Story and style, mood and music all contribute to the quality of any loot-driven action role-playing game like Diablo, but the heart of the experience is the progression structure. You kill stuff, sift through piles of glittering dropped gear, equip the best items, then go kill deadlier stuff you couldn’t before. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. While that may sound tedious, with the right combination of character progression and customization systems, loot games provide a rarely rivaled kind of power fantasy.
Path of Exile developer Grinding Gear Games more than understands that. This free-to-play online loot game currently in open beta testing is very clearly inspired by Blizzard’s Diablo II, from the multi-act questing structure (including a quest to banish unnatural darkness reminiscent of Diablo II’s second Act) to the semi-realistic dark fantasy art style to the often gruesome nature of some of its world’s most sinister characters. The grotesque excess of Act 3’s Lunaris Temple, for example, is revolting, but also reinforces the notion that Path of Exile’s world of Wraeclast is a brutal, unforgiving place filled with some truly twisted characters and within that context the notion of non-stop monster slaughter makes a certain kind of sense.
Storytelling is done more through environment design than dialogue. The friendly people of Wraeclast are more memorable for the purpose they serve as vendors than they are for their personalities or role in the story. The story isn’t very clearly told either, so it’s tough to sympathize with any of Wreaclast’s residents cowering in their townships situated between fields of wandering beasts and horrors. Grinding Gear Games makes a few attempts to tease future boss characters to foreshadow and build anticipation for what’s to come, specifically the sorceress Piety, but no amount of scrolling text boxes or brief cameos convey the depths of her madness as effectively as actually wandering past the blood fountains and stacked corpses in the dungeons layered atop her chambers.
Path of Exile, then, isn’t interesting unless you’re out in the field beating stuff up and boosting your character’s effectiveness at clearing zones of anything that moves. Though the goal of gameplay is simple – hit things with swords and spells until they die – there’s a lot that goes into crafting the most effective killing machine. Grinding Gear’s approach feels like a blend of Diablo III’s mix-and-match skill-swapping freedom and Torchlight II’s more restrictive skill development choices.
All your active skills in Path of Exile are tied to gems and become usable when the gems are slotted into items. Gems also level up individually when slotted, and on items with multiple linked gem slots the associated skills can be further customized. Your Heavy Strike with a two-handed weapon can, with the proper support gem configuration, be modified to do boosted fire damage and require less mana for each strike. Gems can be swapped in and out of items at any time, so you’re free to adjust your active skill loadout whenever you want. There are still statistical restrictions on every gem that shift as they’re leveled, so you’re not free to use everything, but it’s a flexible system that lets you adjust you modify your play style without having to start a new character.
Plenty of ways to modify skills and gear.
Then there’s a whole secondary development system called the passive skill tree where your decisions stick and can mess up your character if you’re not careful. The tree is a colossal network of interlinked nodes similar to Final Fantasy X’s sphere grid. You’ll earn points while questing and leveling and can use each to activate a node to boost your character’s health, primary statistics, elemental resistances, armor and effectiveness with various weapon types along with numerous other parameters. Each of the six classes start in different locations on the tree but aren’t prevented from activating nodes in other classes’ sections. I’m a Templar, for instance, and am currently activating nodes in the Marauder’s starting area because I wanted more health and resistances. Though respec points are occasionally made available to undo a few node choices, you’ll never have enough to fully undo everything, so you really need to look over the tree and decide how you want to build out your character early on. The degree of control available for character development is certainly welcome, but the amount of pre-planning required to figure out a level-capped build across the entire massive skill tree is daunting. You could bypass this step and simply allocate points as you go without an overall plan, which may work out, but may also create an irreparably ineffective character.
The emphasis on the minutiae of stat and skill tweaking also applies to items. Path of Exile has no virtual gold currency, but you will pick up a multitude of specialized orbs that fuel the in-game player trading economy and give you significant power over modifying items. Orbs of Alchemy can boost a basic, non-magic item directly to a rare, which tags the item with a number of powerful bonuses. These bonuses may not mesh with your character build, but with an Chaos Orb you can re-roll rare items for a shot at getting more useful stats. Even the number, color and links of gem slots on every item are modifiable, so if you’ve built up a significant amount of Orbs you have a surprising amount of control over item builds that very directly impact battle performance.
There’s so much depth to the systems that even after a single playthrough at normal difficulty it’s very possible you won’t understand how everything works. Grinding Gear does a poor job of explaining any of this, which is odd considering how vital it all is in the process of building your character into a devastating death ball. Trading with vendors, for instance, can be a complex process. Initially it may seem like many other RPGs, but you’ll eventually start to notice that while a bunch of magic items returned not-so-special Orb fragments, a seemingly useless basic white item returned a much more valuable Chromatic Orb with the power to repaint item socket colors. The rules that govern this system need to be looked up on an online wiki, yet another reason why Path of Exile could do a better job of explaining some of its core systems.
The 'Edward Scissorhands trying to drive a car' skill tree build.
The combat itself tends to be fast and satisfying with some great spell effects and nice touches like landed arrows sticking out of corpses. It doesn’t convey the same kind of raw destructive joy evoked by the way Diablo III’s enemies blast backward after a Barbarian’s thundering slam, but Path of Exile still provides plenty of opportunities to charge into the midst of thrashing mobs of kill-crazy enemies and unleash the full power of hours and hours of careful item and statistical tweaking to violently proclaim your mastery of the game’s systems.
In terms of enemy variety, the opening Act is a derivative mix of slithering sea creatures and shambling undead but things improve with Act II’s frenzied monkeys and rolling rock monsters and get far more interesting with Act III’s walking statues and grisly abominations lurking in the deep shadows of some of the later dungeons. Across all Acts you’ll find familiar action-RPG enemy behavior patterns as some resurrect the fallen and others poison and others explode and in general Grinding Gear does a good job of ensuring you can’t simply auto-pilot your way across a map at difficulties higher than Normal.
Path of Exile is especially punishing on Cruel and Merciless difficulties because your elemental resistances drop and death results in experience loss. If you’re not quite powerful enough to fight solo in a particular area, mistakes in combat can wipe out significant chunks of the xp bar, which can be particularly frustrating if lag spikes interfere with play. While this system can make progress irritating, it also adds a welcome tension to the experience that makes your combat decision-making more important and forces you to truly pay attention when in the field and when making character development decisions. Despite the occasional flash of anger upon death, the added risk at higher difficulties boosts the sense of reward after successfully tackling challenges.
In my experience so far, any time I’ve run up against a wall in solo play I’ve joined with a group to repeatedly grind through zones and gain xp. This seems to be a far faster way to level, especially because the rate of leveling slows way, way down around level 50. The multiplayer experience unfortunately isn’t ideal. You can create a party and invite friends, but if you want to play with others you can only browse a clumsily presented server list and hope the group hasn’t already cleared whatever objective you’re chasing. In a full group there are often so many effects flying around onscreen that it’s extremely difficult to tell what’s going on, and the loot system can be easily exploited by greedy players. Unlike Diablo III and Torchlight II where dropped loot is unique to your screen, in Path of Exile everyone sees the same loot in multiplayer. Rarer items are momentarily lootable by specific players only for a limited time, but the timer often expires before you’re able to disengage and pick it up, which means by the time everyone has time to scrounge for loot everything is available to everyone. A well-mannered group shouldn’t have problems, but the looting system leaves too much room for bad behavior to thrive.
In its current open beta state, Path of Exile feels like a very nearly complete game. The end of Act III cuts off abruptly, the PvP systems are underdeveloped, but much of the rest of the game feels whole. It’s also free. At no point while playing through to Merciless Act I did I ever feel like I needed to spend real money. Grinding Gear offers extra inventory space and cosmetic effects like glowing armor and weapons and vanity pets, but never limits the gameplay in order to let you know that spending actual dollars can alleviate some major inconvenience. It’s one of the most consumer-friendly free-to-play systems I’ve seen, and hopefully it’s enough to keep Grinding Gear Games in business.
So, if you haven’t already, play Path of Exile. It’s one of the best loot-driven action-RPGs available.
Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com
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