Speaking to The Trail, you've spent quite a while now working in the mobile spectrum—how does that compare to that of PC?

The thing that fascinates me about mobile is that it contains a lot of people who have never really played games before. A lot of those people don't really realise what games are capable of POE currency trade , they don't realise that they can play a game with thousands of other people together. They can feel that sense of community. In The Trail's case, this might be in joining a town. They can get their sense of accomplishment by working together and that might be the first time they've ever experienced that in a game, and I find that fascinating. I find that fascinating as a designer to present things that we in the game world have been doing for many years to consumers who have never done this before. Before that, they've maybe thought that games aren't for them. Giving players something new and different is fascinating.

I also think that there's this unbelievably exciting thought when you're designing for mobile is that mobile devices are with people all the time. Instead of scheduling their time in front of consoles or PCs, mobile players can reach into their pockets any moment of the day and engage with the thing that you've made.

When did you decide to port The Trail to PC?

Late last year we considered what it would take to make The Trail that could be played by people who enjoyed PC games. This was made in Unity so it's a case of pressing a button and it's available on PC, it's that simple, but we also thought: what would it take? There was huge debate about whether or not we should allow you to explore the world, whether or not we should open the world up more than it currently is, whether you should be allowed to go forwards and backwards on the trail, whether or not you should be allowed to go into the bushes, whether we should continue to focus on collecting and backpack management.

We decided that we wouldn't do that. We then said to ourselves: is it right for this to be free-to-play or would it be better to be a more traditional experience where you pay once at the start. We decided that it would be a better game for the PC audience if it was pay once, and if you're going to do that then that starts to introduce this idea of skills, unlocking skills, becoming the person in the game that you want to be. We tapped into this idea that you have hundreds of challenges to take on in the world—some against other players, some against the game itself. What we ended up doing was keeping the core of what the game is—travelling along the trail, collecting stuff, trading with other players, finding a place to settle—and reauthored a lot of the motivational mechanics POE divine orbs .