Behold the creepy extravagance of Microtopia, a strange and engrossing factory builder in which your factories are run by cyborg ants.

Created by Netherlands-based Cordyceps Collective, it gives you landscapes of buglike diodes scuttling about on pin connectors, harvesting bolts and other scrap for a queen who resembles a pregnant clump of capacitors. Insect strategy games are startlingly abundant right now, but Microtopia goes a little further than many both in its eerie Darwinian presentation, and in trying to portray how ant colonies "think" while meeting expectations for management sims.

While you can direct ants individually, the game is all about laying down pheromone trails that tie resources or facilities together, while also dictating the behaviour of the ants that follow them. Echoing academic research into how ant nests may resemble computer networks - aka the "anternet" - Microtopia portrays these trails as circuits, with logic gates that, say, limit how many ants can join a particular trail, or send an equal number of ants down each branch in a forking path.

Developers Cordyceps stumbled on the "anternet" concept care of a Kurzgesagt documentary series, and were immediately captivated by how scent trails "naturally" organise the behaviour of individual ants. "'Explorer' ants wander around randomly until they find food or another point of interest," they told me over email, responding appropriately as a group. "Once they do, they follow their own scent trail back to the colony, reinforcing the path for other ants to follow.

"The more successful trips ants make, the stronger the trail becomes," the developers continued. "As food gets depleted, the scent fades, and the process naturally redirects resources elsewhere. In essence, this behavior functions like an algorithm, where simple rules lead to complex, adaptive solutions, similar to how slime molds find efficient pathways. It seemed like the perfect match to replace this algorithm with player interaction." The idea of these being cyborg ants, meanwhile, stemmed from art director Floris Kaayk's old film project The Order Electrus, a fictional documentary about mechanical insects spawned by derelict industrial areas.

As an occasional fan of factory sims, I've relished being Microtopia's tycoon hivemind. While there's a lot in the game you'll recognise from other sims, with stockpiles, workshops, and smelters forming hierarchies of increasingly specialised building commodities, the 'pheromone logic' both puts a spin on the fundamentals and invites reflection on the conventions of factory management games.

Before I get into all that, a couple of more drive-by observations. Firstly, the controls are nicely elastic: once you've pegged out a pheromone trail, you can seize nodes and threads and drag them about, which makes it easy both to adjust your factory layout, and to confuse yourself by doing so.

Secondly, one essential structural element is that your ants are mortal, with different categories of worker having different lifespans. Accordingly, your scent trails will eventually develop a grisly embroidery of bleached and curled-up husks. If you're fond of factory sims, this might sound like a recipe for frustration, but in practice, you can set things up so that newly grown ants join your networks continuously, and feeding your queen regularly enough to maintain your population is an enjoyable challenge.

If Microtopia stands up well as a genre piece, what makes it intriguing as a development story is how Cordyceps' understanding of ant behaviour has worked with or against those genre expectations, to say nothing of the idea of ants as machines.

Sometimes, the game's mingled inspirations agreed with one another. Take those worker categories. They're not just germane to the needs of a factory sim, but derived from "ant castes, a feature unique to eusocial insects where members of the same species have a different appearance from each other". The devs also wove their campaign around the real-life process of queens producing gynes, or younger queens, to fly out and form colonies in other biomes.

At the project's most ambitious, Cordyceps experimented with, as it were, letting the ants take over the simulation. "For quite some time we initially went with making the game revolve around realistic ants and went through quite a few iterations," they revealed. "Though from a gameplay perspective they were required to construct buildings, smelt iron and the like." They also thought about giving the ants "culture and intelligence", a fascinating prospect, though I'm not sure what these terms mean in the context - how does one define or measure the culture or intellect of an insect collective?

Ultimately, however, the devs decided to set limits on the antsiness of the ants for practical purposes. Microtopia's scent trails consist of straight paths between nodes, for example, because real-life 'anternets' are too "organic and painterly" for humans to follow, bulging and scribbling through soil, bark and leaf. "It allowed for easier adjustments and made larger networks clear and comprehensible," Cordyceps commented.

Cordyceps also decided against martial elements, or simulating real-life clashes between rival ant colonies or other insects. "Even though robot soldier ants would be very cool to have, Microtopia is not a game about destruction," they explained. "Building the inner workings of a colony takes time and is a very involved process. After hours of work, it wouldn't be fun to have to start over after some rude neighbor had to come and raid your larvae."

While I don't think Microtopia needs a conflict element, this does feel like a slight missed opportunity - I can't help thinking of the scientists who've used Age Of Empires as a reference point for 'invader' ant behaviour. I'm also curious about how the element of competition might have affected Microtopia's portrayal of scent trails as algorithms: apparently, certain species of ant can hijack the trails laid by ants from other nests, rather than hunting down food reports themselves. Hacker ants, perhaps?

Above all, though, I'm interested to discuss what it means for our understanding of ants to portray these creatures and their homes as motherboards or factories, with all the associated cultural baggage. How does bolting together all these ideas contribute to our ability to live alongside them?

Cordyceps hope that Microtopia resists the "more classical view of ants" as "pests", and presents them instead as "industrious" beings - "an interconnected structure of different ranks of ants within a colony, all cooperating with such grace, as if they were one big organism." But it's not just about modulating our attitudes toward ants. On another level, Microtopia is, of course, parodying the effects of the industriousness of human beings. It unfolds against the backdrop of a sprawling neon landfill, and the ants themselves are pieces of self-propagating electronic waste.

For Cordyceps, Microtopia "is a satire in a way, where even in an environment polluted by humankind, life will find a way to survive and thrive." At once appreciative and cautionary, it "showcases the incredible achievements of nature and holds a mirror to our own human society, in both its successes and failures."

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Silent Hill gets a soccer league in FEAR FA 98, and you can play the demo now

FEAR FA 98 - GDC 2025 Gameplay Trailer - YouTube Watch On.

My hometown has a soccer team now. I live in the United States, so this is kind of a big deal. It's been a cool experience to have a local team, and has led to some really interesting experiences, such as watching the lovely yet bizarre spectacle of internationally ranked goalkeeper Roman Bürki stalwartly defending the honor of my brand new hot pink midwestern American soccer team. When I see him bravely fighting in goal, a bunch of howling fans at his back, in Missouri for some reason, I am faced with one thought that outranks all others: give that man a gun.

Turns out that I'm not the only person to have had that thought. FEAR FA 98, by Madrid-based developer Jacob Jazz and in recent times fully funded on Kickstarter is the beautiful game with a brutal twist. Instead of my sweet, debatably successful team of pink-clad Missourians, the players of FEAR FA are serial killers, "sectarians", and psychotic nurses, the stadiums are named things like "Semetary Hill" and "Chainsaws United," and if your team is struggling at halftime you can summon demons to help you out (Roman Bürki should be allowed to do that too). The stadiums are full of puzzles and traps, so you're playing not just against the opposing team but also against a hostile environment that keeps things interesting by constantly changing. Plus, if the referee makes a call you don't like you can kill him with a chainsaw. What's not to like?

Jazz's "horror arcade soccer simulator" is an unrepentant patchwork of ghoulish influences. He's "always been fascinated" by controversial or banned games that have become cult classics, and wants to pull the "rebellious, chaotic energy" of titles like Thrill Kill and Carmageddon into FEAR FA 98, as well as games like RedCard that pushed the boundaries of what was allowed in a sports game. The over-the-top violence and horror of games like Postal, Phantasmagoria, or Painkiller obviously feed into a game where part of the objective is to score goals with your enemies' heads. He's also a fan of Puppet Combo and the Haunted PS1 Collective, which has been "more of an aesthetic influence, but still essential to the vibe."

For gameplay, he cites Mario Strikers and FIFA Street; for the story mode, he references Resident Evil and Rule of Rose. Outside of games, he points to John Carpenter (and singles out Escape from New York), horror films like Martyrs and Jacob's Ladder, displays like Evangelion and Elfen Lied, and literature like Warhammer 40,000 and the dark gods of Lovecraft.

It's a motley crew of influences on a wildly adventurous game, careless of genre constraints and determined to carve out its own niche. Not that it's got a lot of a choice: survival horror soccer simulators aren't exactly tearing up the Steam charts, after all.

It's a great concept for multiple reasons. First, all sports would be more effective with heavy weaponry. Second, the big name sports games have historically tended to be their own thing, kept pretty separate from mainstream gamer fuel and certainly from indie circles. Perhaps it's a legacy of jock vs. nerd wars; maybe companies that are already making a lot of money don't see any need to market sports games to anyone other than sports people. But the continued separation has always been a bit strange.

However, there's been a boom in indie sports games in the past few years, with games like Football Drama, Pyre, or the upcoming Despelote borrowing the structure and cultural meaning of sports to experiment with different stories, genres, or mechanics. Jazz mentioned he'd be "incredibly honored" to be considered part of that boom, and stressed how FEAR FA 98's genre-agnostic flexibility should actually serve to make it more accessible, not less: with a Resident Evil-style survival horror mode, FIFA Street-style matches, and a hybrid mode with puzzles and objectives, it's really got something for everyone.

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This was part of his design philosophy from the beginning. Jazz's earlier games like Baobab's Mausoleum and Tamarindo's Freaking Dinner were narrative adventures that focused mostly on story, atmosphere, and puzzles, but he realized after a while that he wanted to try to bring his universe to a different audience.

"I was getting tired of seeing my friends or family—who aren’t really into videogames—not being able to enjoy my stories because they didn’t connect with the medium," he mentioned. "So that’s when the idea hit me: what if I mixed my world with something nearly everyone loves to play? Football!" He's excited to see people that normally only enjoy sports games try something new, and hopefully realize that there's something fun for them to find in the horror genre too.

If you did a double-take at the mention of Jazz's "universe," don't worry, you're not alone. FEAR FA does not exist in a vacuum, and Jazz has been making games in his own little world for a while now, with Tamarindo's Freaking Dinner being the latest. They share a low-poly horror aesthetic and a darkly offbeat tone that seems to hit somewhere between Paratopic and Transmetropolitan, and they're set in an irreverent dystopian playground of Jazz's creation, which he's returning to for FEAR FA 98.

I made the dubious decision of asking him for a brief summary of the lore of this game and I think his response is worth printing in full.

In the very near future, our scientists, under the new world order (the secret project PANSPERMIA), develop what is called anisotropic matter, which allows us to explore the Sun. During one of the many trips to the Sun, humanity discovers a grotesque, highly complex ecosystem with an advanced artificial intelligence that has developed autonomously within its core, known as [website] (Neural Overlord Xenon). This AI was not created by humanity. Its origin is unknown. This activates a defense mechanism in the Sun (a devastating event known as The Transmigration), which uses its light to attack all life on Earth, emotionally altering and cognitively reprogramming humans to wipe them out. Or rather, TO MAKE THEM KILL EACH OTHER, creating simulations of alternate realities. It is unknown if any humans have managed to escape solar control, though it’s possible… day after day, graffiti appear on the streets reading: DARK RESISTANCE.

That's great. I love that. I am so excited to figure out what the hell that has to do with soccer.

Jazz has his work cut out for him as he translates FEAR FA 98 from a lovely, chaotic elevator pitch into a playable soccer-murder simulator, but he's excited to share what he's got with the world. The first demo is available on Steam, and he has plans for early access sometime later in 2025. In the meantime, I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment in Jazz's bizarro low-poly sci-fi-horror universe and the chance to finally give my beleaguered goalkeeper the gun he deserves.

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Path of Exile 2 speedrunner dominates official race with the game's 'worst' class

Path of Exile 2 has been out in early access since December, and now that the initial hype has died down we're all in kind of a waiting room until they add more content. In the meantime, GGG is running some smaller events to engage the community, and an early frontrunner for the game's worst class just absolutely demolished the competition in our first official race.

Path of Exile has long supported official speedrunning events, and this first event was an any% run to clear Act 3. There are two more runs being held as well, on March 9 and March 16, so it's not too late to join in the fun. The top racer for each class gets a unique item to mark their achievement, and the overall winner for the final race gets a laptop. Neat!

Clearing Act 3 took most of us over 10 hours when the game first came out, but Angormus cleared it in a blistering 2:28:37. This was forty minutes faster than the second place finisher and made the rest of the competition look like they were standing still.

He did this on a Warrior, which has been maligned by many, including myself, as Path of Exile 2's worst class. Its lackluster clear speed, inability to scale life with the passive tree, and dependence on armor as a defensive layer have made it last place on most players' lists of best classes. However, specifically for speedrunning the campaign, it appears to be top dog.

Angormus showed off incredible technique during the run, making good use of a slick animation cancel that players have discovered over the course of PoE2's first few months. If you launch into a Rolling Slam, hitting Boneshatter after the first hit will cancel the second attack. This lets you out of the slow second animation, instead hitting a huge AE slam. This is especially nasty if you can put the first monster you hit over 40% stun threshold, which lets the Boneshatter hit for even more damage in a larger area.

Another notch in the cap for Warrior is the ability to use Leap Slam and Shield Charge to traverse great distances once you get to Act 3. The final zone in Act 3 is level 45, which means players need to be somewhere around level 28-30 to be able to kill the boss. You can achieve this level at the end of Act 2 however, which means most of the final Act of the run becomes a race past all the monsters. Using the mace and shield travel skills gave Angormus a huge advantage in the final stretch, letting him open up a gigantic lead.

Finally, the RNG gods were clearly on his side. His drops were strong in the entire run, including some early 15% movement speed boots, solid life and resists on his armor, and a unique belt off the chimera boss. The crown jewel was the absolutely monstrous 2H mace he got from a chest in the Dreadnought (open your chests, people!) which dropped with attack speed. He aug'd a disgusting 67% increased physical damage, and snapped off the regal and 3 exalts faster than the eye could see, resulting in flat phys and flat cold. Bonkers.

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So maybe I was wrong. Maybe, for speedrunning at least, Warrior has an critical place in the Path of Exile 2 ecosystem and isn't total garbage. I did have an excellent time playing Palsteron's Sunder Totem Titan, a build that let me absolutely demolish the Arbiter of Ash, so if you're looking for something to do with that Warrior you just speedran through the campaign, check it out.

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