Path of Exile
by Other Contributors
Sep 9, 2017 |
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Genres:
RPG , Action , MMOGraphics:
3DLabels:
Dark Fantasy , Pet , Player vs Player (PvP) , Demons , Fantasy Setting , Dungeon CrawlerPlatforms:
Publishers:
Grinding Gear Games Wraeclast is a vast and dangerous place, with death and destruction around every corner for those who aren’t prepared; so level up your character and equip them with ever-improving skills, weapons, and armour to keep them safe in this deadly land. Maybe, just maybe – one day they’ll be strong enough to conquer this continent! Play Now Similar Games Played
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Summary
Path of Exile is a top-down action-RPG from Grinding Gear Games and is a F2P title on the PC. Coined as the spiritual successor to Diablo 2 and considered the “real” Diablo 3, Path of Exile has been a continuously improved game that has hundreds of hours’ worth of content hidden within it, and that’s only on one character. There’s a lot to see, do, and love in this game and with an expansive player-base, it’s not the sort of game you’ll ever have to play alone.
Plotline
At the very start of the game, your character stands inside a boat as they are carted away to an unknown island for their exile, but due to heavy storms and treacherous waters, the boat doesn’t make it to its destination and becomes nothing more than a wreck as you wash up onto the sure of Wraeclast with nothing more than the remnants of some of that ship. From there, it’s made quite clear that you won’t be able to leave Wraeclast, but while you’re stranded on this previously unknown island, it can offer you everything you’ve always wanted – power!
Gameplay
From the start of the game, it gives the player a very brief series of tutorials to teach them how to play the game, partly down to the fact that the developers expect players of this game to have experienced something like the Diablo series before. For the controls, it’s simply that of an action-RPG; you click on what you wish to attack and bind a bunch of awesome and unique abilities/skills to your hotbar, which are activated by pressing the corresponding button to follow up with an ability.
At the beginning of the game, you’re expected to pick from one of the different classes, each one focusing on a different series of stats in the game, be it: strength, dexterity, and intelligence. Any character archetype that you start with can branch out into different roles and builds, because while you might want to play as the Witch who is designed to be more of a spell-caster, you can build that character to completely focus on dexterity, rather than the usual intelligence.
The character archetypes in the game aren’t considered a set path, they are more of a starting point for certain statistics to kick-start a player’s build from the very get-go. What is meant by this is through the use of the giant talent tree/map in the game that constitutes a character’s passive abilities. This giant talent tree is exactly the same for each and every character, but depending on what class you’d prefer to start with, that class will start in a certain area of the tree that’s far away from another class’.
On the talent tree is a vast amount of nodes that can be activated once per level-up for that character and these passives can either be as basic as +10 to dexterity or a little more in-depth, like an increase in mana regeneration and magical defence. You can’t pick and choose what nodes you’d like from the very start and must follow along these nodes and their branches and can only activate a node that is directly connected to one of your previous nodes.
Completely different from the typical ARPG, Path of Exile has a gem system for a player’s characters and the way it works is that all abilities that can be acquired in the game are inside a socketable-gem that can be implemented into armour or weapons. Each weapon and piece of armour in this game has a couple of open gem sockets on it – or sometimes 1 or 3 – and they can be blue (intelligence), red (strength) or green (dexterity).
Every gem also has one of those 3 colours and can only be placed into one of the corresponding colours and once the pair have been matched up, whatever abilities are inside the gem – be it a fireball or something like that – is now usable by your character, but the gem at which point can be taken out whenever you choose.
As you play the game more and more, these gems can level-up and become more powerful as they start to scale with your character and their statistics and considering just how many different skills/abilities there are in this game, there’s a lot to play around with.
One of the most unique aspects of Path of Exile is the currency system and that’s the fact there isn’t actually one at all. There isn’t any in-game currency inside of Path of Exile, so when you go to trade in all of your loot that you got from a recent adventure, you gain small items that can be used to identify unidentified items or items that completely change a piece of equipment. Path of Exile revolves around a completely player-driven barter system – as you can trade between players – and through the years of this game’s activity, the player base has attained a monetary value for all of these items in the game and that’s what makes the currency system so unique.
Since there’s no in-game currency, there isn’t anything for a player to buy their way into the end game. Everything in Path of Exile has to be worked for, completely removing any kind of pay-to-win this game has because the only thing that can actually be purchased in the form of micro-transactions are used exclusively for cosmetic purposes and nothing more, as they don’t accrue any stat bonuses from cosmetics.
Community
Path of Exile is the type of game that runs on its community and that’s made quite clear by playing the game for the very first time. Spread throughout the game, you’ll find players opening up “shops” to barter with to purchase some new items. Not only that, but there’s an in-game friends list, along with the usual party system that’s practically required in this game because you aren’t going to want to be playing the game alone for too long, as grouping up makes the game both easier and more enjoyable.
Online, there’s a popular forum that’s regularly updated by the community and covers all sorts of topics, some of them being about an incredible new build someone has created or even questions on how a certain passive works. This game thrives off of its community and it’s been made quite clear it is regularly being nurtured by all involved.
Graphics/ Sound
Graphically the game is a pretty dark escapade and that’s due to the fact the developers always set out to make an action-RPG that looked and felt exactly like Diablo 2, and that’s just what they’ve done. Dungeons in the game are dark and the creatures you’ll go up against progressively get more and more horrific the deeper you get into the game; yet the spell effects are bright and vibrant and showcase some of the more detailed graphical parts of the game.
In this dark, epic-fantasy ARPG there’s a great set of musical scores to be heard in the background as you play. The music is the type of thing you would expect to hear in an epic fantasy and Path of Exile definitely manages to deliver on that front. After sometime, though, the in-game sound effects might grate on your mind a little bit because after about an hour of play, you’ll come to realise you’re hearing the same sound about 20 different times in one fight.
Conclusion
Overall, Path of Exile sets out to be Diablo 2, an ARPG that is considered one of the best games in the genre and Path of Exile manages to pull it off almost flawlessly. With a completely unique skill system and a currency system that is completely dependent on the players, there’s a lot to see and do in this game with an almost infinite amount of builds to be had for different characters. Not to mention the constantly added brand new content to the game that just gives you that much more of a reason to come back at the end of each session.
As far as ARPG’s go, Path of Exile is one of the best out right now and considering that the game is completely F2P, it’s quite shocking just how much there is for the player to do; with no P2W connotations dragging the game down in the slightest, making for a very easy game to recommend for fans of the genre.
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