GENRE: Free to play MMORPG
PLATFORM: Windows
DEVELOPER: Grinding Gear Games
OVERVIEW
Path of Exile is a free to play online MMORPG set in a fantasy world whose core mechanics revolve around a barter-based player economy, in-depth character customisation, competitive PVP and challenging PVE.
KEY FEATURES
- Unique fantasy setting
- Seven classes to choose from
- In-depth skill gem system
- Passive skill tree
- Randomly generated and instanced based environments for your party
- Free to play
LORE
Exiled from your homeland you giving cast into the seas and only through fighting the strong waves and currents might you survive the journey to reach the continent of Wraeclast, only here is the true test of survival. A plague continent, the land of the dammed, the home to all manner of murderous and terrifying beasts and undead and even the land itself will rise up and claim unwary adventurers.
As a newcomer to this place you must align yourself with other exiles if you hope to survive, exploring this dark land from the plague coast racked with the grief of wandering ghosts from the myriad of shipwrecks that line its rocky shores, to the dark forests and twisting caves that hide the ruins of some once great civilisation, the fallen Eternal Empire.
ATTRIBUTES AND CLASSES
In Path of Exile the classes revolve mostly around one or more attributes:
Marauder (strength), Ranger (dexterity), Witch (intelligence), Duelist (strength/dexterity), Templar, strength/intelligence), Shadow (dexterity/intelligence) and Scion (strength/dexterity/intelligence).
- Strength: using raw physical power and the ability to best utilise weapons and adorn themselves with armour to increase their defensive capabilities.
- Dexterity: speed and swiftness in combat is represented by a faster attack and ability to evade your enemy’s blows in battle.
- Intelligence: wisdom and knowledge of both deadly combat manoeuvres and the ability to wield arcane magic and inflict terrible critical strikes. Intelligent classes rely more on magic to bolster their defences by creating magical shields.
GEMS AND SOCKETS
Items in Path of exile often contain a number of coloured sockets, which correspond to the three attributes in the game and determine what type of skill gems can be fitted into them. The combination of colours general determines which classes the item is most useful for, a piece of armour with mostly red strength sockets is going to be useless to an intelligence focused Witch. Items can have sockets of different colours on them as well as different total numbers of sockets, anything from one sockets for lower tier items to up to 6 sockets.
Skill Gems are the items that players can equip into their gear and give them access to powerful abilities, each skill gem gaining its own experience as the player kills mobs through gameplay, gaining 10% of the players XP, improving their abilities in addition to their standard character levelling. The item itself retains its XP when removed from its socketed item and essentially players can buy, sell and trade levelled up Skill Gems to each other.
These gems can be received as quest rewards or discovered out in the wild and in various dungeons, the more dangerous the area the rarer the gem and the more powerful the ability it holds.
Gems have their own attributes prerequisites, meaning that a high level melee focused skill gem will require someone with a high amount of strength, essentially classes that are not focused on having a high value of a particular attribute will be unable to use certain skill gems and abilities.
Players can also earn support gems, similar to skill gems these particular items have no specific ability on their own but are used to augment and enhance other gems that they are linked with, which must be placed in unique linked socket items. For example a player may equip a fireball skill gem and could choose to link it with an increased damage support gem or an increased splash radius gem.
PASSIVE SKILL TREE
Each class has access to the same skill tree that is a huge sprawling web made up of 1350 skills that give your character passive bonuses by spending points to unlock different nodes along the web, points are earned by levelling up or when completing specific quests. Depending on the class you’ve chosen will start at a different location on the Skill Tree, your primary nodes for your attributes being closer to your starting position.
Players can only activate a node that is linked to one they have previously activated, meaning players can either focus on activating all the nodes in a certain cluster or branching out deeper into the skill tree to unlock harder to access skills and abilities that might not necessarily be primarily meant for their class. What this allows is completely unique customisation of a character and the level of hybrid and multi-classing unseen in other MMOs.
PvP AND PVE
PvE is one of the primary focus is to the game with a huge vast world to explore of randomly generated areas, both subterranean dungeons and even external wilderness and ruin areas, creating continual replayability with the game.
Players can compete against each other in various leagues, seasonal ladders, random arenas, ranking system all of which offer unique PVP item rewards.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENT
- CPU: SSE2 Supported
- RAM: 2GB
- Graphics: Pixel Shader 3.0 or higher
