Fresh wind but a sour taste for longtime players
Something new on the ARPG horizon
Grinding Gear Games, the developer and publisher of Path of Exile, is a small indie studio located in New Zealand. The lack of a hardcore experience in the action rpg genre pushed the developement of the game since the guys behind GGG wanted to form their own experience and push the boundaries of the genre. An ambitious project which was rather undiscovered until the game went into closed beta in 2010. Beta tester were able to buy certain founder packs which consisted of cosmetic items or more stash tabs. While ingame items were and are sold, none of those give you an advantage inside of the game, this model still sustains the game with more and more cosmetic items and supporter packs finding their way into the shop.
What is different?
Path of Exile tries to cater to the hardcore audience and does this with a huge skill tree which is updated with each start of a new season. Seasons are known since Diablo 2 were you could compete against other players for being first to reach level 99 or gather the most experience inside of a season. Each season starts with fresh characters and with an empty inventory. So if you want to start playing you don't have to compete against already fully geared chars, you can rather wait for the start of a new season and start fresh from the beginning like everyone else.
The skill tree is something different. You can play almost every build with every char since Skills aren't character based but socketed into your items. These skills can be further refined with support or aura skills while the latter benefits often times the whole group. Each skills has it's own color, these colors must be socketed in slots which also have this color. Not every equipment part has the same probability to carry certain slot color so that off color equipment can be really hard to acquire. But thankfully there is a possibility to craft items by yourself or isn't there?
Crafting can be a pain
You don't pay for your items with gold like in most arpgs but you find materials with which you can craft or refine your items. If you want to you can find a basic white item without any properties and craft the best item on the server out of it. But to achieve that you will most likely spend thousands of currency items which are rather hard to find. In the end you will have to start trading in the later stages of the game and that's where the trouble starts. While items do have a worth which is determined by the market through supply and demand, popular streamers often times pushed the value of an item by playing a certain build. So while build diversity was one of the major goals of the game, each season has it's preferred builds which are played by the majority of the players. If you want to build your character solely with items you find by yourself you will have a rather hard time. If you're playing in a hardcore league it will be almost impossible to level past level 80 without trading. If you want to keep up with the top players you will have to trade and you will have to trade a lot. In the end my playing to trading time were almost equal and it took a huge amount of fun out of the experience. Because in the end you want to play and action rpg and find your loot rather than feeling like a broker at the stock exchange.
And I'm dead...
The major problem I have with Path of Exile is rubber banding. When you market a game as a hardcore experience and want your players to compete in an hardcore seasonal environment, you should make sure that their deaths can't be blamed on the game. But that's what happens in Path of Exile and seems impossible to fix. What happens is that you see your character standing at a point where it isn't standing. Your client has a different information than the server and suddenly you character is dead. You can prevent or at least lower the risk by being aware of the problem, not using certain skills near walls, not using some skills at all, always typing /oos in the client when you feel you desynced and so on. To me, that's a huge quality of life issue because you can't play the game the way you want to and it's also a flaw which almost never gets picked up in reviews from major gaming news sources which is kind of sad. If I can't be blamed for a loss of a character with several hundreds of hours gaming time in it, the game does something wrong.
Great game with endgame flaws
If you plan to play Path of Exile for a few days to experience a different kind of arpg with a huge emphasis on skills, trading and character perfection, try it out it is free to play and you can do nothing wrong. If you're looking for a long term game where you want to sink hundreds of hours into Path of Exile is also a game to consider. But you have to keep in mind that the game is far from flawless and will need you to trade heavily. Losing your hardcore character to something you cannot control is also something you should consider if you're planning to start in a hardcore league. If you're aware of those things and are still looking for a challenge in the game you will have a huge amount of fun. For an indie developer GGG does a huge amount of things right, from community interactions up to designing items because of ideas which came out of the community. The game is far from finished and the fourth act should drop in early 2015.
