In Path of Exile, trading items with other players is a whole other game in itself. Nearly every piece of loot you find while adventuring can be traded away, and if you know the right stuff to look for you can make an absolutely absurd amount of money. But what if you don't know how to trade in Path of Exile? Don't sweat it. This guide covers all the basics.

If you've just started playing, a big part of what makes Path of Exile cool is its complex bartering economy. Unlike, say, Diablo 3, there's no single currency like gold that you use to purchase items from NPC vendors or other players. Instead, trading in Path of Exile is done in a variety of currencies that also double as crafting resources. When you sell loot to a vendor, they'll also pay you in these currencies. It's a little bit complicated, but don't sweat it too much—before long, you'll start to get the hang of things.

How to trade in Path of Exile 

Unlike other online RPGs, Path of Exile doesn't have any sort of in-game infrastructure to facilitate trading with other players. There's no auction house to browse, so the only way to trade is to physically find a person and manually start a trade with them. It's a pretty standard interface where you can each drag items from your inventory into the trade window, which requires both players to agree before the trade is finalized.

To find out what other players have for sale, use Poe.trade. This tool, built into Path of Exile's website, let's you search through items that other players have marked for sale.

Here's a quick rundown of how this process works:

• Use Poe.trade to find an item you're interested in.
• Click the 'whisper' button next to the seller's name.
• This copies a string of text you can then paste into the in-game chat window to automatically message a player saying you want to buy the item.
• Assuming that player is online, they'll message you back and typically invite you to their hideout to trade.
• Make sure to bring the currency with you in your inventory.
• At their hideout, complete the trade.

The below image shows where the whisper button is, since it's hard to find.

How to sell items in Path of Exile 

This is a little bit trickier and will require you to also spend a little bit of money. In order to list items for sale and make them appear on Poe.trade, you need to have a premium stash tab. The chest found in every main hub and your hideout is your stash, and it normally comes with just four basic tabs (think of them like pages) for you to store loot in.

Premium tabs have a few extra features:

• They can be renamed.
• They can be colored (for easy organization).
• They can be set 'public' so that websites like Poe.trade can index the items stored there so it'll show up in search results and other players can buy it from you.

Don't worry, though, making a tab public doesn't mean anyone can come and take your items.

The video below is also an excellent guide to trading by YouTuber Engineering Eternity.

In Path of Exile's microtransaction shop, you'll find a category for stash tabs that offers a bunch of different tabs that suit various purposes. Some have special layouts for organizing your crafting items, maps, or other unique types of loot you might find. If you play Path of Exile seriously, it's worth investing in a few of these tabs.

Here are the two I recommend buying to start:

• Premium stash tab upgrade (15p) - This upgrades one of your regular stash tabs to a premium one.
• Currency stash tab (75p) - This adds a new tab with a special layout for storing different currencies. It's super helpful to have.

With your new premium tab, you can now right click it to set its color and also set it to public. You have two options for how to sell items:

• Set it so every item in the premium tab sells for the same price
• Set it so each item is priced individually

For now, you'll probably want to individually price your items since you only have one premium tab and the value of loot can vary wildly.

When you drop any gear into this premium tab, you can right click it and set its price, choosing how many of a certain type of crafting resource you want someone to pay for it. Then, assuming it's priced reasonably and is an item people actually want, other players will soon start messaging you.

What are the best items to sell in Path of Exile? 

I could give a whole seminar on what items are worth selling to other players and which ones are worth dumping at an NPC vendor. There is no simple answer to this and items value can change wildly over the course of a patch. But there are some simple steps you can take to find out if an item might be worth some money.

Since Poe.trade lists all other people trying to sell that item, the first thing you can do is search for similar items to yours and see how much of a price they fetch. This works particularly well with Unique items (the ones with the brown names). But it's also important to remember that even two Uniques can have a wildly different value depending on the layout and color of their sockets and their overall item level. For example, if you find a Unique at level 13, it'll be vastly weaker than the same Unique found by someone who is level 80.

If your search doesn't return any results, cast a wider net before giving up. Use the advanced search to filter by the item's base type and pick a wider range of item levels to see other items that are similar but not exactly the same. 

The above video by Engineering Eternity is a great resource that breaks down what items you should be looking for while playing. It doesn't tell you how much you can get for those items (since prices are shifting all the time), but it will help you understand what stats to look for on gear. 

How does Path of Exile's currency work? 

As I mentioned above, Path of Exile doesn't have a generic currency like gold used for trading. Instead, players barter using crafting materials. Called orbs, these each have a variety of effects that are useful for modifying items that, in turn, affects their overall value. However, the de facto standard (what you could think of as the equivalent of a dollar) is a Chaos Orb. These are relatively rare, but once you reach Path of Exile's endgame you can expect most transactions to require a certain amount of Chaos Orbs—so you should always hold onto them when you find one.

This website shows a breakdown of the major currencies and what the conversion rate is to other crafting currencies. As an example, right now you'd need around 160 Orbs of Alteration, which are super common, to get a single Chaos Orb. Path of Exile's rarest item, the Mirror of Kalandra, costs a whopping 48,300 Chaos Orbs.

When deciding on what items to sell, I'd say that unless you're guaranteed a Chaos Orb, it's probably not worth your time. Players certainly sell items for much less—and it's possible to make a fortune that way—but more casual players should be out exploring dungeons instead of trying to play the market, unless that's your thing of course.

Path of Exile will continue to grow in 2020 despite last year's announcement of a sequel, studio Grinding Gear Games has confirmed. Though information is thin at the moment, a new blog post assures that the free-to-play ARPG will get four new expansions this year on its usual quarterly schedule.

The first expansion, 3.10.0, will "probably" be detailed late next month, with reports early last year suggesting it'll likely release in March. 3.11.0, 3.12.0 and 3.13.0 will then follow later in the year. "The timing of the expansions may vary by a week or two from last year's ones," the update reads, "as we work around various holidays/events and make sure that the bigger ones have enough time to be fully tested."

As for Path of Exile 2, formerly known as the 4.0.0 update, expect more information about that in the middle of the year. "Development on 4.0.0 continues, with the team hard at work on content that wasn't shown in the ExileCon Act One Demo. We expect that the next time we'll show significantly new content and features will probably be in the middle of this year. Maybe around E3? We'll let you know once we have a firm plan locked in."

Steven got hands on with Path of Exile 2 late last year, and the early view is promising.

Cheers, Gamespot.

When Path of Exile creator Chris Wilson took the stage during ExileCon this weekend, I expected a big announcement. I didn't expect him to announce Path of Exile 2—a whole new campaign set 20 years after the first one. Though it's still all one game (players will choose which campaign they want when starting a new character), Path of Exile 2 will feature major overhauls of many core systems along with significantly upgraded graphics, all while avoiding the problems inherent with sequels. No extra costs, no divided playerbase, and every core expansion from the original campaign will be re-integrated into the new one.

After playing through the first 45 minutes of its new campaign a few times, it's hard to overstate how much Path of Exile 2 feels like a proper sequel. It's an improvement over the original in nearly every way, and its smart refinement of its skill system makes Path of Exile's daunting complexity a lot more accessible—all without sacrificing an inch of depth. If anything, Path of Exile 2 is going to become even more of a theory crafter's dream come true. 

Return to Wraeclast 

Set 20 years after the events of the original campaign, Path of Exile 2 is the story of a society trying to rebuild after the original cast of player characters killed every single god in existence and used their power to murder an even bigger god. Now all the gods are dead and humankind is left to clean up the corpses (there's a lot) and try and move forward.

Path of Exile 2, Wilson tells me, is Grinding Gear Games' chance to preset the reset button on Path of Exile and tell a smaller-scale story that isn't about apocalyptic world-ending threats. You play as an entirely new exile who narrowly escapes their execution and washes up on the shores of Wraeclast again. Though it wasn't immediately clear from the early quests I completed, your goal is to investigate the Duke who sentenced you to die and the paranormal mysteries that surround him. Like Path of Exile's original campaign, that means clicking on enemies until they explode and good loot (hopefully) falls out of their dismembered corpses.

Even in the first minutes of this adventure, Path of Exile 2 feels like a big improvement over the original. The original three acts of Path of Exile are now seven years old and their age is shown most in how one dimensional much of boss fights are. More often than not, you're standing in place clicking on a big monster until it stops moving. And after beating those bosses dozens of times, the lack of challenge is grating. Path of Exile 2's bosses clearly benefit from years of figuring out what makes these fights fun.

One early quest tasked me with killing The Devourer, a monstrous worm living in an underground passage. Path of Exile's first bosses are usually pretty simple but The Devourer was a surprising challenge. During the battle, The Devourer would frequently tunnel underground and explode upwards, forcing me to run for my life or die. But I had to be careful, because each time The Devourer's head moved, it would leave behind a pool of acid that I had to avoid, and its deadly tail would crush me if I ventured too close. Meanwhile, the worm's head constantly fired acid projectiles or tried to dismember me with one of its large mandibles. It was hectic and overwhelming—exactly what I love about action RPGs. 

Each of the bosses I fought were exceptionally good at keeping me on my toes and fighting for my life. In a later zone, The Rusk King pelted me with jagged bits of metal. If I got nicked even a little bit, I could quickly bleed out.

That high-stakes combat trickles down to regular packs of enemies. Contorted witches spawn occult symbols on the ground that explode seconds later, while hulking ghouls slam stone slabs into the ground, sending shockwaves in my direction. I still slaughtered hordes of imps, skeletons, and slimy bugs with reckless abandon, but I also felt far more aware of how they could, in turn, slaughter me. 

Path of Exile 2's combat benefits greatly from an improved graphics engine, too. Environments in the original campaign were great, but better lighting and particle effects enhance the creepiness and danger of some areas. A zone called Grimtangle is a dark and colorless knot of gnarled branches that would be boring to look at if it weren't for the searing glow of yellow fungi found on the floor. These mushrooms aren't just pretty to look at, though. Venture too close and they'll explode, coating you in acid. What's worse is the zone is full of infected zombies with a special attack that coats the ground in more mushrooms, forcing me to always be on the move.

More demanding combat means players will also have to make smarter use of whatever skill gems they happen to find. Fortunately, this is another area where Path of Exile is significantly improved—especially for new players.

The skill system in Path of Exile is enormously complicated, but the gist of it is that, unlike Diablo, abilities aren't automatically learned by specific classes. Instead, every ability is a skill gem that can be looted or received as a quest reward and must be socketed into your gear before you can actually use it. Things get more complicated when you start getting gear with linked sockets, letting you equip support gems that augment how your main skill functions. You could cast fireball yourself, or you can socket it with a Spell Totem support gem and summon a stationary totem that fires off an endless stream of fireballs for you, saving you time and mana.

It's a great idea hindered by an unintuitive interface that makes managing and understanding skills troublesome. But the new system coming in Path of Exile 2 fixes most of these problems while adding even more ways to tinker and build ridiculously powerful monster slayers.

With the new system, armor no longer has randomized sockets on it so that players don't have to swap skill gems every single time they equip a new piece of gear. Now, each armor type has a set capacity for skill gem, with the skill gems themselves having sockets for support gems. This is all managed in a new inventory menu that makes it much easier to understand how skill and support gems interact.

The other exciting feature of this new system is that it's now possible to have more six-linked skill gems. It's hard to explain why this is awesome without diving into a 40-minute lecture on Path of Exile theorycrafting, but the current maximum amount of linked sockets is six, which is extremely rare but creates an astronomically powerful skill. The current system is limited, though, because only a player's chest armor and two-handed weapons are capable of having six sockets. With the new system, any skill gem can have six sockets. Players will now have way more options available to them—if they're lucky enough.

From my short time playing through its first act, it's clear that Path of Exile 2 is a major improvement over an already great game. The new graphics and more demanding combat is a lot of fun, but the reworked skill system goes a long way in sanding down those few remaining jagged edges. And because this isn't a separate sequel, the original campaign will get access to the same core improvements—everything except the better designed bosses and enemies, that is.

This weekend Path of Exile developer Grinding Gear Games surprised fans with the announcement of Path of Exile 2. Revealed during the opening ceremony of its first-ever ExileCon fan convention in New Zealand, Path of Exile 2 deceivingly isn't a standalone sequel, but rather a second campaign and a major overhaul that will be incorporated into the base game. With a vastly improved graphics engine, animations, and deep reworks of core systems, Path of Exile 2 is an exciting step forward for the small New Zealand studio.

The elephant in the room, however, is Diablo 4. Announced just two weeks prior at BlizzCon 2019, Blizzard Entertainment's legendary action RPG is back in all its satanic, profane glory. And with an increased emphasis on MMO-esque features, Diablo 4 looks and sounds an awful lot like Path of Exile. But Grinding Gear Games co-founder Chris Wilson isn't worried.

"One thing with Path of Exile 2 versus Diablo 4 is they're making a new product and they're going to try some new things," Wilson explains. "They're going to get some things right and some things wrong. [Diablo 4] may be amazing or it might be bad. We don't know. And [Blizzard] won't know until people play it—until the die is cast—and they've released something."

As Wilson explains, Diablo 4's situation is very different to Path of Exile, which already knows what its audience wants and how it can improve. "I know Path of Exile is good," he says. "I'm not planning to screw around with anything that makes it good. I know the new campaign has better quality and more fun than the old campaign. I know the new skill system lets you do everything with the old one while removing some frustrations and adding some new stuff. So I want to only make it better in a safe way. If we have a crazy change like a new idea for the skill tree that might just be dangerous. We probably won't do it."

But Wilson also recognizes that despite Path of Exile's popularity, the studio can't stand toe to toe with Blizzard. "Look, Path of Exile is successful and is making good money, but it's not making Blizzard money at all," Wilson says. "The first week of Diablo 3 sales probably made more money than our company will ever make, I suspect. A lot of people have a lot of fun with Diablo 3 regardless of what the hardcore fans and Path of Exile fans happen to think of it."

That disparity in the cultural influence of Diablo is something that Path of Exile can benefit from, Wilson says. "[Diablo 4 is] a retail game from what they've indicated, and we're a free game. They're also going to be spending a lot of money marketing their game, which is great and will be good for the genre. And that means that when people have enjoyed playing [Diablo 4], they can also enjoy playing us because it costs them nothing to get into it. And people will certainly be talking about both games."

There's even potential for a healthy kind of balance for players that want to play both Diablo 4 and Path of Exile, Wilson suggests. Because Path of Exile is structured around temporary Challenge Leagues that remix the core game every few months, there's a kind of natural tide of players jumping in during the start of a league and waning over time. "Path of Exile is kind of designed around playing heavily at the start of the league, and then gradually going to play other games," Wilson says. "We're not in communication with Blizzard about their season start times, but if both companies were smart, they would stagger it so the season start times work well for both groups of players."

"Every Path of Exile player is probably going to buy Diablo 4 and enjoy it. I strongly believe that and that's amazing. It's going to be good for the genre. And, likewise, I would like a lot of Diablo 4 players to try Path of Exile. If both games are good, I think it's a win for everyone."

Path of Exile's developers just announced an expansion so big that it's practically a sequel (even though it's still one game). But long before Path of Exile 2 arrives in 2021, the game will continue pumping out new updates and temporary leagues for players to challenge, two of which are coming next month.

Path of Exile's 3.9 update is called Conquerors of the Atlas and, among many smaller changes, features an entirely reworked endgame. Currently, once players beat Path of Exile's campaign they set out to explore the Atlas of Worlds, a map of randomized alternate dimensions that go from mildly challenging to batshit insane. Once the new Conquerors of the Atlas expansion releases next month, the Atlas of Worlds will be significantly changed to present an even stiffer challenge.

Path of Exile's endgame is enormously complicated and hard to explain, but the gist is that after defeating the original villains of the Atlas, the players themselves have become corrupted and now need to be put down. To be clear, the character you will be playing isn't the boss, but Conqueror's of the Atlas adds five new endgame bosses that are based off the main character classes you choose.

Like any Path of Exile update, there's going to be dozens of new changes and new items. One of the biggest is a complete rework of bows, including new skills and buffed damage. Bows will now be more viable as a weapon type, and abilities like Ensnaring Arrow, which prevents enemies from moving, will give bow users more options in a fight.

This new update will also introduce an optional new league called Metamorphosis. For the uninitiated, these temporary leagues force players to start new characters but offer fun new systems that remix the core gameplay in interesting ways. In this case, Metamorphosis introduces a new character named Tane Octavius who will periodically join you while you play.

Tane will take DNA samples from monsters you kill, and once you have enough you can call on Tane to combine them to create your own boss battle. Each DNA sample Tane collects will have different properties that will change what abilities this new boss has, with more powerful samples increasing your chances of getting more powerful rewards—assuming you can defeat your creation that is.

Both the Conquerors of the Atlas update and the Metamorphosis league launch on December 13 on PC.

Path of Exile 2 was announced today at ExileCon, the big show that's taking place at this very moment in Auckland, New Zealand. Despite the title, it's not actually a separate new game, but rather an expansion that also completely overhauls the base game in the process.

Path of Exile 2 will add a new seven-act story that takes place 20 years after the end of the current game. It will overhaul many of the game's core systems and rework the mechanics of each of the game's seven character classes. It's also getting a major visual rework with physics-based rendering. For example, arrows will bounce off of some surfaces and stick into others depending on what they're made of.

Path of Exile 2 characters will use the same "class archetypes" as those of the original game, but you'll have to create a new one in order to play the new story. PoE2 characters can select from 19 new Ascendancy Classes that differ from the old ones, which will still be available in the original Path of Exile campaign. Fortunately, all your cosmetics will carry over, as it all exists within a single ecosystem.

Path of Exile 2 is still a long way off: Grinding Gear Games said it won't likely even begin beta testing until very late in 2020. For the more immediate future, Path of Exile expansions will continue to release on their regular three-month schedule, with content that will be available in both Path of Exile 1 and 2 campaigns.

Our man Steven is on the scene in New Zealand and will have a far more in-depth report on what's coming soon. In the meantime, you can find out more at pathofexile.com, and check out the vastly improved Path of Exile 2 engine in action in the 14-minute gameplay video below.

The latest of Path of Exile's free league updates is called Blight, and it adds tower defense to the action-RPG—a bit like the minigame in The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. Tendrils of the fungal Blight lay down paths for enemies to follow, and you'll have to plant towers that fire off elemental effects to exploit their weaknesses. Of course while that's happening you still click on everything until it dies as per usual for the genre.

There's new loot as well, including oils that can be combined by the NPC responsible for those towers, Sister Cassia, and applied to items. There's also an extra skill bar now, as well as various class tweaks and other changes.

Blight's out now, and the Path of Exile website has a whole section devoted to explaining its finer details.

Loot-hoarding action RPGs and tower defense are two mouse-destroying compulsions that sound perfect together—despite how few games have tried. But on September 6, Path of Exile is doing just that with Blight, the next quarterly 'league' expansion for Path Of Exile, Grinding Gear Games' popular free-to-play dungeon crawl. Like all previous leagues, Blight is a free update bringing new systems to wrestle with, loot to hoard, and a weird hybrid tower defense mode—if you're willing to start a fresh character, that is.

In the upcoming Blight league, players will find a small tower defense mission in every zone. The latest plague to hit the cursed continent of Wraeclast is a fungal infection, and the only cure (according to new NPC Sister Cassia) is to attach a big siphon to the fungal cysts to squeeze out their mushroom oils. Yum. This process doesn't take long—just a minute or two per bloom—but waves of monsters will rush along sprawling fungal tendrils to stop you.

Talking to Grinding Gear head Chris Wilson, he explained that this is still Path Of Exile first and tower defense second. You'll still run around like a mad thing, hacking up monsters as quickly as possible. But there's just too many fronts to handle yourself, so you get to place a variety of damage-dealing and ailment-inducing towers along the tendril-paths the monsters travel along. The goal is to stall and weaken them using towers so that you can dash in to finish them off. As Blight encounters get more complex, you'll have to deal with more tendrils at once.

Why do all this? Loot and experience, naturally. Every tendril that you successfully defend against spawns a treasure chest at the end of the encounter, and the fungal extractor spits out a variety of special oils that Sister Cassia can use to anoint your jewelry. Two oils on a ring provides buffs to your tower defending abilities (a purely additive upgrade), and combinations of three oils anoints an amulet with a "notable" passive skill from the maze-like passive grid—even ones your character wouldn't otherwise be able to access.

On top of the usual range of new gear, the maddest loot-hoarders can hunt for a full set of unique Blight gear which can be anointed with extra skills similar to amulets. The potential for oddball character builds using cherry-picked perks from all over the skill tree is high, if you can harvest and blend the right oils. The Blight league extends all the way into the Atlas Of Worlds endgame, with some endgame Blights fully overgrown with monster-spawning tendrils, making them rich sources of loot.

While most PoE leagues put the previous update out to pasture, Blight is making the current league (Legion) a regular fixture. Players can beat up armies from Wraeclast's bloody past in Incursions and Delves, with plans to expand Legion's integration into the endgame some time after patch 3.8.0. Here are more details on what's happening to the Legion content and Grinding Gear's future plans.

Grinding Gear is also bringing the best bits of the divisive Synthesis league (I liked it, but it was practically a game unto itself) back as endgame maps. The complicated player-built dungeons may not be returning, but the gilded Synthesis enemies and boss fights will sometimes appear as random encounters, along with some of the unique Synthesis items as loot.

Of course, this wouldn't be a PoE update without them making some tweaks to what's already there. Summoners are feeling the love this time, with a trio of new support gems allowing you to give Attack, Defend or Focus orders to your swarm of zom-buddies and skellington pals. They've also rebalanced the Necromancer ascendancy class, letting players specialise in a wider range of minion types, along with a whole new minion. The Carrion Golem, for example, provides buffs to other undead friends, and is buffed in turn.

They're also returning to Poison Assassin characters, previously nerfed, with five new skills to pick from, a new support gem, and some tweaks to return them to their glory days. Mine Saboteurs have been given a rework too, right down to how mines work. Now thrown faster and further, mines can activate each other, and the longer a chain of explosions, the more powerful it becomes. There's some new types of mines to play with as well, if you just want to cover the battlefield with explosives.

Lastly, Grinding Gear is making a few tweaks to how the endgame's optional daily side-missions (Delves, Incursions and other previous leagues) work. Instead of having to do them as they're assigned, you can now save them up to complete when you feel like it. Definitely a change for the better—Delves in particular are far more fun when you're binging on them.

The Blight update lands on September 6 and is free.

This article was originally published in PC Gamer UK issue 331. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US.  

When Chris Wilson was called a noob in his own game, Path of Exile, he knew it was going places.

Before the Grinding Gear Games co-founder had gone to bed, on the first night of Path of Exile's closed alpha test, he was running the highest level character in the game. When he woke up, he had the privilege of being insulted by the player who deposed him.

"The thing we were worried about with our closed alpha was whether or not people would actually keep playing overnight,” Wilson recalls. “This was basically us inviting our friends and family to play, and they’d play for a few hours to humour us. But if this person was willing to call in sick the next day and not go to work because he could be the number one player in the world in this upcoming action-RPG, which was his goal, then we had something.” 

Back then Path of Exile fizzled out in the prison sequence of Act One. Now, several years of free expansions later, it’s one of the best value PC games around. That initial player vigil turned out to be the first act of worship for a fanbase that now plays the action-RPG in the hundreds of thousands. But Wilson and his team almost didn’t make it. Success nearly killed Path of Exile. 

Like the exiles arriving in Wraeclast, Grinding Gear Games had to bring about order where there was none. The handful of established studios that existed in New Zealand at the time were not in contact with the five friends working out of Wilson’s garage. Potential hires would arrive in suits, and be walked past the embarrassed team’s laundry for their interviews. There was a budget, but it was tighter than the tighty-whities. 

“Our goal was to be smart,” Wilson says. “We wanted from the beginning to write code that could do the work, rather than put people on it. We planned, for every asset we made, to use it five different ways. We made sure that we leaned heavily on random item generation and monster properties. We wanted to write our networking code once and get it right.” 

Frugality shaped the initial version of Path of Exile. Meanwhile, in California, another team was working on a rival action-RPG with a far larger budget. “I met one of my two co-founders playing Diablo II online,” Wilson says. “There had been no Diablo game for six years at that stage, no sign of anything on the horizon.” 

Hardcore action-RPG

When Diablo III was announced, it was a cause for alarm—but Wilson and his team found solace in humongous shoulder pads. That World of Warcraft-like touch to Blizzard’s barbarian class reassured Grinding Gear that its chief rival was taking the genre-dominating series in a more accessible direction. In doing so, Blizzard had unknowingly left space for a gothic, hardcore action-RPG from New Zealand. It was the first potentially fatal blow Path of Exile had dodged. 

“If they had made Diablo III as a very direct Diablo II sequel, I suspect the timeline would have gone quite differently,” Wilson says. “But thankfully, that differentiation meant that we had a slice of the market that we could explore and double down on.” 

In the years since, Diablo III has not only survived a disastrous launch but recovered the series’ reputation. Yet Grinding Gear has discovered that life isn’t so bad in the shade cast by its looming genre mate. 

“The effect we noticed was basically that every time we were mentioned in the media alongside Diablo III, it had a large positive impact on us,” Wilson says. “We’ve realised that in a genre like this where there’s a heavyweight able to get a lot of marketing for its own games, it’s a rising tide that lifts all ships. And if Blizzard eventually announces another product in that franchise it will probably be good for all action-RPGs, because it will bring attention back onto the genre.” 

Grinding Gear made Path of Exile public for a weekend during Diablo III’s launch to drum up interest—and in early 2013, they began open beta. After running the game with a few thousand paying players, the studio didn’t know how many would show up on the shores of Wraeclast now the game was free-to-play. “This was the scary point,” Wilson says. “We knew it could be a lot more—potentially tens of thousands.” 

In the event, nearly 80,000 testers played concurrently. It was the outcome the studio had hoped for, and it was horrendous. Support tickets flooded in as server problems emerged, fielded by just 20 developers at the time. 

“It turned to hard mode immediately,” Wilson says. “Because now we’re expected to run a full-on games-as-a-service thing. Nowadays, we have dozens of people that handle all that stuff to make it seamless. But it’s tricky to decide to expand before you need it, because that feels like wasting money at the time.” 

Staffing up wasn’t a simple process. With a lack of experienced developers in the local area to pull from, Grinding Gear would have to make time to train new hires—time it no longer had. “There were a lot of sleepless nights and learning the hard way,” Wilson says, “as you do when the servers just keep crashing.”

Real-time strategising

The exhaustion is still audible in Wilson’s voice when he talks about that period in Path of Exile’s history. His life felt a little like an RTS—how could he spend his limited resources in order to save Grinding Gear HQ from being overwhelmed? If the team didn’t develop the game fast enough, the players would leave. If it crashed too often, the players would leave. If support couldn’t reply to customer tickets fast enough, or there was a community disaster the team didn’t address, the players would leave.

“Trying to tackle all the problems at once, with constrained resources, and also still sleep when there’s an eight hour period where we’re not able to solve those problems? It’s an interesting physiological challenge,” Wilson says. 

Eventually Grinding Gear’s enemy had a name: desync. When the studio had built Path of Exile, it had plumped for a predictive networking model. Every time you attacked an enemy or moved an item, the game checked in with the server to make sure you weren’t cheating. And in the meantime, your PC assumed the check had worked—allowing you to hack and slash as if you were enjoying a single-player game, with no lag. This step was particularly important in the early years of the game, when servers were further behind than Grinding Gear would have liked, leading to slower checks. 

The problem arose when your PC drifted out of sync with reality as the server saw it—leaving you unable to trust what you were seeing on your monitor. Advanced players in particular were constantly out of sync in ways that endangered their characters as they zipped back and forth across the screen. 

For a long time, if you saw a positive comment about Path of Exile, it was often accompanied by a reply in which someone would bring up desync. “It became the thing where, if there was a good Reddit thread about Path of Exile, half the users were loving it and the other half were saying, ‘I quit because of desync’,” Wilson says. “It was a game-killing problem from that point of view.” Even as the game grew in size and strength, the team worried that one day, the albatross around their necks would sink them. 

“That problem plagued us for years,” Wilson says. “The way to solve it involved a lot of math, months of work, and a whole team. Thankfully it’s a thing of the past—I haven’t seen a player mention the word in more than a year.” 

Grinding Gear finally banished desync with the release of Path of Exile 2.0.0 in 2015. Now Wilson worries about how often he sees players complain about clunky combat animations. “It’s true that we have a complete redo of all that stuff coming, but again, it’s a long-term project slated for next year,” he says. While running a live game, there’s no plateau the studio can climb to that truly allows them rest. The grind never ends. 

That fact is reflected in the rigorous update cadence the studio has devised for the game. “Prior to 2015, and this isn’t something I’ve talked about a lot publicly, but our releases were not growing the overall community,” Wilson says. “We released the game and each of the expansions we released did OK, and sometimes went up and sometimes went down. The money was great, and it was awesome to have made a successful game. But at the same time, it wasn’t growing.” 

Grinding Gear’s angel investors, who had helped fund the game, weren’t applying any pressure. And so it became a question for the studio itself to answer—did they want to try and be the next League of Legends, and how would they achieve that if they did? 

If you’ve logged into Steam anytime in the last three years, you’ll know that not only did Grinding Gear decide to take over the world, but that it’s succeeding. Since the team adopted a rigid 13-week schedule, they’ve seen a 20 per cent increase in players with the release of each league—Path of Exile’s take on Diablo’s seasons. It’s a reversal of the industry standard, in defiance of the trajectory that even the likes of World of Warcraft has suffered. 

“Path of Exile’s been out for about six years and we’re still seeing new records,” Wilson says. “Our highest month was December. We’re expecting to see more records broken in the next couple of years, especially with the massive 4.0.0 coming out next year.” 

The swift turnover on expansions has helped, paradoxically, with keeping hold of the staff the studio so desperately needs—Grinding Gear is still something of an island as a PC game developer in New Zealand. 

“We want people to be constantly working on varied stuff,” Wilson says. “We make sure they have mobility within the company, and that every moment of overtime that’s asked for is both paid at a higher rate, and also seen as a management failure so that we can make sure to minimise that as much as possible.”

Players' health

Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that an action-RPG developer can see the benefits of a commitment to staff welfare, eyeing the long-term reward beyond the immediate grind of the next expansion milestone. It’s heartening to learn that several of Grinding Gear’s staff have been around for more than a decade, and that all of its founders are still with the company. “People are seeing it as a lifelong commitment,” Wilson says. 

What is surprising—in that I’ve never heard a game developer ever mention the concept before—is that the studio is starting to consider the long-term impact of the game on their players’ lives as well. 

“Some of our players put in a lot of hours each day—eight, ten, 12 hours,” Wilson says. “And that often comes at the expense of their real-world progress, right? Because of this, they’re potentially even unhappy about their achievements in the real world. So it’s very important that they can feel incredibly good about the fact they’ve achieved so much cool stuff within our game.” 

It’s for that reason you don’t see as much power inflation in Path of Exile as in some comparable MMOs—where you might find a beginner weapon in a new expansion that makes the one you spent hundreds of hours raiding for look a bit silly.

“People talk about how it feels satisfying to shatter a whole screen of enemies at once,” Wilson says. “But a lot of our core designers want the real satisfaction, deep down, to be that you found something awesome that you can then go home and load up on your screen and look at. You’re able to trade it to someone else if you want to, but you don’t want to because it’s yours, but you could give it to them, but you’re not going to. Path of Exile players are heavily, heavily encouraged to care very deeply about the things they’ve accomplished on the game.” 

It’s a tribute to Path of Exile’s uniquely enduring success that its studio is having to worry about where its players aren’t grinding elsewhere in their lives—and testament to Grinding Gear that the studio takes the problem seriously. It didn’t have to. But in Wraeclast, the only justice is the one exiles make for themselves.

Path of Exile's Legion update is here, and it has some of the longest patch notes I've ever seen. The two most important changes are, firstly, that it adds a new Legion Challenge League in which you'll visit battlefields frozen in time, smash enemies to wake them up and collect a mountain of loot. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it includes the action-RPG's long-awaited melee overhaul, which should make whacking enemies in the face a lot more satisfying.

When you attack, you can now hit multiple targets by default—previously, the game would automatically choose a single target for you. You can now interrupt skill animations with movement or a movement skills, too. As long as you haven't dealt any damage with the skill you can instantly launch straight into a different one.

Your accuracy is no longer capped at 95%, which means enemies will be unable to avoid certain attacks. Enemies with shields can block attacks, but they'll just prevent a portion of the incoming damage, rather than all of it.

Animations should now be more fluid: a dual-wielder will "alternate attacks in a way that feels much more natural", making your off-hand weapon choice more important. 

The way enemies attack has changed, too: instead of just locking onto you, they'll deal damage in a 120-degree arc in front of them, which means you can sidestep out of the way if you're fast enough. Enemies now have a slower attack windup, making it easier to respond with an appropriate movement or skill before you get hit.

For the Legion Challenge League, players will find monoliths in the world that they can activate to unfreeze ancient battlefields and defeat the newly-active soldiers. You'll earn "great rewards" from these soldiers, and you might even get a splinter, which you can combine into Emblems. Placing two or more Emblems in a map device will take you to the Domain of Timeless Conflict, where you'll battle some of the armies you've already faced, as well as new, powerful generals. 

The update also adds a long list of skill gems, jewels and items, including Incubators, which will only reveal their contents when you've slain a certain number of monsters. If you're interested, check out the full patch notes here. You can click on the headings in the contents to read specific sections.