Path of Exile Open Beta Trailer (the game is now out of open beta, but this is still a great trailer)
If there is one thing I enjoy in games, it is being able to play a character how I want to play my character - and if there is one thing Path of Exile does incredibly well, it is provide effectively endless options for making characters.
Path of Exile is an action role playing game, similar to games like Diablo 2, where your goal is to progress through the game world, leveling up your character and getting better gear for your character. Your character, one of the six (seven as of release, once you unlock her) exiles, is sent to the continent of Wraeclast for various crimes they may have committed.
Your exile of choice washes up on the shoreline of Wraeclast, waking up next to a dying exile. After some conversation and a most likely brief fight, you begin making your way up the coast armed with a weapon that you found and a skill gem, which is how skills are able to be used in Path of Exile. If you don't skip enemies and simply fight them all, you will quickly hit level 2. You get a nice little notification on your toolbar that you have unspent skill points, and you click the button, and you find out just how grand the skill tree is.
The Shadow's starting area on the skill tree.
The game very effectively uses the first 10 or so minutes of gameplay to show you how the game works.
- There are no preset skills, instead you use Skill Gems to have access to whatever skill you want. This means you are able to use whatever skill you want on whatever character you want, if you are of a high enough level and have the required stats to place it in a socket. The sockets are also sometimes linked, which later allows you to apply Support Gems to augment your Skill Gems (demonstrated in the video, with things such as Fireball linked to Chain)
- This game will not pull any punches in terms of difficulty, even in the first areas. Watch your health or die. I did not mention this, but in the very first area of the game, Twilight Strand, the enemies, especially the very first boss (a minor one, but still counts as a boss), will do a decent amount of damage, and if you do not use your flasks that are given to you at the start, you will die. This game does not hold your hand and tell you that you will get to the level cap eventually, it tells you to fight for your life to maybe get past act one.
- The Passive Skill Tree is very robust, allowing for a large variety of builds. What I feel is the main draw of this game is the Passive Skill Tree. All of the exiles share the same passive skill tree, with the differences between them being where they are on the skill tree at the start (the Shadow, for instance, is near the top right), and their starting stats. This allows you to make whatever character you want and have it work. You could turn a betrayed assassin into a hulking juggernaut of beating things to death with a blunt object, if you want.
This is a truly great game, if you are willing to lose. If you get upset when you die in games, turn back now, because this game will catch you off guard on multiple occasions, and you will die. You could have the most durable, hardest to kill character possible, and you can still die if you make a big enough mistake. In fact, this happened to me, and as I play solely on the Hardcore leagues (when you die, your character is removed from the Hardcore league and placed into Standard league), I ended up losing two unique items, a lot of good gear, and about six hours worth of leveling. Did I quit? No - in fact, I went ahead and made a brand new character with a brand new build and gave it another go. (That character also died.)
There is no one build to rule them all, no one skill that will outperform all others, no character that is strictly better than others. However, that is the fun of it. It frees you to try new skills, new ideas. My suggestion to new players is not to look up guides, not to learn much about the game beyond the bare basics. The game starts off simple enough to where simply by winging it and playing at your leisure, you can get decently far. In fact, my first character made it to Cruel Difficulty in Act 2 of 3 before I could no longer continue on him, but the lessons I learned from that character were invaluable, and I would have just been disappointed if I had used some other build with various intricacies and mechanics that I did not yet understand.
The game website can be found at www.pathofexile.com, and the game is also available on Steam. It is completely free to play (and the developers are outspoken about their dislike of "pay to win" microtransactions - the closest you will get to pay to win is extra stash space, and you do not need it to play the game even to the end), so it is worth a try. Feel free to comment on what you like and don't like about the game in the comments section.
Walyn Curtis
I've seen this game on steam, but I never took the time to read anything about it before your post. It's interesting that some games can have such harsh penalties for dying, but can still keep the player coming back (RPG's especially). I guess it's the trill of knowing that you can win and that there are so many ways to win that keeps a gamer excited. However, I do not think I could handle losing all my hard earned stats.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how they balance the game so it isn't too hard for someone like me, yet challenging for a hardcore gamer like you?
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Well, you can choose to farm an area for pretty much as long as you like (for instance, you can farm the Ledge (a level 7 area) pretty effectively up to level 13 or so, and that should be enough to make the first major boss not be too much trouble), trade with other players to get better gear (of course, players tend to not bother selling low level loot unless it is flat out amazing), join groups with other players if you don't want to try soloing content (and depending on the party settings, have your loot get ninja'd if you're not on your toes/you're in a fight). Also, you can play on a Standard league, where you don't lose all of your stuff (you actually don't lose your character when you die on Hardcore, you just get moved to Standard and the stuff in your Hardcore stash stays on Hardcore, your equipped items and things in your inventory go with you)
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