Rise And Shine: Path Of Exile's Expansion The Awakening
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Back when our Adam had a good play of free-to-play click 'em up action-RPG Path of Exile [official site], he called it "a smart and content-rich ARPG", saying "It doesn't rewrite the click-for-loot formula but it does tweak just the right parts to make the repetitious hacking and casting a more involved and intricate experience." Sounds good, that. It's soon to get even more things to click on, as developers Grinding Gear Games have announced the next expansion.
The Awakening will bring new zones, skills, items, customisation bits, and more. Signups for closed beta testing are open now.
Grinding Gears explain the setup for the expansion:
"The Betrayer strives to awaken an ancient and terrible being. Should he succeed, the Cataclysm will see the whole world remade... in the image of Nightmare. The time has finally come to venture into the kingdom of Corruption and drive a blade through its black heart."
Which reads like a win for anyone playing Fantasy Buzzword Bingo. Capital-B Betrayer, capital-C Cataclysm, ominous ellipsis, capital N-Nightmare, driving a blade through a black heart and BINGO! come on up to the front to choose your prize from the table. No, I'm sorry to say the teasmade was already claimed by Arthur after his winning line of: kingdom thrown into strife, lost prince, amnesiac stranger, broken legendary sword, and capital-D Darkness.
Oh, but what does all that mean for players? New areas, new skills including summoning elemental golems, new jewels to customise the passive skill tree, another 70-odd unique items, an improved UI, more customisation options, and a spot of rebalancing. Grinding Gear say the expansion has been in development since 2013. All these folks have previews if you'd like to know more.
Beta testing will begin on Monday and the developers expect it'll take 6-8 weeks before they're happy to launch, but that might happen sooner or later than that, so they won't commit to a release date yet. For now, you can watch folks murdering monsters in this vid from The Awakening:
