We're now in the fourth week of the Metamorph league! Most of our devs are back from their holidays, well-rested and ready for another busy year of development. This week we're planning to deploy a big 3.9.2 patch. Its patch notes will likely be released tomorrow. In the meantime, we have prepared a small list of additional issues which have been resolved and will be fixed live in a hotfix very soon (before the main patch).

• Specific Atlas Regions can end up in an incorrect state after migrating from SSF.
  
• Releasing Legion Generals during Legion encounters can cause a client crash.
  
• Instance crash in Mao Kun unique map.
  
• Instance crashes when interacting with the Betrayal content.

We'll continue to monitor your feedback and develop patches with fixes and improvements. Thank you for your feedback!

The colourful Carnival microtransactions from our previous Mystery Box are now available for purchase! It's also still possible to combine some of the individual Ringmaster and Harlequin pieces into the corresponding alternate colour version of these designs. Please note that the Jovial Ringmaster and Dismal Harlequin cosmetic effects are only available by combining the original sets and can't be purchased directly.

Watch the Carnival Mystery Box trailer below to see everything that's available or check them out in the store by pressing M in game.



In case you're looking for something more gloomy, we have also brought back the Gore Fireworks for a limited time until January 15th (NZT). The Gore Fireworks come in stacks of 10 and cost 15 points per stack. These are only available around the New Year holiday period and don't necessarily come every year!



Thank you for your support!

We're continuing to publish developer presentations from ExileCon with a very interesting talk about storytelling in Path of Exile, given by Matt Dymerski, one of our narrative designers. If you're interested in lore and our approach to storytelling in Path of Exile, this video is a must-watch for you. Enjoy!

It's already 2020 in New Zealand! We want to wish our community a Happy New Year and also to take a moment to look back on the year that has just concluded. As is tradition, today we're posting our annual retrospective.

In 2019:

• We launched four expansions: Synthesis, Legion, Blight and Conquerors of the Atlas (with the Metamorph challenge league).
  
• We hosted ExileCon, our very first Path of Exile convention with more than 1400 attendees from around the world, including special guests from Blizzard North, community streamers and content creators, and very real Eihnar Frey and Zana.
  
• We announced Path of Exile 2 and the Path of Exile Mobile project!
  
• We partnered with Kakao to launch Path of Exile in South Korea.
  
• We released Path of Exile on PlayStation 4.
  
• We set a record number of players online (224,000 on our server alone).
  
• There were 30% more hours played of Path of Exile on our international realm in 2019 than 2018.
  
• Around 8.7 million players played Path of Exile on our international realm this year.
  
• We expanded from 122 to 147 in-house staff members.
  
• We deployed more than 45 updates/patches to our realm.
  
• We posted 382 news articles - an average of 7.3 posts per week.
  
• We remastered the existing Path of Exile soundtrack and updated it with new music.
  
• We hit a new record in viewer numbers on Twitch.
  
• We introduced a new system that allows you to manage your Master missions.
  
• We praised amazing talents of our players by hosting four community competitions.
  
• We revamped spellcasters, melee combat, Necromancers and dozens of skills.
  
• We reworked the entire Atlas system.
  
• We updated the look of the Lioneye's Watch.

Thank you to everyone who has joined us in 2019, who has returned and who has been with us throughout the year. Thank you to all of you who has travelled all the way to New Zealand to attend ExileCon in November. Path of Exile wouldn't evolve that significantly without your generous support and continued feedback. We love you all! Here's to another big year in Wraeclast!

The holiday period continues, so we don't have any development news to share today (though we're keen to give you an update regarding our current work and to deploy a major patch as soon as possible!). It's also the end of a year and we're preparing a traditional summary of our annual achievements which we'll publish tomorrow. While you're getting ready to celebrate New Year's Eve, why not take a moment to remember 2019 in Path of Exile with us by watching the video below?


Thank you for being part of this amazing year with us! See you next year, Exiles!

We always enjoy showcasing the artwork of our team in a form of concept art. Today we've selected several images of the cosmetic effects introduced in our recent Polaris Mystery Box.







Click here to view more concept art.

As you know, this November we hosted ExileCon, our very first Path of Exile convention, where we announced Path of Exile 2, our recent Conquerors of the Atlas expansion and the experimental Mobile project. In addition, over the ExileCon weekend some of our developers gave various presentations where they shared their experience in different areas of game development. We'll be publishing these talks in our news in the upcoming weeks. Today we're starting with a presentation about world building for Path of Exile 2 from our art director and one of the GGG founders, Erik Olofsson. In this video Erik explains our approach to creating the atmosphere, areas, characters and items of Path of Exile 2, and then answers some questions from ExileCon attendees. Watch the video below:

On behalf of everyone at Grinding Gear Games, we'd like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and happy holidays! As is tradition, we've prepared a gift! To celebrate the conclusion of another great development year, we're offering everyone a free Polaris Mystery Box.

To redeem a free Polaris Mystery Box all you need to do is to open the in-game shop! The Mystery Box will be automatically added to your account. Please note that visiting the shop on the website does not trigger the free box - it must be accessed from inside the game client.

To receive a free Polaris Mystery Box, your account has to have been created prior to today. It's only possible to get one box per account.

The free mystery box will stop being available at 3am on January 8th (PST).

We hope you're having a great holiday!

It's Christmas day in New Zealand and we want to take a moment to wish Happy Holidays to the entire Path of Exile community! Whether you're already enjoying your vacation or still busy with finishing your last tasks at work, we hope you'll have a wonderful day.

Don't forget to come back tomorrow for your annual free Mystery Box!

Last week we released the new Polaris Mystery Box. Designed in a futuristic style, this Mystery Box instantly became one of the most popular ones we ever released! As an appreciation for your support, we're making the soundtrack of the Polaris Mystery Box available as a free download.

To download the Polaris Mystery Box soundtrack, click (or Right-click, “Save link as”) on the file type you prefer: .flac or .mp3.

Speaking of soundtrack: we've updated the Hideout Music Player with five themes of new Conquerors and Tane's Laboratory theme. You can find them under the 'Expansions' section.

If you enjoy music, created by our composer Kamil, check out his Soundcloud here or YouTube channel.