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Clockwise: The Gilded Age, Anika Moa Unleashed, Quiz Lady, All The Light We Cannot See.
Clockwise: The Gilded Age, Anika Moa Unleashed, Quiz Lady, All The Light We Cannot See.

Pop CultureOctober 30, 2023

New to streaming: What to watch on Netflix NZ, Neon and more this week

Clockwise: The Gilded Age, Anika Moa Unleashed, Quiz Lady, All The Light We Cannot See.
Clockwise: The Gilded Age, Anika Moa Unleashed, Quiz Lady, All The Light We Cannot See.

What are you going to be watching this week? We round up everything coming to streaming services this week, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, ThreeNow, Neon and TVNZ+.

The biggies

All the Light We Cannot See (on Netflix from November 2)

A decade ago, it seemed the title of this book was haunting me everywhere, on every Whitcoulls bookshelf throughout the nation. Now, it can haunt me on Netflix. This miniseries adaptation follows the lives of two teenagers during the height of World War II: Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and Werner, a German boy forced to fight for the Nazi regime. Shawn Levy, whose work includes the Night at the Museum franchise, will surely bring his trademark hilarity to the table here./ Sam Brooks

Love Island Games (on TVNZ+ from November 1)

Just when you thought the franchise was on its last legs, Love Island has extended out a single acrylic nail and beckoned former contestants back to the island for a whole new iteration of the series. Much like the United Nations, Love Island Games sees representatives from each Love Island territory (UK, Australia, USA) together to live, love and slide down a waterslide in a mermaid tail together. And this time, we’re told, “the challenges determine everything” rather than solely being a chance to spray foam on young women in slow motion. May the odds be ever in your favour. / Alex Casey

Anika Moa Unleashed (on TVNZ+ from November 1)

New Zealand’s best interviewer is back for a third season and thank god for that, because what the world needs now is Anika, sweet Anika. The new season sees Moa sitting down with interviewees including Aotearoa’s TV Personality of the Year Nix Adams, musician Benee and TikToker Uncle Tics with her trademark lack of filter and extremely forward way of asking the questions that nobody else would dare to. / SB

The notables

The Gilded Age (season two on Neon from October 30)

The first season of The Gilded Age asked the question, “What if Downton Abbey were set in America and involved a lot of silly accents and massive hats?” And we answered with, “Another season please!”. This show from Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes hasn’t attracted the following of his previous worldwide phenomenon, but I’d argue that the conflict between the new moneyed Russells (led by a wondrously hammy Carrie Coon) and the more established van Rhijn-Brook family (played by the equally delightful Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon) is just as enthralling as the Crawleys, if not better. / SB

Black Cake (limited series on Disney+ from November 1)

This new series, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Charmaine Wilkerson, bills itself as a “family drama wrapped up in a murder mystery” that stretches back decades. A widow named Eleanor Bennett dies, leaving her two adult children a flash drive with previously untold stories of her journey from the Caribbean to America. Mia Isaac, Adrienne Warren and Chipo Chung star./ SB

Spartacus (all seasons on ThreeNow from November 1)

Man, remember when Spartacus seemed to dominate our entire film industry? Were we ever so young. If you weren’t around when Spartacus was all the rage, it is a very loosely historical drama revolving around Spartacus, a Thracian gladiator who led a major slave uprising against the Roman Republic. There is a lot of blood, a lot of sand, and a whole lot of sex. It’s pretty fun! / SB

The films

Nyad (on Netflix from November 3)

Based on the life of record-breaking swimmer Diana Nyad, this drama floats onto Netflix after receiving positive notices out of Toronto Film Festival. Nyad, probably the most famous long-distance swimmer in the world, is played by Annette Bening, while Jodie Foster is her long-suffering partner Bonnie. It’s co-directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, who also made the excellent documentary Free Solo. / SB

Fingernails (on AppleTV+ from November 3)

Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley stars as Anna, a former teacher who joins a company offering a test to determine if a couple is truly in love. Thought-provoking! Rounding out this AppleTV+ sci-fi offering is a stacked cast including Jeremy Allen White, Riz Ahmed, Annie Murphy and Luke Wilson. / SB

Quiz Lady (on Disney+ from November 3)

Well, this sounds goddamned delightful. Anne (Awkwafina), a tightly wound, game show-obsessed young woman, has to join forces with her chaos energy sister Jenny (Sandra Oh) to help pay off their mother’s gambling debts. When Anne’s dog is kidnapped, the sisters have to set off on a journey in order to get the money they need. No surprises: Anne’s game show obsession comes into play. / SB

Netflix

November 1

Wingwomen

Nuovo Olimpo

Locked In

Hurricane Season

Mysteries of the Faith

Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs Haysom

November 2

All The Light We Cannot See

Cigarette Girl

Higuita: The Way of the Scorpion

Unicorn Academy: Chapter 1

Onimusha

November 3

Ferry: The Series

The Tailor: Season 3

Selling Sunset: Season 7

Daily Dose of Sunshine

Vacaciones de verano

Nyad

Sly

Erin & Aaron

Blue Eye Samurai

Don’t Breathe 2

Neon

October 30

The Gilded Age: Season 2

Christine

October 31

Mafia Mamma

November 1

Essex Murders

Being Mary Tyler Moore

The Ringleader: The Case of the Bling Ring

Richie Rich

November 2

I Am Shauna Rae

Love Island Australia: Season 5

Mama’s Boy

Rocketman

The Book of Eli

November 3

38 at the Garden

John Wick: Chapter 4

November 4

John Early: Now More Than Ever

The Fisher King

November 5

After the Bite

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

TVNZ+

October 30

Luther: Season 1-5

October 31

Christmas with the Kranks

Wolf Creek

November 1

Anika Moa Unleashed

Love Island Games

November 3

Crahsed: $800 Million Festival Fail

ThreeNow

November 1

Spartacus: Seasons 1-4

November 3

Celebrity Goggle-box UK: Season 1

Celebrity IOU: Season 3

Disney+

November 1

Black Cake

Behind the Attraction: Season 2

The Three Detectives

Big City Greens: Season 3

November 3

Quiz Lady

The Mill

Prime Video

November 1

Christmas with the Kranks

The Night Before

This Christmas

November 2

Knuckle Girl

November 3

John Wick: Chapter Four

Invincible: Season 2

Romancero

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Apple TV+

November 3

Fingernails

AMC+

N/A

Acorn

N/A

Shudder

November 1

I Saw The Devil

A Tale of Two Sisters

Keep going!
Path of Exile is one of the biggest online games in the world, and it comes from a studio based in Auckland. How has it been such a huge success? (Image Design: Archi Banal)
Path of Exile is one of the biggest online games in the world, and it comes from a studio based in Auckland. How has it been such a huge success? (Image Design: Archi Banal)

Pop CultureOctober 30, 2023

The decade-long success of Path of Exile

Path of Exile is one of the biggest online games in the world, and it comes from a studio based in Auckland. How has it been such a huge success? (Image Design: Archi Banal)
Path of Exile is one of the biggest online games in the world, and it comes from a studio based in Auckland. How has it been such a huge success? (Image Design: Archi Banal)

It’s one of New Zealand’s biggest gaming success stories, played by a million people around the world every day. On the 10th anniversary of Path of Exile, Sam Brooks finds the game is still going strong.

Auckland’s Aotea Centre was fitted out like never before. The massive windows that look out towards Queen Street were blacked out, and a dry ice haze pumped through all three floors of the labyrinthian space. Huge screens with fantasy characters loomed over replicas of similarly fantastical artefacts. 

This is a venue that hosts big events. Conferences with people in identical suits. Operas with six-figure budgets. Festivals for both readers and writers. But for one weekend in July, it hosted an event dedicated to a video game: Path of Exile.

As I sat in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, full from the front row right up to the circle with people in black hoodies, clutching tote bags emblazoned with “Exilecon 2023”, on their laps, I wondered if the dame herself had ever heard of this game. Most New Zealanders probably haven’t.

Which is odd, because not only is the game made right here in New Zealand, by New Zealanders, it’s one of the biggest success stories in gaming in the past decade.

Exilecon 2023, at the Aotea Centre and in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre. (Photos: Sam Brooks, Image Design: Archi Banal)

The journey to Path of Exile actually started well over a decade ago. Grinding Gears Games, founded and still based in Auckland, was then just a small group of role-playing game enthusiasts who wanted to develop a game of their own. After three years of development, helmed by lead designer Chris Wilson, they announced the game in September 2010. Their inspirations included the Diablo series, Dungeon Siege, Magic: The Gathering, Guild Wars and Final Fantasy. (If that list doesn’t give you an idea of what the game looks and feels like, you may not be its target audience, sorry.)

Path of Exile leans towards the darker side of fantasy, taking place on a desolate continent where an island nation exiles people, which also happens to be home to many ancient gods and ruins. Players can choose one of several classes – think Dungeons and Dragons if you’re lost – and fight their way back to Oriath, either by themselves or alongside other players from across the world.

Between its announcement in 2010 and its full release in October 2013, meaning the release of version 1.0.0, Path of Exile became its own phenomenon, picking up loyal fans who provided feedback through the development process. One of the core goals of the game was to provide a free-to-play game financed solely by “ethical microtransactions” – essentially players could pay for cosmetic items, but the game never engaged with the lootbox trend that was looming at the time.

By the start of 2013, before it had been properly released, Parth of Exile received over $2m in crowd-sourced contributions. It was clear: this game was a big deal, and people actually wanted to play it.

Path of Exile, as played on an Xbox One.

Upon its full release, the game was an immediate success, not just among audiences but also critically. It was named the 2013 PC Game of the Year by GameSpot, up against a list of heavy hitters, and best PC role-playing game by IGN in the same year. Less than six months after its release, it had five million registered players – more than the population of New Zealand at the time. In 2018, tech giant Tencent became a majority holder in GGG, a huge step for the company. Seven years later, in 2020, it won the award for Best Evolving Game at the British Academy Games Award, arguably the world’s leading game awards. 

As the 10 year anniversary of the official launch of the game passed just this weekend, it maintained over a million daily players, spiking every time a release pack is released.

So what keeps people playing it, more than a decade on?

Longevity was always in the cards for Path of Exile, according to lead designer and managing director of GGG, Chris Wilson. “We were aiming to make what we call a lifestyle game,” he says. “One that could be something people would play for a very long time. They could learn the systems, master the gameplay, and take it with them for the rest of their life.”

This, obviously, informed the way that GGG developed the game. It had to be something that people would come back to, frequently. “They’d be a Path of Exile player,” says Wilson. He also points out that it’s good from a business point of view, because you get customers not just across a release window, but over their entire lifetime.

To enable this, Path of Exile implemented a 13-week cycle. Every 13 weeks – so roughly every quarter – the company would release a new update for the game. These updates could include everything from new characters, new gameplay modes, new skins for pre-existing characters and rebalancing of mechanics designed to fix what might have been broken (in a gameplay sense) and rein in what might be overpowered. The latest update, Trials of the Ancestors, released just a few weeks after ExileCon, includes all of these.

The chaotic gameplay of Path of Exile.

Wilson notes, however, that while the 13-week cycle does get players coming back, they often don’t stick around for that entire time. “Players often have their month of playing Path of Exile really hard, looking forward to a fresh start and beating other players,” he says. “Then they get their couple of months off, they play other games, catch up on TV, see their friends in real life, before they’re sucked back into the next expansion.”

Through this pacing, the company “lets players live their life” between releases. “It creates that longevity, because they know there’s another Path of Exile release coming,” he adds. “And if they miss that, they can just come back three months later, for the following one. It makes it very easy to maintain a long-term relationship with the players.”

That cycle, now a part of the Path of Exile experience, wasn’t an immediate development. When the game was first released, it was obvious that people liked it, from both the reviews and the amount of players they had.

“Then players started to leave, and we weren’t used to that fact yet,” he says. After each release they would stay for a number of weeks, and then drop off. It was “horrifying” for the developers to watch the players leave, and they worried they would have to settle on a relatively low number of players.

“It was only when we’d done a cycle that we realised that this was going to work for the long term,” he says. “The relationship was that we would release expansions that the players would play for a period of time before taking a break and coming back for the next expansion.”

The fanbase is, like many in the gaming sphere, a double-edged sword, but one that Wilson ultimately finds helpful. “If we do something great, they’ll be our biggest evangelist and our biggest advocates on the internet,” he says. “But if we do something they don’t like, they’ll be very quick to let us know.”

“It cuts both ways.”

The gameplay of Path of Exile.

The company’s relationship with New Zealand is a fascinating one. The country doesn’t make up a whole lot of the worldwide gaming market (0.6%), but because GGG is based here, it is important to them. “We do stuff in New Zealand because it’s our local jurisdiction, and it’s very cost-effective for us to do it,” he says. “But if it were somewhere we weren’t living, we wouldn’t put a special focus on it. It’s only that it’s near and dear to us.”

A lot of local gamers they interact with are not even aware the game is made in New Zealand, even though the company has an outsized presence here, and much of both the cast and creative team behind the game are New Zealanders. Despite the game’s popularity, and the size of both ExileCons, neither have received any local coverage either. “It doesn’t bother us, and it’s not important for us to market the game in that way, but we were a little  surprised considering the scale of the event.”

Exilecon

Back in July, in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Wilson walked out onstage to rapturous applause. The cameras on either side of the audience swung around to capture his every move, every word, watched by thousands more eager Path of Exile fans across the world. He was followed by Jonathan Rogers, talking over gameplay of the long-awaited sequel (announced in 2019, out in June 2024). I later realised that I went to primary school with the guy who ends up playing the demo of Path of Exile 2.

Even as an experienced gamer, sitting in the audience of the keynote session often felt like watching a foreign language film with the subtitles turned off. The crowd erupted into applause at moments that I couldn’t parse – the mention of 1500 passive skills generated especially loud whoops. The phrase “press spacebar at any point to roll, no cooldown” was received so vocally that I felt like I was in an evangelical church, listening to an especially uproarious sermon. A young man a few seats along from me, sitting by himself, was especially vocal during the gameplay demonstration, with little desire to contain himself. Why would he? He was in an audience of his peers.

The true scale of the event didn’t hit me until after the keynote speech, though. Less than 10 minutes after the speech was over, nearly every PC in the building – and we’re talking dozens, scores here – had someone on it, clicking away at the demo build of Path of Exile 2. Hundreds more attendees stood in line for merch, exclusively available at the convention. Downstairs, streamers discussed the keynote speech, being beamed to thousands of people across the world.

ExileCon is a very humbling experience for Wilson – meeting people in person, and seeing the faces of players. “So many people will introduce their wives and explain, ‘We met playing your game and got married with a wedding themed around Path of Exile!’”

“Obviously, there’s selection bias – the type of players that come to an in-person event in New Zealand to meet us are obviously the biggest fans, but those fans are really lovely.”

The convention makes the success feel real, obviously. These aren’t numbers on a screen, these are people in a real space, meeting each other, and bonding over a game that has ten years of goodwill in its favour. 

It was way back in 2010 that Path of Exile started to feel real for Wilson, though. The company had just had a server set up to play the game locally, and were still a year away from being announced, 13 away from being a decade-long success. The developers had invited friends and family to play the beta. “They all logged in, and they started to take it really seriously – trading items, grinding through the game. We saw them taking it really seriously as an actual game.”

“That’s the moment when we realised all we needed to do was polish this, dump a lot of players on it, and they’ll have a blast.”

But wait there's more!