On November 15, Grinding Gear Games held the first ExileCon, giving the New Zealand studio the opportunity to present upcoming releases on Path of Exile, their one and only title under development.
They announced a second title, a mobile version and the first information on the next contents to arrive in PoE.
Just two weeks after Blizzard announced Diablo 4, Grinding Gear Games responded by revealing Path of Exile 2 during their flagship ExileCon event — spoiling fans of hack-and-slash ARPGs!
What is Path of Exile 2?
Hidden until the Exilecon under the term of update 4.0.0, POE2 is a rather gigantic overhaul of the Path of Exile experience, with a new campaign containing 7 unpublished acts, 19 additional ascendancy subclasses, a thoroughly reworked skills system and a technique in line with current standards.
This is a second game, but fully integrated into the first one: the 10 acts of POE1 will benefit from all the improvements of the 2 and everything you may have bought via micro-transaction in the first one will still be valid in the second. No specific release date has been announced and Path of Exile will host at least 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11 (in POE, each patch of the genre is accompanied by a new season with new content) before this happens. A beta will be planned, at best, for the end of 2020.
Reworked Graphics
Apart from the intimidating side of his passive talent tree and his gameplay featuring theory crafting, the technique was probably what could prevent some hack and slash fans from taking the plunge. With Path of Exile 2, GGG offers a striking graphic redesign: everything is much more readable despite the profusion of spells and pyrotechnic effects and the atmosphere simply seems much more detailed.
What is even more shocking is the care taken with animations and impacts in particular: in the gameplay demo, you could see each arrow interact realistically with any of the elements of the set and no longer disappear by magic. This brutality in the blows is something that POE has lacked since its beginnings and it is necessarily very pleasant to see that the devs are on the right track with POE2.
The technique at the service of gameplay
In the crypt of the gameplay demo, enemies could be seen acquiring a buff by walking through the puddles of blood left by their colleagues.
New gem system
After seeing this system of skills reworked, it was difficult for us to review the first one by restarting our templar. No worries though: everything that makes the strength of the gem system will be kept in the 2 and it will always be possible to mix skills and support gems to unlock ever crazier effects. In POE2, the equipment menu no longer offers a variation in the number of sockets for gems, but instead, it is the gems themselves that offer variants and can accommodate the 6 locations so sought after by perfectionists.
Thus, each type of equipment has a fixed number and colors of sockets (the bows will always have 4 gem locations), which greatly facilitates the replacement of equipment. The variations of statistics apply directly to this new window, for an ever more fluid reading of its build.
Meta Gems
This new type of gem will simply allow you to combine several skills on a single shortcut. In the example given in the gameplay demo, the player equips two auras on the Meta Gem, which he then activates at the same time with a single key.
GGG expertise from act 1
If you have already ventured beyond Act 3 of Path of Exile, you may have noticed a lot of differences: from Act 4, the bosses become more interesting, everything is prettier and generally "better done". This is a very normal observation since everything that goes beyond the original end of POE was only published several years after the first release of the game, by a studio that had built experience over the years.
Thus, even if the first three acts have been refined over the major patches, they are still dated. With Path of exile 2 and its new campaign, GGG ensure that newcomers benefit from all their expertise from the first to the last act. In the gameplay presentation, you just have to see the boss at the end of the video tear off the set and run away to several arenas to be convinced that it all smells very, very good.
PSE 3.9.0 : Conquerors of the Atlas
For all players who have successfully conquered the end-game of Path of Exile, a new threat will appear with the 3.9.0 available on December 13th. Thus, the Atlas system will be modified and will add a new end-game scenario with 5 additional bosses. In addition, 35 support gems + will be integrated, more powerful than their basic level 20 models, the bows will be redesigned to make them much more viable and finally, the Metamorph challenge mentioned below will also be available at the end of the game.
Metamorph
This new challenge league will propose you to cross paths with Octavius, an NPC capable of extracting the essence of the monsters you have selected, in order to create unique bosses: the available rewards will be distributed according to the species you have chosen. Metamorph will be integrated into the game at the same time as 3.9.0 Conquerors of Atlas.
Path of Exile Mobile
As Grinding Gear Games explain, Path of Exile was released at a time when free-to-play was plunging under micro-transactions and pay-to-win. A state of affairs that has evolved well in recent years on PCs, but not yet on mobile phones. Thus, GGG offers POE Mobile, completely free of charge with the exception of MTX cosmetics as on its older brother and a progression based on the excellent Atlas of cards that is currently used as an end-game for PC games. Through this first trailer, the developers highlight the fact that tools allow them to update very easily both versions of the title and that the objective is to offer the POE experience without any compromise compared to its desktop colleague.
Just two weeks after Blizzard announced Diablo 4, Grinding Gear Games responded by revealing Path of Exile 2 during their flagship ExileCon event — spoiling fans of hack-and-slash ARPGs!
