Man it feels good to have a full sleep for once, recently having a chat with someone on my blog i came to realize, I've never reviewed Path of Exile a game which iv'e spent close to a thousand hours in and keep coming back to, so today i'm going to dive into Path Of Exile a game that in my honest opinion took the crown from Diablo as the best "Diablo" game there is and keeps getting further and further out of reach of anyone coming close to.
Those of you who have played Path Of Exile know just how insanely big and complicated the game is so i'm going to be focusing on some key points rather than trying to explain every aspect of the game and it's classes which would take me hours to write and an hour for you to read.
So lets jump straight into Path Of Exile.
What is Path Of Exile.
Path of Exile is a top down, action role playing game from Grinding Gears Games, a small independent company in New Zealand, creating in secret over the space of 3 years, players finally got their hands on the game in early 2011 in the closed beta before a full release in October, the plan was simple at the time.
To release a faithful diablo like experience for the modern age, there had been numerous attempts from other companies to try and get this but they ultimately never succeeded in recreating the wonderment of Diablo 2, Grinding Gears took a different approach, instead of trying to copy Diablo, they created their own game with their own vision in mind whilst sticking to the principles of their hardcore approach.
So instead of just having a class based grinding simulator, they instead focused on making a classless skill based system so in-depth people are still figuring out combinations to this day and providing literally thousands of hours worth of content not only in the actual game but in creating unique and amazing characters from what's offered, recently with the new expansion and patches the classes feel a little bit more "authentic" but they're still ultimately up to how the player creates it.
On the game play side though the game currently has 10 unique chapters, 6 of which were added in the amazing Fall Of Oriath expansion, for comparison, Diablo 3 has only managed 5 acts in the same amount of time, the game is pretty straight forward, you being your journey on the shores of Wraeclast as an exile banished to a prison ship for your supposed crimes, after the ship sinks you wash up on the beach and find the shores to be completely infested with the undead in a forsaken land where there's very little refuge.
From the start you'll be asked with picking your character, while it's true class doesn't matter that much it will set you up on the correct path for the type of character you want, you'll journey into Lionseye Watch, a small shanty town that will give you your first quests and introduce you into the world of Path Of Exile all though it's very short as you learn how to play by actually playing the game.
The game starts off in Normal mode which is pretty easy where you journey through the acts, i'm not quite caught up on the story so i can't account for the veracity of the story line, but i'm told it has some pretty involved lore in it, it's not until the harder difficulties, merciless and cruel that the game really takes off as numerous mechanics begin to spiral out of your control and even the starting enemies become an obstacle.
The game also has no gold, instead numerous currencies are used to upgrade,trade and progress as well as a very heavily player invested market with items, this game has thousands of items and even the most basic items can be valuable to the right players such as 6 socket connected items that can be upgraded and used by specific character specs, but more on that later.
Lets take a look at the character development and progression.
Progression Driven Characters.
The leveling and upgrade system in Path of Exile is vast, there are entire sites dedicated to going through hundreds of talents, items and progression strats to make their characters the best possible with maximum damage while also being able to survive, while some characters are built to support or soak up damage in the traditional sense, but again these are only some very individual specs in a sea of hundreds, it's easier if i just show you with pictures what to expect.
Here we have the talent tree and yes that is for every character, even with that picture that's not even the entirety of the talent tree you'll find in the game for your character, these have numerous different paths that can completely rewrite your character and how you play it, there are numerous different ways to play one specific character and you usually need to decide on it before you even make the character as a badly made character may cost more to respec than to create a new one entirely.
You also have to take into account the harder difficulties and acts, resistances play a huge part on harder difficulties, so much so that just having a lot of damage and health can still result in you being killed in one hit and some monsters may be immune to your specific type of attack damage, so understanding that you will need to build your character for late game, rather than just leveling and sometimes leveling becomes the hardest part, it's truly strange sometimes.
On the other hand though you have Skill Gems, they're used for all your skills in game and will be tied in directly to the talent system as they will require a certain level of attribute to equip but also to keep leveling up as your skill gems are based entirely on attribute points you may even have to go out of your way to level up a certain gem that can take you to weird places in your talent tree.
It's also important to note that some gems will not be readily available to your class so you may need to either farm for them or buy them with the currencies which leads me into the next part, the overwhelming amount of currencies and how to get them.
Since there's no gold in Path of Exile, everything is bought and paid for with currencies, there are about 10-15 different currencies you will regularly use in the game, some small and common others exceedingly rare and hard to obtain that will need to be worked on for extended periods or just getting lucky with drops.
The most common upgrades and currencies are tied together, you can sell items to the vendor to get parts of the currency then create it or you can go socket shopping, which is essentially just looking for items that have linked sockets in them that sell very well to the vendor in terms of currency generation.
These currencies do most of the things in the game, changing sockets, adding different attributes, changing socket colours, completely changing it into a new item, corrupting it or purifying them, there's a currency for basically everything you need and there's always a way to obtain it that isn't too time consuming unless you're looking for extremely late game currencies to maximize your gear.
As with Diablo, PoE is loot based, your character can equip numerous items with almost no restrictions from classes, as with everything the gear is based largely on attributes which means you can be a caster running around in full plate armor if you have enough in strength to equip the pieces, but that very rarely happens as taking points away from your main build is a great way to fall short at late game.
Path Of Exile has numerous inter-connected systems that only grow the longer you play it, the harder the game becomes the more critical your itemization and build become as some things at the end game can be down right absurd to try and complete even when you do everything correctly but it also pays handsomely to explore when you first get into the game, since there's numerous different acts and a vast multitude of classes/talents to create you never know what the right assortment of gear or talents might be right for your play style.
I will say though, get chaos damage resistance asap(trust me on that).
Destroying the Leader.
Path of Exile is, by many objective view points a vastly superior game to Diablo 3, given the resources GGG had to work on Path of Exile and the resources Blizzard had to work on Diablo 3 it's not even a close call, you might ask why I am comparing the two games though, well it's because it serves a purpose in the review of the game and it's scope in the ARPG genre.
This game has been named the spiritual successor to Diablo 2, even though Diablo 3 exists it never really came close to Diablo 2, Path of Exile feels and plays like the next logical step from Diablo 2 that sadly D3 never was, it's also the developers unending commitment to the game that makes it the best in the industry at the moment, even 6 years after release they're consistently adding new content each month and releasing massive expansion packs and individual content.
It's also their Free2Play model that is done so great, the genesis of the game was from hardcore PvE experience and the cash shop doesn't interfere with that in any way, you can pay to get some quality of life things or to catch up on certain things but the best....well everything is still only obtainable in the game, it's more so there so that the players can support the developers to continue making the game that they love.
It's also important to note that level of detail that has gone into Path of Exile, now standing at a staggering 10 acts long the game is that perfect balance of procedural generation and static environment so that the game never gets boring, every patch they release they figure out new ways to let the players play and evolve with the game, like I said above there's numerous websites dedicated to PoE builds and guides and that gets increased with every patch as they continually balance the classes and offerup more ways to play.
All of this is a stark contrast to Diablo 3 which took 3 years to release a followup act with one new act and one new character and has been consistently dumbed down the longer the game is out whereas PoE has done the exact opposite and became harder the longer the game is out all of this combined with GGG's commitment to the game is what makes it the market leader in the (western) ARPG front.
No signs of slowing down.
Last month saw the release of the Fall Of Oriath expansion that was also free, that added 6 whole chapters to the game, most companies would probably do 3 at a maximum but GGG are on a roll, the one thing that stings the most about a great game is when companies either abandon the project or move at a snails pace on content and patches, GGG doesn't have that problem and every 2 or 3 months Path of Exile feels like a new and refreshed game.
But on the other hand it's the dedication of the team to keeping the game moving at a fast pace, you very rarely see gold farmers in the game selling things because it requires you to actually play the game to progress, and you're left with very little spare currency if you want to keep progressing, GGG have done an amazing job at curbing that in the game with their design.
But it also has a built in meta game with the currencies as it's used to control long term inflation of the market in Path of Exile, anyone who has played a long standing multiplayer game knows just how much a market can inflate if left stagnate for a few years, a prime example is World of Warcraft, when released the tokens sold for around 14k gold, now they're breaking 200k, so it's nice to play a game where you know people can't out hoard your progress or hold you ransom.
After their release of Fall Of Oriath, GGG confirmed they would continue to update the game and are working on another expansion that will take place in the future, with no real talk of Path Of Exile 2 just yet it seems the games life cycle still has a few years ahead of it in terms of content and a finished game cycle.
All of the aforementioned things are a reason to give Path Of Exile a try, but in a game as big as Path of Exile, no review is going to truly do it justice and being that it's free the best way to experience it is just to download it and give a try, it's a game of immense content, interesting design and has a development team that is solely dedicated to making it the the best they possibly can.
Just one thing to mention, it is a bit of a time sink if you get sucked into it like I did so don't be surprised if you end up spending hundreds of hours on it like I did.
