The Apollyon Mystery Box features distinct designs that bring a mystical glimmer to Wraeclast. In today's news post, we've gathered some concept art to share a look at the magic that goes into creating these ethereal cosmetic effects.



































You can check out the full Apollyon Mystery Box sets or buy yours here.

It's been some time since we last hosted a Q&A on Path of Exile's most complex game mechanics and we are keen to answer your questions and help you understand some of the less-well-understood corners of the game! We'll collect your questions and present the answers sometime next week.

The intention of this Q&A is to be exclusively about game mechanics rather than game design or other Path of Exile topics - for example, how specific passives interact with particular unique items, etc. It's unlikely that we'll be able to get to every question due to time constraints but we aim to answer as many as we can.

We look forward to seeing your questions! You can post your questions on our forum thread here.

In Path of Exile, some days you play out of your mind and defeat the Maven without dying. Other days, you slip up and die to the Shaper. Regardless of what happens, we wanted to share and highlight a few Twitch clips from our awesome community. Check them out in today's news post here!

Whether it's a simple voice line from Zana or the chime of an Exalted Orb drop, the iconic sounds of Path of Exile bring the gritty world of Wraeclast to life. Today, our sound design team shares some of their thoughts and inspirations behind the audio of recently added skills, mechanics and NPCs.

Please Note: If you would like to hear examples of the audio described below, please check out the full news post for video samples.

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Hello Exiles!

I'm Kane and I'm the Audio Lead on Path of Exile. The audio department at GGG is now 5 sound designers strong (including myself), and ‘the maestro' Kamil handling everything to do with music. I feel privileged to have sound designers on my team that are all very talented and it's great to be able to show off some of the work that we've been doing in recent times. We love hearing feedback from players and regularly check the forums and reddit for your thoughts. So here's a chance for us to give you some insight into our thought process while designing sounds and audio experiences for Path of Exile.


Gritty, dark, and disturbing. Those have always been common themes in my design process and I feel as if my sound design finds its place nicely in the world of Wraeclast. With that in mind, when I saw the visuals for Exsanguinate I was excited to get to work. I used a mixture of slime, liquids, some earthy cracks, and crunches paired with some duct tape recordings of rips, twists, and tears mixed together with all kinds of audio processing and added synthesis to create the sounds you hear in-game. I went through a similar process when making the audio for Corrupting Fever which is a skill that pairs nicely with Exsanguinate and together they sound horrifically satisfying.

Another skill I loved working on was Splitting Steel. This skill could be the closest we will get to guns in Wraeclast so I made the most of the opportunity and designed the audio to be as impactful and threatening as possible. This involved using recordings of real guns layered with huge metallic impacts and explosions to exaggerate it as much as I could. Throughout my everyday life, I often hear sounds that catch my attention and excite me. If I can experience those same feelings through my work for Path of Exile then that is when I know those sounds are game-ready.


Over the two and a half years of designing sounds at GGG, I've learned to imagine sounds in my head quickly when I first see the visuals of a given asset. To me, the thought process behind the sound of a player skill is about creating a distinct and immediately recognisable sound. When I saw the animation and effects for Reap, I wanted to blend together metallic swinging sounds with gore to match the bloody visuals. There are wooden spears being thrown, airy whooshes, and two handed swords swinging to create a base layer for the scythe. Then I subtly added the sound of squashed tomatoes and yoghurt with a plunger to create a gory layer to it. For the buff sound, I used a reverse reverb on a heavy metal door closing sound and then layered that with some pitched down watery splashes to suit the aesthetic.

I used a simpler approach when designing sounds for the Maven Astrolabe Map Device. I gathered some audio which I had previously designed for the Maven boss encounter as a starting point. Then I blended it with mechanical sounds of rotating gears and metal, and a subtle boom as the celestial animation expands.


Stepping out of the Ultimatum ring puts you in a situation where you are risking losing it all.
Trying to give the player a sense of “danger” and to signal they are doing something wrong, I made the first sound like a cinematic impact blended with screams. On the countdown I used a heartbeat, and a sound of knocking on wood that would increase in volume and pitch on each second to add a sense of pressure, urging you to return to the ring.

With the Vaal being so thematically tied to sacrifice and death, I wanted the player to feel that they were using a Vaal skill that had those components infused in it. To express that I used a blend of screams and incoherent mumbling as core sounds, that later I shaped, processed and synthesized to generate the vacuum, shockwaves and details from it.


The explosions for Blood Sacrament (Relic of the Pact) change in size depending on how much life you've reserved channeling the skill, so we needed a small, medium and large explosion. In the example video, you can hear that the small explosion is a bit squishier, while the larger explosion has some low end crunch.

Most of the high end gore here consists of things like, squished chicken, sloshing water and slime going through tubes. The low end is a little bit of live explosives, and dropped stones to add the crunch and movement.

I spent a bit more time on the channeling sound (which is funny because from what I've seen, the optimal way to play the skill involves next to no channeling time). I thought it would be cool to blend together a heart beat, the sound of moving water (similar to what you might hear when you put your hands over your ears and listen to your own blood moving), and some quiet creature noises to add to the unsettling nature of the Vaal atmosphere.


For Ultimatum, we needed key gameplay audio cues for the core league mechanics. One of the first elements I worked on was the time stop mechanics. Making it feel like you are being sucked out of combat for a moment, then you make your decision before being thrown back into the fray. I blended ghostly voices and drones to use as ambience during the selection menu sequence, then reduced and filtered gameplay sounds during this time to add to the impact of it all coming back in after your choice is made. It's important that we make the most of these unique gameplay mechanics with audio, to help make encounters feel satisfying and cohesive.

Another example of this is from the Maven fight in Echoes of the Atlas. These larger scale boss fights really need clear audio cues to signal certain things to the player, and to help provide context to different effects. The memory game effects here are a good example of this. Also, Patricia's audio on the nuke beam is very satisfying and telegraphs “certain death” quite nicely!

Lastly, I wanted to mention Heist. That release really showed how much passion our team has for what we do. On the dialogue side alone, I worked on around 3,800 files of dialogue that were used as final in-game assets, this includes the various NPCs and the monsters. I really wanted to make these encounters feel unique and give monsters a bit more personality with audio. Of course, spamming dialogue isn't fun, so I used a bunch of cooldowns and limitations on monster dialogue during implementation. I was very proud of what we accomplished there and it showed us how we can look at pushing things further for monster uniqueness going forward.

With every new league, we introduce a variety of new content to Path of Exile and our Ultimatum expansion was no different. In today's news post, we've gathered some concept art of the Trialmaster as well as some of the Vaal-inspired creatures and items that were introduced in Ultimatum to give you a behind-the-scenes look at our development process. Check them out below!

In Path of Exile's Ultimatum League, we introduced The Trialmaster, a mysterious immortal figure that seeks to challenge Exiles on behalf of his master, the Vaal entity known as Chaos. Our narrative designer, Matt Dymerski, has written an overview of creating the Trialmaster.

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You're a Path of Exile player. You're entering a new league. You're going to encounter the league NPC in every. single. area. How do I, the Narrative Designer, help make that experience fun rather than repetitive? The answer might just involve leaning into the iteration rather than trying to avoid it. Thus, the Trialmaster was forged.

The Trialmaster is not Path of Exile's first foray into creating personalities that remember what you, the player, have done. Betrayal League had a one-step system in which the NPCs said different things based on the last interaction they had with you. However, their memory didn't extend beyond that, because keeping track of relationships with nineteen different characters would have been a mess. The Trialmaster, on the other hand, has a very personal relationship with you, and you are far more likely to remember the thrill of your own victories and the sting of your own defeats.

The key here is 'your' victories and defeats. A few players have noticed that the Trialmaster still remembers your past record when you switch to another character. That's because he's not talking to your character. He's talking to you! If you've seen my talk about our Narrative Design philosophies at ExileCon, there's a bit here where I talk about how players are 'entities of pure chaos.' Across the population of players, if something is possible, someone will do it. All the possibilities must be accounted for, because they can and will happen.

Sound familiar? The Trialmaster serves a Vaal entity known as Chaos, who sees all of the possibilities. The Trialmaster directly tells you that he is challenging other exiles in other outcomes even while he's talking to you. In their possibilities, they survived the initial boat wreck, not you. Chaos is the first (and possibly only) entity in the world of Wraeclast aware of our timelines structure, in which all of you, the players, are living different parallel adventures.

The part that was most fun to write: this isn't actually fourth-wall breaking in the traditional sense. Chaos and the Trialmaster do not know what you truly are, they only know that a higher-dimensional entity somewhat like themselves has begun making moves on Wraeclast. Sometimes, you're a Ranger. Sometimes, you're a Marauder. Your willpower sometimes jumps back into the past, going from a god-killing veteran rampaging in the Atlas back to waking up on the beach again as someone new. In short, you fascinate Chaos, something which is communicated very subtly in the purposely hidden relationship between the Trialmaster and his unseen boss. Astute players may notice hints that the Trialmaster is not exactly happy with his situation...

The Trialmaster is voiced by the talented David de Lautour, who knocked the nuance of the character out of the park. There are thousands of years layered behind the Trialmaster's emotions, resulting in a certain structure to the things he must simply accept, the things he despises, and a few things he can still enjoy, such as watching an exile fail in spectacular fashion. Too, there remain moments of sincerity in his otherwise fatalistic and tortured existence, like when an exile who has lost countless times finally wins one. All these factors combine to make it clear that the Trialmaster is an antagonist, but not an enemy—whether the same is true of Chaos, however, remains to be seen.

After seeing so many awesome suggestions for the community designed novelty Cyclone microtransaction, we need your help to pick three more concepts for our final poll! In addition to two existing concepts we have (one of which includes the coveted Sharknado), the top three suggestions voted on from this poll will receive concept art for their ideas.

Once we have all five pieces of concept art, we'll share these with you for our final poll which decides the ultimate community-made cyclone skill effect! This is your chance to be a part of developing a truly unique cosmetic effect in Path of Exile so be sure to cast your vote!

Now that you've had a deeper look at Act 2 in Path of Exile 2, we wanted to share some awesome pieces from our concept artists that were brought to life in our recent gameplay showcase. Check them out below!

We're currently working on Patch 3.14.1 which we aim to deploy later this week or early next week. We're also preparing additional information about resource loading, invisible enemies/skills and various related issues. In the meantime, we have prepared a preview of Patch 3.14.1 for you. Please note that this is a preview only and some patch notes may be added or removed before it is deployed.

• Stand in the Stone Circle Ultimatum encounters now have larger circles.
  
• Monsters in the "Stand in the Stone Circle" Ultimatum encounters have had their experience and drops improved to bring them more into line with other Ultimatum encounters.
  
• Re-enabled the Razor Dance Ultimatum modifier.
  
• Improved various visual effects in The Trialmaster encounter.
  
• Fixed a bug where Monsters could sometimes fail to disappear after completing an Ultimatum encounter.

• The in-game Character Sheet now displays "Immune to Chaos Damage" if you have the Chaos Inoculation keystone passive skill allocated.
  
• Clarified that the Snow Cloak buff doesn't cause you to take less damage. This is purely a description change.
  
• Clarified that Fanaticism grants reduction of all costs (not only mana costs). This is purely a description change.
  
• Clarified that the "Luminous Trove" and "A Modest Request" divination cards reward corrupted items. This is purely a description change.
  
• Fixed a bug where the City Square, Factory and Ramparts maps were generating inaccessible areas.
  
• Fixed a bug where opening the Temple of Atzoatl or a Betrayal Safehouse in a map containing a Conqueror's Citadel could cause the Conqueror to fail to drop a watchstone.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Betrayal Investigation board could sometimes fail to show the correct Syndicate members and their relationships.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Duelist was unable to purchase Cruelty Support from Yeena after completing Sharp and Cruel.
  
• Fixed a bug where Corrupting Fever could cause you to apply Corrupted Blood to yourself through reflected or self-inflicted hits.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Rotblood Promise unique ring could allow curses to bypass curse immunity when activating a curse aura that affects you.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Fractal Titan boss in the Cortex map could use the incorrect skills if it absorbed too many Energy Volatiles.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Alternate Quality effect on Divergent Phase Run wasn't working correctly.
  
• Fixed a bug where unique Talismans could drop unidentified from the Temple of Atzoatl.
  
• Fixed a bug with the Atziri's Rule unique staff where the Queen's Demand skill could sometimes fail to trigger Flames of Judgement and Storm of Judgement.
  
• Fixed a bug where Tormented Spirits could use skills while possessing a defeated Betrayal target.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Hale Heart divination card wasn't counting towards the "Influenced Item" reward criteria in the "Turn in Divination Cards" challenge.
  
• Fixed a bug where Flameblast microtransactions could be applied to the Blood Sacrament skill granted by the Relic of the Pact unique wand.
  
• Fixed a bug in the Caldera map where items could drop in an inaccessible area.
  
• Fixed a bug in the Siege map where items could drop in an inaccessible area.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Sirus, Awakener of Worlds encounter was missing music. The track has also been re-added to the Hideout Music Player.
  
• Fixed a visual bug where certain item base types introduced in 3.13.0 weren't displaying correctly when used with Animate Guardian.
  
• Fixed a bug where the Blackflame unique ring wasn't applying the correct ignite visual.
  
• Fixed a clipping problem with the Deadly Renegade Cloak microtransaction.
  
• Fixed a clipping problem with the Orion Gloves microtransaction that affected the Duelist.

• Fixed a client crash that could occur when unveiling items.
  
• Fixed a client crash.
  
• Fixed an instance crash.

Ultimatum is in full swing now, so we'd like to highlight the reveals of some stunning cosplays and exciting moments in Path of Exile: Ultimatum. Check out some of the clips we've gathered during the Ultimatum League here!

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