Path of Exile

Path of Exile is one of the games that is heavily inspired by one of the legendary RPG game out there that spawned a new genre, Diablo. Despite being heavily inspired, it does not qualify to be called as a "Diablo rip-off". The game brings new tables to the ARPG genre. One of the key aspects of this game that makes it stand out in comparison to other games of the genre is its skill tree and how they have made it support it's skill system.

To describe the tree, it is like a huge big pile of mess. Each character classes are connected in this very big tree, heck I can even start from the ranger class and end up to the direction of the duelist class. The tree as well works differently; most ARPG games, upon level up gives you a class point and attribute points, where the class point is for class specific skills and attribute point is for improvement purposes. In here, each time you level-up, you are granted a skill point to assign a node in. The node provides a passive bonus, where these passives can stack and create an interaction with each other. Like there are nodes out there that provide flat bonus to life. A +30 to a character's life may mean little, but if you also have the +% bonus to life, it will interact with the flat bonus. So lets say the total +% to life bonus is 200%, that means that +30 life would give us 90 instead.

It may sound messy and confusing at first but this is one of the things that makes Path of Exile unique. That is to say it gives a character class a diversified playing field.

For example the Ranger class in Path of Exile is aligned in the dexterity portion of the tree. Most of the nodes near the Ranger tree focuses on projectiles. It makes sense that whenever we pick the Ranger class, we always use skills and items that are related to projectiles, such as bows. But you can traverse around and borrow nodes from other classes of the tree. So if you want, you can make that Ranger character use melee weapons instead. We can extend from the Ranger to the duelist portion of the tree which offers more melee specific nodes. Hmmmh... a class named "Ranger" playing the game as melee. Isn't it interesting?

What makes it more fun is that with the 2.2 update each class are given 3 ascendacy options that are unique to that class. This means that you are given more options to buff up your character build idea. To bring up the previously example. You can ascend melee ranger to a Raider to further power-up it's killing ability.

Now what about skills? How do we obtain skills in Path of Exile? Well, like I said you don't unlock it from the skill tree. Skills here are obtain instead by equipping skill gems to an items slot of an appropriate color. Allowing you to use that skill. This alone is the reason why I describe the skill tree as flexible, because you can use any skill on any class as long as you meet its stat requirements. The fun part here is that skill gems are separated into 2 categories, active skill gems and support skill gems.

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Active skill gems are the skills that you use to kill enemies. So if you are using puncture, when your next hit connects. The enemy will bleed out taking additional damage per second. Support skill gems are gems that modify the behavior of an active skill gem either by increase its damage or making a unique interaction of the skill. If for example you are using a bow as a weapon and you use puncture, that would mean every-time you hit an enemy they bleed, but with the fork linked to puncture, every-time your hit connects, your arrow will split out into 2 more. effectively hitting 2 more enemies aside from the target. Not to mention, they will also bleed too! Don't forget though that in order for them to interact, the slots must be linked. If there is an arrow that is attached between two sockets, this means it is linked allow support gems attached to other slots to interact in someway to the active skill it is attached.

Well for items in this game. It offers the standard ARPG package, what I meant by that is that items are separated into categories: these are normal which offers no extra stats aside from its built in type bonus, magic which has 2 maximum modifiers, rare which has 4 maximum modifiers and unique which offers a unique set of modifiers depending on the item.

Here is the catch, the currency in this game is consumable and are called orbs. It is possible to modify an item's existing stats for normal, magic and rare items. This can be done via using your currency to that particular item. Each currency has a specific condition for it to work. You can't just use an exalted orb on a magic or unique item, it has to be rare. This makes crafting in this game fun. If you for example, found a good rare items dropped by a monster, and realize that it still has an available slot, you can use an exalted orb and give that rare item a new property.

For content, it offers a progressive style for questing where each act is connected to the other, There are even quests where in which its reward and outcome will differ base on your decisions. Storyline wise, it's pretty much like what you would expect for an ARPG game. where in every act, you get to know more about your character or the lore of wraelcast.

Once you have finish the quests, the late game content is pretty addictive. You have plenty of options from here: either you farm for better items on specific areas (or kill bosses), you can clear out maps (which you will unlock after you finished act 2 on merciless), or clear the labyrinth. You will also encounter masters that will help you improve your character. Not to mention that once you unlock these masters. You are given the ability to create your own hideout. This hideout is very much like having your own house in MMORPG games, you can design your house from decorations that you can obtain from buying offers provided by each masters or you could also buy decorations from the microtransactions shop. Each masters also gives you a crafting bench that are unique and best represents them.

There are so much to do in the game and added with the skill tree, new players will find it confusing and sometimes overwhelmed. The game is usually describe as designed for hardcore players since it the very much sense, only dedicated ARPG players do play it. You might actually find your 1st character boring simply because most of the time, first timers build their character wrong ending up struggling on higher difficulties. The pacing also starts slow and starts to get faster as you progress. There is a saying in game that "the real fun only starts at merciless" (The hardest difficulty you can attain in the game) simply because this game revolves around the end game.

This type of playstyle can turn off casual gamers, but then again that applies to all ARPGs. The game actually encourages you to recreate and explore new builds. As a matter of fact, there are events in the game that starts and ends on a specific date and varies. These are called leagues and these leagues are represented by a signature mod which adds an extra challenge or uniqueness to the gameplay. Each league starts and ends in a specific time frame with the exception of Standard and Hardcore where all league characters go after their respective league ends.

The trading system in this game is unique. They have implemented the vendor recipe system for NPC vendor trading. This means that selling an item to an NPC might give you different results depending on what items you offer to the NPC (This also means you can get unique items from the recipe system). Also if you're used to trading in mmorpgs, be prepared. Since the trade system for player to player in this game is very basic. There is no auction house or public bidding mechanisms emposed. You are forced to socialize to players to buy and sell stuff and there are no means of doing trades when the seller is offline.

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Just like in any other ARPGs, if you feel a little bit lonely and none of your friends are online. The game offers a public party system, however the difference is unlike on other ARPGs where you either host or join an entire game session, you instead host a game session base on a specific area of an act or share a map instance with other players. Although at later parts of the game, you will probably notice that the notice board of the public party system is being used in a wrong manner. Instead of hosting games or runs, you will see players creating parties with the sole intent of selling items. I know this problem originated on other ARPGs but it needs improvement.

It also has a friends list system where you can add the people you meet in game or real life friends and host parties with them, a further expansion of this in-game is the built-in guilds. On its own a guild doesn't offer much aside from a guild stash (which is a shared stash that all off your guild members can access) but what makes it a great tool is that it allows you to effectively host parties or even high level map runs that only your guild can participate.

One thing to be way off on this game how optimized this game is at this moment. I'm not trying to be nit-picky but it's somewhat a continuous problem. Like for instance there are skills out there, combined with the fast pacing at the end game can cause lags (not latency lag, but fps lag). Skills aside, certain effects can actually crawl the fps as well. Fortunately some of these are fixed or mitigated. Although, I'm not saying that you really need a high end pc to be able to play this one, I'm just saying that there will be cases that you will experience lag even though you have a reasonable powerful PC.

With a very deep game-play, high replay-ability, huge end game content. Coming from a diverse list of games, specially having played games that has microtransactions as well. I'm pretty surprised that the micro-transactions of this game doesn't even provide ground breaking options (they're offering the whole game for free). There are no stat boosters, or those box thingies that give you a random in-game item (there are boxes though that gives you a random cosmetic item). What is there are cosmetics, stash tabs and additional character slots (in any case that the 24 character limit is not enough for you)

So, to summarize here's a table of my review:

Well I guess there are things that I might have missed on this review but overall its a very great game. If you consider yourself as a hardcore ARPG player then you should definitely not miss this one.