Tag: ARPG

I consider myself more of an older school MMO gamer here at MMO Fallout, so I have a simple policy regarding beta status: Once the wipes stop and the cash shop starts rolling, the game is in soft launch and the “it’s just beta” excuse doesn’t fly anymore. Path of Exile has become quite popular recently, not just because it has shown itself to be a pretty solid game, but because the free to play model is exactly what people want out of it: No nickel and diming, no pay to win. Path of Exile also has the opportunity to display itself to jaded gamers who purchased and were disappointed with whatever feature from Diablo 3 (take your pick) they didn’t like. Path of Exile builds upon the dungeon crawling experience, while simultaneously taking much of what you knew about the genre and throwing it right out the window.

You may have noticed a very important detail missing from the screenshot above (apart from the incredibly limited inventory): A gold counter. There isn’t one. Path of Exile does not feature a cash currency of any kind, a move that is surely at least partially intended as a repellent to any potential gold farmers. You can still buy and sell items at vendors, however depending on what you want to transact, the “currency” you’ll be using is actually a combination of several key items from Scrolls of Wisdom (identify items) to specific stones which can also be used to grant magical properties to items. The lack of currency also means that if you plan on trading with other players, you’ll need to be decent at bartering (or at least hope that they aren’t). It also means that you’ll need to bring something to the table worth trading, since the option to grind mobs for hours to generate gold is no longer viable.

You also won’t have cash to spend on massive amounts of health potions. Your character has five slots to fill with health, mana, and miscellaneous potions. As you level up, better vials become available in the shops and dropped through creatures, and those vials themselves can be upgraded with magic stats and various buffs to offer better healing power, more uses per vial, etc. The kick to the vial is that they refill whenever you enter a new zone, as well as randomly during combat.

While we’re on the subject of reinventing the wheel, why don’t you have a look at Path of Exile’s skill tree:

Yikes! Don’t panic, though, that overwhelming monstrosity is not an active skill tree. As you level up, you’ll gain the regular assortment of points that go into what is called a “passive skill tree.” The tree branches out like an active skill system, except instead of dictating your abilities, you put your points into slots which grant passive traits. +10 dexterity or +8% bow damage, or +10 intelligence, etc. It is worth doing some research down the line into where you want your traits to go, and although you won’t make use of a great majority of the board, you’ll find the game becomes much easier if you know where you are heading. Find the traits suitable to your class, and branch toward them. Once you make your destination, you can start branching out from there. It seems that unless you completely ignore stats related to your class, it’s pretty difficult to gimp your character down the line.

So if the active skills are not delegated through points, where do you get them from, you might be asking. Another simple answer that shakes even more ground. As you complete quests and continue the massacre of various creatures, zombies, and mud monsters, you’ll come across skill gems which are placed into the sockets of your equipment. Gems come in green, red, and blue flavors and are how you obtain and customize your abilities. For instance, my ranger is equipped with a fire shot, split shot, rain of arrows, puncture, and poison. Each skill corresponds to a key on the mouse (left, right, middle) as well as five customizable keyboard keys (Q,W,E,R,T). Skill gems level up universally as long as they are equipped while you are in combat, so you don’t need to grind poison shot (for example) in order to level it up. Just play as you normally would, and each gem builds up power as you go. To add to functionality, skill gems can be added and removed from equipment with a simple right click, no need to worry about enchanting or failure.

As you may have expected, this adds another level of depth to Path of Exile. In order to use a skill gem, it must be linked to your weapon or armor (it doesn’t matter which). This means that often times you may have to trade some of your abilities in return for far superior equipment that doesn’t have the same gem sockets. You may, for instance, be using a bow with two green sockets, only to find a much superior bow that only has one green, or perhaps zero green sockets. So you can either lose one or two abilities for the time being (until you find a bow or armor with suitable slots) or go without the boost to your base stats.

The cash shop, true to its word, only offers cosmetic items. You can buy pets which are purely cosmetic, special dance animations, alternate skill effects, and alternate item effects. The only piece that has an actual effect on your account is the ability to buy extra stash tabs and extra character slots, and unless you are an intense hoarder of items or altaholic, you won’t have much use of either.

If this review seems like I’m just rattling off a list of features that Path of Exile has that aren’t present in many other ARPGs, that is intentional. At its core, Path of Exile is the same Diablo style game you already either love or hate, but I felt from the start that some of the features I mention above may take the game down a path that some Diablo/Torchlight/etc fans don’t want to go down. So if the core of your fun in Diablo or Torchlight was the constant running of vendor trash, you won’t find that here. If your idea of combat is buying limitless health potions and chugging them down in mass quantities, you won’t find that here. If you’re a gold farmer and want an easy free to play game to con, you won’t find that here.

Path of Exile feels like a separate generation from the rest of its ARPG brethren, keeping what makes the genre great while at the same time creating a new path for itself to walk down. It is a free to play game with a cash shop that most gamers would only hope to dream of if their game of choice didn’t charge $5 for the Sweet Dreams lockbox. I would definitely recommend Path of Exile as a must play.