Path of Exile is a Great Game

Three months ago, I was bored out of my mind. Business was slow, and we were back in lockdown again. My friend suggested I try out the new Path of Exile ritual league.

I was shocked how much fun it was.

When Path of Exile was in beta about eight years ago, I gave it a shot. It wasn’t for me. At the time I was deep into Diablo 3. D3 was a more polished game. POE was in beta. It was clunky. Bareboned. Boxy graphics. It seemed like an inferior Diablo clone. A game designed by soccer dads with a Lord of Destruction fetish.

So I dropped it.

Nearly a decade later the game has changed dramatically. I admit I was totally wrong about how this game would end up.

Path of Exile is absolutely fantastic.

There is a crazy amount of stuff to do. I played two characters over the last three months and I haven’t even come close to exploring everything. It always seems like there something new around the corner.

Near the end of the ritual league, I was just getting into delving. If you haven’t tried delving, give it a shot. It’s difficult. It’s fun. You’re exploring a dark mine shaft that’s filled with monsters and unique encounters. You must follow a minecart as it makes its way down a path. If you stray too far from the cart, the lights go out and you start to die. But you can also drop flares. These allow you to run into the darkness, grab some loot, and dash back to the cart before you’re a corpse.

Delving is high on the risk/reward scale, and it promotes skilled play. Good decisions.

Path of Exile is easy to learn, and near impossible to master. Just take a look at the skill tree.

There are hundreds of choices. But it doesn’t force you down a single path. Most of the game is like that. You can choose almost anything you want. Which is one of my favorite things about POE. If you want to play a flimsy necromancer that carries a big axe, you can do that.

If you want to play a hulking barbarian-type that summons magic swords and animated armor, you can do that too.

The rules are loosely defined, and the game is limited purely by your own imagination.

My friend said not to worry about my first character. “Everyone bricks their first one,” he said. “Bricking” in this context means you designed your character in a way that isn’t ideal for end-game content. But you can still learn.

After I bricked my witch, I made a marauder. It was a Dancing Dervish build with a lot of life and life-regen. I designed him as a tank so I wouldn’t die as much. That’s one thing about Path of Exile which can be frustrating sometimes. You will die a lot. Especially if you’re new. There are a ton of weird bosses that will instantly kill you if you don’t dodge their special attacks.

That’s one of the major differences between Path of Exile and Diablo. Most of my deaths in POE were my own fault. They weren’t gear checks. I was either too slow to dodge, or too dumb to step out of the way.

(Pro tip: Never stop moving. If you stop moving in POE, the boss will kill you. I guarantee it.)

The better you get at Path of Exile, the more accomplished you feel. There is a sense of progression that transcends the loot. The more you play, the more you learn. This leads to making better decisions, which improve your character and allow them to progress further.

Decisions are an important thing in game design. In in the past, I’ve ranked games based on my own personal metric called DPH (Decisions Per Hour).

The more decisions a game provides, the more fun and challenging it is. Many games only appear to have decisions. For example, landing on a property early in the game of Monopoly is not really a decision. In most cases, you’d be stupid not to buy it.

If you score a hit in Battleship, your next shot should attempt to hit the same boat. Again, this is not really a decision. This is just optimal play.

Games don’t have to be complicated to have a high DPH. Look at Overcooked for example. This game is loaded with decisions. Your little chef is constantly running around, grabbing, cooking, washing, and probably yelling at your partner. Games don’t have to be complicated to be fun, but they do need decisions.

That’s probably why I’ve always disliked chess. You just can’t do enough stuff. There are only 20 different opening moves. Even less if you’re playing to win.

The joy that games provide is a function of utility. Some people only care about winning. I’ve never understood that. There are so many other avenues to having fun. Customizing your character, exploring, doing weird stuff, or maybe just even zoning out and smashing zombies with your friend.

Covid-19 has been stressful. Smashing zombies makes it less stressful. At least for me.

I don’t know what your financial state is right now, but my business is down bigtime. Money for a lot of people is tight. Which is another great thing about Path of Exile. It’s free to play.

There are different types of free-to-play games. Some games, like constructed Hearthstone, are more like free-to-install. You can’t play the complete game without investing hundreds of dollars, or hundreds of hours.

Most people don’t value their time when it comes to free-to-play games. They defend a greedy business model by saying, “I didn’t spend anything. I just played six hours a day.”

Time is still a cost. Depending on how much you could earn at a job or running your own business, time is possibly a much higher cost than money.

Path of Exile is the good kind of free-to-play game.

Most of the things you can buy in the microtransaction shop are cosmetic in nature. They make your character look cooler. Weapon effects.  Footprints. Portal animations. Pets. All sorts of neat stuff.

After a month of playing, I bought some stash tabs. The stash is where you store your items, and in Path of Exile there are a lot of items. Stash tabs, especially the ones that let you organize specific items, improve your quality of life.

But again, these are not needed to play the game. You don’t gain an advantage over other players.

These are types of companies I like to support. Grinding Gear Games makes a fantastic product. They’ve been updating it and adding more content for years. My purchase of stash tabs goes towards the creation of more content. Some companies will take the extra money you spend in a game and award fat bonuses to corporate executives.

This is the wrong way to go about it.

The developers of Path of Exile have chosen a better path. Gaming can be a win/win for everyone involved.

Obviously the game is much deeper than what I’ve written about here, but if you’ll excuse me, the next league starts in a few hours, and I’ve got some errands to run before it starts.

If you like hack-and-slash dungeon crawlers, I highly recommend you check out Path of Exile. It is a gem.