Feature: Put your wallet away
Read this article about the very best free PC games and watch as capitalism collapses around you. There are enough that there's no reason you should ever spend money again.
Path of Exile
4 months ago
1 year ago
Feature: That which kills them makes you stronger
Path Of Exile gets a bit Shadow Of Mordor in the Betrayal league
Path Of Exile's next league - Betrayal - is set to be the largest expansion to Grinding Gear's free-to-play action RPG since its story doubled in length last year. The Forsaken Masters, four NPCs who gave you minor side-quests as you progressed through the game, have disappeared - no great loss, really. In their place, the past three league quest-givers are returning permanently, plus one…
Feature: Delve a little deeper
The pain of designing Path of Exile’s exquisite balance of restriction and reward
Every three months, Grinding Gear Games adds a new league to its excellent action RPG, Path of Exile. Each league adds a new spin on its core monster-slaying action for a few weeks until the next is added, and the latest is Delve, which launched at the end of August. Delve presents you with an infinite and pitch-dark mine to dig into, a sprint into…
Feature: How low can you go?
Path Of Exile’s Delve league is taking us deeper underground on August 31st
Path Of Exile's quarterly leagues are always a good excuse to return to the free-to-play action RPG. A fresh start for all players, new skills to learn and a major new twist added to the game each time. The previous Incursion league was a fast and focused side-dungeon adventure, and the Delve league - launching August 31st - looks similar in structure. They've found a deep,…
2 years ago
Feature: Gotta get back, back to the past.
As much fun as collecting critters was in Path of Exile's Bestiary league, it perhaps got a bit away from the heart of the free-to-play action RPG: running around dungeons, kicking stuff over and hoarding the loot. The next league - Incursion - starting on June 1st brings us back to basics with a twist: travel to the past to violently carve out your own perfect side-dungeon, then pick…
Feature: Farming for loot, literally.
Path of Exile’s upcoming Bestiary league adds zookeeping and blood-rituals to your repertoire
In The Fall of Oriath, you went to war with the gods themselves. In the Abyss, you fought ancient undead, led by a nameless lich-king and in the War For The Atlas, you set your sights on two almighty beings that create and destroy entire worlds on a whim. Now, Path of Exile's next league challenges you to... open a zoo? Well, that's a bit…
Feature: The biggest hits of the past 12 months
Another year over, a new one just begun, which means, impossibly, even more games. But what about last year? Which were the games that most people were buying and, more importantly, playing? As is now something of a tradition, Valve have let slip a big ol' breakdown of the most successful titles released on Steam over the past twelve months. Below is the full, hundred-strong…
Feature:
We asked a handful of our contributors to put together a list of their three favourite games from 2017. Their picks are running across the week while the rest of RPS slumbers. 2017 has been a stunning year. Partially in the ears-ringing, shellshocked way, partly in the ‘Wow, I’m making a living writing about games’ style, and consistently in the ‘Nobody has time for even…
Feature: Redrawing the map
Path Of Exile’s endgame expands yet again next month in War For The Atlas
Path of Exile is already a very big, very demanding game. Ever since its first public beta debut, the free-to-play action RPG has grown steadily, layering new content and mechanics onto an already complex design. With the release of the massive Fall Of Oriath expansion back in August it grew into one of the largest action-RPGs ever made, ballooning from four acts (played three times…
Feature: Socket to me
I'm not sure there's a more dangerous, time-consuming diversion in gaming than a good ARPG and Path of Exile [official site] is a very good ARPG. It doesn't have the dynamic world of a Soldak release or the exquisite polish and crunch of Diablo III, but after playing for more hours than I care to mention, I'm still peeling back layers of the character system.…
Feature: Listen now or have a wretched existence
Bring out your ears, it's the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. Adam has returned from Gamelab in Barcelona and is ready to tell us all the hot goss about Arkane's president leaving the studio (there's not much) but also all the gamescience he acquired from RiME developer Raúl Rubio and Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith. In the mean time, Brendan has been falling off…
4 years ago
Feature: Control your future
Using my mystical powers, I am able to look into the future and tell you that Path of Exile's newest update, Prophecy, will be arriving June 3. But wait, there's more! I sat down with Chris Wilson, producer and lead designer at Grinding Gear Games, to get a peek at how Prophecy is going to be mixing up Path of Exile's loot grind - and…
7 years ago
Path Of Exile sounds like something you'd find on a demon's GPS. "Go straight for 666m, turn right at Pentagram Lane. You have reached your destination, have a horrible existence." I checked and it's not on Google Maps, so the real world is safe. It is, of course, a game. An action RPG that people angry at Diablo III and all clicked out at Torchlight…
This might actually be brilliant. I mean, everything in Diablo-ish ARPGs is ripe for the socketing, right? Maybe you stick some molten rock into your blade and get a fire sword. Or perhaps you imbue a hammer with lightning bonuses and make Mjolnir. So, in essence, Path of Exile's saying, "OK, well, why can't we use that idea on places?" The promising-looking pulverizer's solution? Portals…
8 years ago
Feature: There ain't no sanity claws
There's no reason in the world that anyone reading this would know how much I love dual wielding but let it be known that I've just finished eating a bowl of cereal, a spoon in each hand, and immediately afterwards I gripped brushes akimbo as I cleansed my mouth-rocks. Last night was mostly about dual wielding as well, as I prepared myself to share some…
In the weekend family get-together of the fantasy RPGs, Uncle Diablo is hanging around, talking to his niece Torchlight about her new tattoos. She's just asked where Path Of Exile is. "He's suffering from stress and couldn't make it", said Uncy D. Abstractly, of course: what's actually happening is that Path of Exile, Grinding Gears' isometric online action-RPG is actually holding a stress test this…
Feature: But no jetpacks
The entire internet has filled up with discussions, videos and arguments about the Diablo III beta this week. Just to even things out, I’m reserving this little corner to talk about a different line of hacking and looting RPG though. Path of Exile, which will be free to play at launch, is also in a playable beta state at the moment and I’ve been walking…
We last wrote about online-only, free-to-play ARPG Path of Exile in April and it was already looking like an interesting proposition. It’s in closed beta now and there’s a terribly agonising countdown clock on the website to inform the world of when another lucky player will be allowed in. It’s like a cruel competition that I never win. Has anyone had any luck and if…
9 years ago
I'm loving the swell of action RPGs in development at the moment. Another we've recently discovered is Path Of Exile, from independent developers Grinding Gears Games. It's to be an online-only, free-to-play game (no, wait, come back! - this one looks very different), which they describe as a "competitive online action RPG". So while the game's hubs will have very many players, the randomly generated…