During our 3.13.0 Livestream reveal on January 7(PST), Twitch Drops will be enabled! Just link your Path of Exile account with your Twitch account, watch our livestream and you can earn your own Magma Wings!

Just simply link your Path of Exile account to Twitch (see below) and watch the 3.13.0 Livestream at http://twitch.tv/pathofexile, or any Path of Exile stream* this Thursday starting from 11PM (PST) and until the end of our official livestream (2PM (PST)). That's it!

You will get the Magma Wings with 30 minutes of accumulated watch time on any stream streaming Path of Exile during the event. This means that the drop is guaranteed for everyone who has watched any Path of Exile stream for this amount of time. This promotion is available for PC, Xbox One and PS4 accounts.

*If you're planning to stream Path of Exile during our livestream and want to enable Twitch Drops for your viewers, you can do it in your Twitch Creator Dashboard here.

Step 1) Log into Path of Exile website.
Step 2) Click here to check your Twitch Settings.
Step 3) Link your Twitch account or click 'update permissions' if you've linked your account previously.

Once your account is linked or your permissions have been updated, this page should say 'Your account is eligible to participate in Twitch Drops'.




See you at the livestream at http://www.twitch.tv/pathofexile in two days!

Later this week, we're announcing our 3.13.0 expansion during an exclusive livestream and you'll be able to play it yourself on January 15. Because we usually have more time between an expansion's announcement and launch, you may be wondering what the news period between these two dates looks like! We've got you covered.

[li]Jan 7 - 3.13.0 Announcement and new supporter packs. [/li][li]Jan 8 - Q&A summary and possibly an FAQ if needed.[/li][li]Jan 9 - Challenge rewards revealed.[/li][li]Jan 10 - All [redacted] revealed.[/li][li]Jan 11 - Heist League ends at 1pm.[/li][li]Jan 11 - 3.13 Private Leagues become available for pre-purchase.[/li][li]Jan 11 - All [redacted] revealed.[/li][li]Jan 11 - 3.13 Balance Manifesto.[/li][li]Jan 12 - Patch Notes, Item Filter and Passive Tree information.[/li][li]Jan 13 - All new and changed gems at level 20 with 20% quality.[/li][li]Jan 14 - Launch day information and possible torrent link for pre-download.[/li][li]Jan 15 - 3.13.0 Launch.[/li][li]Jan 16 - New Mystery Box Revealed.[/li]

We may also post teasers throughout this timeframe to reveal new items and more!

As you know, we're announcing our 3.13.0 expansion very soon! We've revealed that it features enhancements to Path of Exile's endgame, a new challenge league and new ways to build characters, through skills and balance changes. Before we reveal the expansion's contents live on Twitch and enter a new era of endgame for Path of Exile, we wanted to take a look back at past endgame expansions to see how the Atlas of Worlds has evolved over time.




Prior to our Atlas of Worlds expansion at the end of 2016, Path of Exile's endgame consisted of a pyramid-shaped progression of maps, disconnected from one another with no progression system that connected them and no pinnacle boss content aside from the highest tier maps. You were able to craft your maps to modify their properties but that was the extent of the control you had over the experience.

We wanted to design a system that would unify these maps through story and mechanics and also provide new ways for players to visualise their progress and have to have more control over their gameplay. Thus, the Atlas of Worlds was created, introducing dozens of new maps and 19 new bosses - including the guardians and Shaper which represented the hardest content in Path of Exile at the time.




2017 was an absolutely massive year for Path of Exile - perhaps the most formative to date. We released the Legacy Challenge League which was our send-off to Path of Exile as it used to be with the old difficulty level system, before launching The Fall of Oriath in August. This was an epic expansion that introduced acts 5-10 and transformed Path of Exile from a four-act campaign with three difficulties to ten acts with a single play-through of the storyline.

Later that year, we launched the War for the Atlas expansion which was also immense in its own right. It introduced the Elder, a new Atlas entity who was an enemy to both players and The Shaper, alongside 32 new maps. It also added the concept of Influenced Items, which draw from exclusive high-tier pools of modifiers.




Path of Exile: Betrayal launched at the end of 2018 and completely changed how master missions work - saying goodbye to Tora, Haku and the other original Forsaken Masters and introducing Einhar, Alva, Niko, Zana and Jun as the new roster of Masters.

While this expansion was focused more on master missions and their rewards, it did introduce one key element that is still a big factor in Atlas play today - Scarabs. These are map fragments that are placed into the map device alongside your maps to control what content spawns in those maps.




The Conquerors of the Atlas expansion launched at the end of 2019, shortly after our first ExileCon convention in New Zealand. It introduced five new bosses - the four Conquerors and Sirus, Awakener of Worlds. This expansion also fundamentally changed how the Atlas worked. Instead of starting from four outer points in the Atlas and working your way to the centre, players now started at the centre and worked their way out.

Conquerors of the Atlas also separated the Atlas into Regions and introduced the concept of Watchstones, items that can be placed into your Atlas in order to increase the level of maps that drop within that region. When you place enough Watchstones into your Atlas, it increases the level of the entire Atlas so that every map is between tiers 14 and 16.

On January 7th (PST), we'll be announcing our 3.13.0 expansion via an exclusive livestream on http://www.twitch.tv/pathofexile. While we can't reveal the details just yet, you can expect new endgame content and rewards, a new combat-focused in-area challenge league, balance changes, new items and more.

We will see you then!

We can't believe it, but we made it through 2020! Happy New Year, Exiles! As is tradition, we're taking a moment to look back on the year that has just concluded.

• We launched three expansions: Delirium, Harvest and Heist. Our fourth one was developed during 2020 but its release was pushed from December to January. We developed much of Harvest and Heist from home during the country-wide lockdown.
  
• We've been continuing to work on Path of Exile 2 and Path of Exile Mobile. There will be lots more news on these projects in 2021.
  
• Despite our borders being closed due to COVID, we expanded from 147 to 149 in-house staff members.
  
• We deployed more than 90 updates/patches to our realm.
  
• We posted 347 news articles - an average of 6.7 posts per week.
  
• We set a record number of players online (237,160 on our server alone).
  
• Around 7.5 million different players played Path of Exile on our international realm.
  
• There were 17% more hours played of Path of Exile on our international realm in 2020 than 2019.
  
• Path of Exile won the 2020 BAFTA Award for Evolving Game.
  
• We released our Vulkan renderer.
  
• We released Path of Exile in the Epic Games Store, and a Beta of the macOS version.
  
• We improved the Steam patching process alongside the general patching process.
  
• We introduced Stash Folders and the Stash Tab Affinities system.
  
• We ran three official events, including Mayhem, Endless Delve and Flashback (which is still running and will end in a few days).
  
• We finally got around to requesting our Silver Play Button from YouTube!

Thank you for being part of this unusual year with us. We could not do this without you! We are very excited for the year ahead and most imminently - our 3.13.0 expansion which will be announced at the end of next week. Be sure to tune into the livestream at www.twitch.tv/pathofexile at 8am NZ time on January 7th. See you there, Exiles!

On January 7 at 11am (PST), we will announce Path of Exile's 3.13.0 expansion which includes new end-game content, a new challenge league, new skills, items and more. Alongside our regular announcement page, we'll be revealing in-depth details of this expansion via an exclusive livestream at http://www.twitch.tv/pathofexile. This post contains all the information you need to know before it starts.

Before we jump in, make sure you check out the teaser video for 3.13.0!



The livestream will start on January 7 at 11am PST. We'll showcase the official expansion trailer followed by a deep dive into the expansion's new content and features.

On the livestream, we will reveal almost everything* the expansion has to offer in quite a lot of depth. For example, for new gems, we'll show each one in action alongside its tooltip with an explanation of its mechanics.

*For the sake of brevity, we won't discuss every single balance change, but you'll certainly get a good idea of the direction of the changes. The patch notes the following week will contain the full details.

Players have often asked for a look at the type of material that we cover on expansion press tours with journalists, so we're quite interested to see what you think of us presenting the new expansion to you directly in this way.

Following the deep dive, Ziggy will join Chris Wilson for a Q&A with questions from the chat.

Tune in at http://www.twitch.tv/pathofexile to watch the reveal live. We'll also post standalone videos on YouTube. Our announcement page will unlock once information has been revealed in the livestream. Streamers are also welcome to restream the livestream and enjoy it alongside their viewers

Yes, Twitch Drops will be enabled for any channel streaming in the Path of Exile category during the duration of the livestream. We'll reveal more details about how that will work and which rewards will be up for grabs.

Yes, we'll have our regular announcement page that showcases everything revealed, links to journalist coverage, and videos up on YouTube alongside the livestream.

The livestream will be presented in English. The individual videos will have translated subtitles on YouTube and much of the English text in the video content will be translated. These will go live at around the same time as the subjects are presented in the livestream so you shouldn't have to wait too much longer to get access to this information.

The live Q&A portion likely won't have subtitles once it's on YouTube but we'll create a news post within a few days that includes a written summary of the information discussed.

As usual, we'll also have a fully-translated announcement page in Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, Thai and Korean.

We can't wait to share with you what we've been working so hard on.

With our announcement of the 3.13.0 endgame expansion on the horizon, today we thought we'd take a look at past endgame expansions, and give you a narrative developer's reflections on the lore of each Atlas-focused expansion. This post is written from the point of view of Nick, our senior Narrative Designer.

The first true endgame overhaul since the introduction of Maps during Path of Exile's beta, Atlas of Worlds was intended to provide a visible framework and very high-level goal for player's to pursue. Atlas of Worlds introduced the Shaper as an adversary, and turned the Forsaken Master Zana into your ally and guide for this storyline.

This expansion was relatively light on narrative and contained the 'twist' that the Shaper was Zana's father all along. It introduced the "Shaper Quotes" read out by the Shaper himself as you entered new maps for the first time. It was a reasonable foundation for a story, but with only 7 little memory fragments and a few little updates from Zana, it did not contain much other than the core mapping experience to keep players moving forward. The Shaper was also strictly endgame content, with only occasional appearances on the way to the final encounter.

One thing I liked a lot about Atlas of Worlds was the 'random' nature of finding the memory fragments. They felt a little more special as something you stumbled across than as something presented at the end of a boss encounter.

This took the successful parts of the Atlas of Worlds and built on them, introducing the Elder as a new foe, and positioned the Elder and the Shaper as opposing forces. War for the Atlas changed the Shaper's origin somewhat, and revealed his relationship to Zana much earlier, giving the player (and Zana!) a larger emotional handle to grab hold of.

The Elder and the Shaper each had their own 'influence' on the Atlas, which allowed them to be much more present than in the Atlas of Worlds. We took careful steps to introduce the Shaper in increments, positioning him as an entity to be wary of, then introduced the Elder as something even the Shaper is afraid of.

Slightly counterintuitively, you were able to fight and defeat the Elder much earlier than the Shaper, though you were unable to seal the Elder away until you'd completed Zana's storyline and reached very high tier maps.

Of our three major endgame expansions, I would argue this was the most narratively complete, but it had the advantage of using the Atlas of Worlds as its foundation, letting the players wrap their heads around the Shaper for a good long while before the Elder was introduced. It had 15 different memory fragments to find and more Zana guidance. We also later introduced the 'Uber Elder' fight, in which the player witnesses the Elder defeating the Shaper and whisking him into his own realm.

Our most recent Atlas expansion at the end of 2019, accepted the sealing of the Elder and the defeat of the Shaper as canon, but was handled by a different group of Exiles than yourself. The Elderslayers were hired by Zana to do exactly what players had done in the War for the Atlas, but in the Conquerors of the Atlas, the player instead witnessed the effects of long-term exposure to the Atlas (and the Elder in particular) on these Exiles.

Conquerors introduced the NPC Kirac, as well as 5 characters to pursue through the Atlas incrementally -- Baran, Veritania, Drox, Al-Hezmin and Sirus. Each had a series of story glyphs to help fill in their back-stories and motivations, but due to the lengthy structure of mapping to reach Sirus, as well as some time constraints, Sirus seemed to more or less come out of nowhere.

I quite like the themes explored in Conquerors, but it lacks the clarity of the War for the Atlas, and having the story glyphs appear in such a systematic way feels a little too sterile to me (and they are easy to miss!). The Conquerors as foes are also more mundane than the Elder and Shaper, which makes their presence feel less threatening, even despite their more regular appearances and dangerous effects on the map.

With the above in mind, in 3.13.0 we're looking to achieve a few goals:

We want to reintroduce some of the ominousness that came with the eldritch feel of the Shaper and Elder. We also want to inject more story into regular mapping with an element of unpredictability.

We also want to address some of the omissions and gaps in the Conquerors of the Atlas storyline, and build upon what was already there. Although it's important to note that the new storyline exists in addition to and parallel to the existing Atlas content.

Finally, we want to provide narrative hooks for the future. This means some questions will remain unanswered for a little while, but if you're a fan of speculating, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Make sure you check out the announcement at 11am January 7th (PST) at http://www.twitch.tv/pathofexile

This post is written by Nick, our senior Narrative Designer.

A few days before every major release, there's Patch Notes Day. For the uninitiated, Patch Notes Day is approximately as exciting as Christmas and your birthday combined, if you knew all you were getting was a list of data (but you were, like, really into data). The patch notes are a culmination of the previous months of work across GGG's many employees, distilled into a few hundred sentences, belying the amount of labour and love that has gone into each update. But even the patch notes themselves have to be made by someone.

That someone is me, and the work that goes into each major patch's patch notes is substantial. Today I'm going to take you through the process from start to finish, to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the process involved here.

Contrary to popular belief, patch notes are not automatically generated. Nor is it really feasible to have people working on a program write their own patch notes. Instead, everyone works as normal, creating monster models or tweaking skill balance or cutting exalt drop rates in half, and as they 'commit' their work to our version control system (adding it to the huge collection of game files) they ideally write a little note explaining what they've done. Every single thing someone does while working on Path of Exile is submitted to the big repository of files alongside such a note, and can be viewed in our version control software.

Before I can start writing the patch notes, I have to go through all of these commits and pull out the relevant ones -- things that noticeably change existing content or add new features that the players will want to know about. We have four main repositories, and in a typical quarterly PoE update there are approximately twenty thousand commits between them (at least). I take the relevant commit notes and start listing them in a document in their raw form. It can take a few days just to go through all those commits. Once I'm done, I have a stiff drink and grit my teeth for the next step.

The people who work at GGG are very smart and skilled and I like them a lot. They are absolutely god-awful at writing commit notes, however. I don't blame them -- typically they don't need to think about the commit notes. A lot of people's work does not get patch-noted simply due to the nature of what they're working on (such as a new microtransaction, or incremental performance, graphical, or audio improvements). So 98% of the time, it doesn't matter that their commit notes are nonsense. But it's my job to make sure that their nonsense is either not relevant, or becomes non-nonsense. Sense.

We have a system for tracking all the work that needs to be done, and commits are usually linked to that system. So I look at the commits I've pulled out, find the 'issue' (the master work-tracker for that piece of work) and go through all the commits and comments on that thread to figure out what the heck a commit note like "Tweaked the damage" actually means.

Often it'll be for something the players haven't seen yet, so it goes into the irrelevant category. Sometimes it's for something important, like an existing player skill or boss fight, and I'll have to figure out what changed and how, and write that as a patch note.

Note that not everyone is terrible at writing commit notes, and the game designers have gotten a lot better since I started threatening to karate-chop their necks due to lack of detail. Luckily, they don't realise I am extremely feeble and my hands are marshmallow-soft. Thanks guys!

Sometimes, however, the content of the commit is no clearer even with the information in the issue. This particularly happens for pernicious bugs. For that, I have to actually talk to the person who worked on it and get them to explain what they were fixing or changing.

This whole step takes a long while, and is often happening in tandem with the other steps below. I also get bored easily, so this is the step where I will write silly jokes into patch notes to keep myself amused. It doesn't work.

Even the best commit notes rarely contain the specifics players want to know about. So every patch I figure out which skills, items, mods and whatever else has changed and go through them one-by-one in-game to jot down the starting and new values. This is the step I dread the most, particularly because it is very easy to miss something like a mana cost change at gem level 1, and also because balance changes are frequently ongoing, so anything I note down may change the next day.

This is not helped by the fact that what many things are called in-game are not what they're called in our game files, and sometimes there are things in our game files that have the name of other things in-game. For example, if I try to spawn the Vulnerability curse gem, I will get the Despair curse gem. So, often I have to solve a little puzzle before I can unlock the "reward" of Balance Information.

By the time we publish our patch notes, they're typically somewhere between 7000 and 14000 words long, and almost certainly riddled with typos, errors and out-of-date information. Thankfully, we have a QA team who have had to manually check all these changes, and a team of translators who have to read all these patch notes for the sake of translation anyway.

Typically a few lovely people from QA will make their way through, looking for obvious errors and omissions, and leave notes for me to correct. Meanwhile, our wonderful translators are carefully going through each note and turning it into something their audience can read. Did you know our patch notes are translated into eight different languages? Our translators are also exceptionally good at checking names, spacing, capitalisation and whatever else of our myriad game terms, and leave plenty of notes for me to go through and fix up.

Before we can publish out patch notes, they need to be formatted. On Patch Note Day, our Community Manager Natalia spends a few hours doing this, because she's a masochist. The end result is really nice, though, so, thanks Natalia! Also, Web Developer Rieko recently made a tool to help with formatting, as well as posting massive lists of data like mod changes. Thanks Rieko!

Meanwhile, Community Director Bex ("Director", so fancy!) spends the day posting teasers, memes and generally trying to keep the community appeased, like a monkey dancing for scraps in a bazaar, except the scraps are upvotes (Bex is still a monkey).

Once all the formatting is done, we try to publish all the languages simultaneously and sit back and relax.

Just kidding!

Because of the sheer volume of changes in each patch (and definitely not because of any amount of ineptitude on my part), we usually miss a few things, and players (and other developers!) are more than happy to tell us. So, often the rest of Patch Note Day is spent receiving messages from people who tell me all the things I've missed, and then me telling Natalia all the things she needs to update.

Writing patch notes, like breaking a bone, or eating too much mexican food, is traumatic. Not long after each major patch's notes are published, I forget how terrible the last few weeks of combing through commits was, and continue to work on other things, blissfully ignorant of the next looming Patch Notes Day on the horizon.

From start to finish, the major patch notes for each expansion takes something around 80 hours to collate, write and publish, not including the other people involved. I've been doing them since patch 3.0.0, which means I have spent half a working year just doing patch notes.

So there you have it. Now you know what goes into the patch notes. Now, you too, are cursed.

I know there is one burning question that remains unanswered: PATCHNOTESWHEN?

January 12 PST. That is patchnoteswhen.

The Heist Flashback Event is in full swing! The event ends in a week, at 10am on January 4th PST, so you have a whole week left to enjoy it. For this news post we've selected more Flashback highlights captured by our community (click here to check out the selection of highlights we published last week).

Watch the highlights here

On behalf of everyone at Grinding Gear Games, we'd like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and happy holidays! In the festive spirit, we're offering everyone a free Twilight Mystery Box!

To redeem a free Twilight 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 Twilight Mystery Box, your account has to have been created prior to today. It's only possible to get one box per account. The offer is available for PC, PS4 and Xbox One!

The free mystery box will stop being available at 3am on January 8th (PST). Check out the contents of the Twilight Mystery Box in the trailer below.



We hope you're having a great holiday!

As you know, we'll be announcing our new expansion on January 7th (PST). At that time we'll be introducing a new set of 3.13 League Supporter Packs, which means the Harvest Supporter Packs will leave the store forever.

There are two pairs of Harvest Supporter Packs available in the store, the Malice and the Benevolence. Each of the two pairs is designed in its own style and has different contents, so you can choose whichever one you prefer (or both). You can upgrade from the smaller one in a pair to the larger one. All of the microtransactions from the Supporter Packs are exclusive and will not appear in the store again.



If you're interested in getting one of the Harvest Supporter Packs but you're not sure you'll be able to do so in time, we'd recommend setting up a payment plan which can reserve a pack for you for up to three months after the commencement of your plan. Just email us in advance at support@grindinggear.com, we'll be happy to help you!



The Harvest Supporter Packs on consoles will be replaced with the new ones alongside the launch of our next expansion. The Heist Supporter Packs will remain in the store for all platforms until the announcement of 3.14 expansion.

Thank you so much for your support!