K-SCORE: 49
Developer/Publisher: Grinding Gear Games
Designer: Chris Wilson
Programmer: Jonathan Rogers
Writers: Edwin McRae, Brian Weissman
Artist: Erik Olofsson
Spoiler Level: None
Tala moana, readers.
We're looking good.
“the extent of Grinding Gear Games’s plagiarism is so severe that it might be lawsuit worthy”
I sunk hours into Path of Exile that I don’t understand. There’s something very very compelling about the game… Diablo II. At best, Path of Exile is more Diablo II, cloned from the essential gameplay to the user interface. The extent of Grinding Gear Games’s plagiarism is so severe that it might be lawsuit worthy, though I’m sure Blizzard is making so much money on their other franchises that they don’t really care about it, and because it’s not nearly as close to a clone of Diablo III, which is a more polished, more modern, more sensible, less fun experience through and through, and thereby a progression of the action rpg genre. Path of Exile is a crazy leap backwards into the past, made by people so in love with Diablo II that they honestly thought the problems with the game were things like insufficient complexity in gem sockets, too few recipes for the Horadric cube, and the in-game economy being run on both gold and a unique ring called a Stone Ring of Jordan was just too simplistic, instead of the game’s actual problems like loot, attack, and move (the only things you do in the game) being mapped all to the same button, or half of all classes being unplayable because they have to stand next to the enemies and get attacked. Those problems along with the .3 second timeframe from full health to dead are imported from the 2000 PC classic.
Path of Exile is a game that a certain subset of the community craves. It begs to be branded with the short warning label that should be more of an admonition: Not For Casuals. The game is so ruthlessly complex that I’d be surprised if it had a single player that didn’t gasp as soon as he or she opened the passive skill tree. Understanding where to spend your hundreds of skill points is a baby step along the journey to creating a character that can effectively handle the game’s top ten percent of challenging content. You also need to have an understanding of concepts like damage calculation formulae, the way linked gems work in conjunction with each other, what items need to be sold to vendors in packages with other items, how to modify the items you pick up both in terms of their stats and their sockets, which modifiers are useless, which are essential, which modifiers come on which pieces of gear, which uniques are worth a damn and what the drawbacks to those uniques are, what the top-end rolls for valuable modifiers on each piece of gear are, how to properly set up gems to protect you when you take a certain amount of damage, which keystone passive skills will define your build, what the ascendency choices for your class are, the difference between crit chance, global crit chance, crit chance with spells, and crit multiplier, the difference between added fire damage and increased fire damage, the difference between flat phys damage and phys damage multipliers and which skill gems are actually modded by which of those, which maps drop in which zones and at which tiers, and how to properly modify those maps with orbs of alchemy, cartographer's chisels, and chaos orbs to make the map playable and likely to provide solid returns on the investment in terms of currency. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Neither do I! Of all the time I spent “playing,” a solid quarter of it was on the wiki or other community support sites looking up information. Because it’s dastardly in its overly complicated behind the scenes, never-explained gameplay systems, I wasn’t able to craft my own characters and find success through trial and error, clever set-ups, and smart decision-making. Regardless of my personal knowledge base, lifelong hobby of gaming, and hundreds of hours of experience playing this game’s source material, I was woefully underprepared and ill-informed to be in control of my own destiny in Path of Exile. I did find some nice guides on YouTube and the game’s forums that helped explain to me things like firestorm bolt spread, how I can use the aura herald of thunder with elemental conflux to apply the curse warlord’s mark to nearby enemies and thereby acquire enough endurance charges to make immortal call effective, and which support gems to use for my main skills.
“You kill enemies too quickly and so the challenging content must come from enemies that kill you too quickly.”
Complexity won’t deter me, even when it’s barbaric. Path of Exile is so needlessly confusing that it’s hostile to new players, but I pushed through that and let myself learn a little bit more about the game every day. There was a solid chunk of hours where I felt like I was learning things that made the game more fun. Peeling back the layers of their endgame mapping system created satisfying new encounters for a while. Reaching something close to the maximum potential of my two primary characters and burning/meat-grinding thousands upon thousands of enemies was also enjoyable. Discovering that in red maps you can roll elemental reflect modifiers on the map itself and die instantly upon casting your first spell was less fun. Even worse was dying so often that I made no progress despite a few hours of playtime. Worst of all was the number of times I died and afterward lifted my hands from my keyboard and shrugged, saying, “I have no idea what happened.” In the end, that’s the second biggest problem with this game. It’s too fast. You kill enemies too quickly and so the challenging content must come from enemies that kill you too quickly. With a major fight lasting no more than ten seconds, you don’t have time to reflect on your tactics and choices. You barely have time to jam on all the keys that do all the things you can do.
And all you actually can do in combat: attack with your area damage skill, attack with your single target skill, drink a potion, or run the fuck away. There’s a lot of setup in Path of Exile but the goal seems to be to get your character as close as possible to an autopilot state, and the very best of players just make their autopilots fly Harrier jets. One way to get that clearspeed down is to do away with that single target skill entirely and just have one skill you actually cast. It’s depressingly non-dynamic gameplay and after a while it will lead you to ask yourself what the hell you’re doing.
The story does nothing to help there. A single play-through on a single difficulty is short. A character is exiled to the land of Wraeclast and a few hours later will be killing the evil monstrosity known as Malachai. What happens in between is anyone’s guess. I played through all four acts nine times and I have no clue what the essential conflict is. In order to get the story, you have to slow down your progress by 70,000% and sit around listening to the horribly written monologues from all of the poorly rendered stationary characters in the little towns. I even did that a couple times and still have no clue what was supposedly going on. That’s how awful the writing is. Bad voice actors will drone on and on to you about the Karui way and the Gemling Queen and General Gravicius. You kill them all. Killing is the only thing your character can do. Once and awhile some guy named Vorici asks that you injure a target but not kill him for ten whole seconds - by far and away the thing I failed at most. I even employed my fourth and final ability: run the fuck away, and the target still tended to die while he was off the screen.
not an acceptable character model
The worst problem with the game though has nothing to do with the speed with which things die or the wretched story of Wraeclast and its… problems? or even the insanity of the skill tree and the mathematical formulae that run the game. The worst problem is that Grinding Gear Games does not have its shit together enough to make a game that runs properly and consistently with features it absolutely needs. I have a high-end graphics card, powerful processor, plenty of RAM, a reasonably steady internet connection most of the time, and a Windows OS. My PC can play any game I’ve come across at 60 FPS without a hitch, so why in the world is it crashing every forty minutes when I boot up a game with polygon-based graphics marginally better than Zelda: Ocarina of Time? It’s ridiculous. And if you can imagine how annoying it is to die so fast you don’t know what happened to you, imagine dying from things that are off the screen because your game started to lag because its servers couldn’t display all of the particle effects and mobs it put on the screen! The way the game increases the challenge of end-game content is to only let you enter the maps you’ve selected to run six times. If your game crashes while it's trying to load that map, make that five times. If it crashes four times while loading the instance, well then you’ve got two portals to use to kill all the monsters and ferry your assload of loot back to your hideout where you turn it into smaller, more valuable loot.
Oh… the loot. The loot. The loot. The loot hurts my brain. I’ll suggest this yet again, my standing offer for most of my game reviews. If you listen to only one element of this review, let it be this final message: THE LOOT GLUT MUST STOP. Path of Exile has more loot than any other game in the history of games, I’m confident. The rate of pieces of loot per hour played is frightening. It’s so bad in Path of Exile that there are third party gaming enthusiasts that have programmed their own filters so that the lowest quality stuff doesn’t even appear on your screen when it explodes from the corpses of the millions of mobs you’ve slain. That’s not enough though. The filters also have to do the job of stratifying the loot for you so that you know which items are definitely worth picking up, which are probably worth picking up, and which are likely not worth the time it will take you to evaluate their worth. Even with these filters, more than half of the gameplay time is spent dealing with these heaps and heaps of crap. The whole game devolves after a time to an enormous inventory management simulator, a masterclass for the best of the best of sorters, condensers, and ruthless sellers. The only thing a dedicated PoE player should spend real money on is added inventory space. I spent $0 on the game, and I imagine I made it longer than any other player ever without buying more space. To do that I had regimented practices of what to do with everything I picked up be it something I might use, something I wanted to sell to other players, something that I sold to vendors, a skill gem, a quality flask, a quality gem, a divination card (fractions of gear masquerading as a feature), or a currency item.
unfiltered loot
with filter
Because reasons, Path of Exile forewent the usual system of silver, gold, dollars, or credits for their economy and implemented something so much worse. Instead of a single unit displaying your wealth, you have a constantly fluctuating economy of orbs that is as confusing as understanding the complex international dynamics that dictate the value of the dollar to the yen to the peso to the Botswana pula. So if you’ve mastered when to turn your chaos orbs into exalted orbs, feel bad that you could be a millionaire just by trading your real money for other moneys. I turned scrolls of wisdom into portal scrolls into orbs of transmutation into orbs of augmentation into chaos orbs. I turned orbs of alteration into chaos orbs. I turned jeweler’s orbs into chaos orbs. I turned chromatic orbs into chaos orbs. I turned armourer's scraps into blacksmith's whetstones into glassblower’s baubles into chaos orbs. I turned orbs of scouring into chaos orbs. I turned cartographer’s chisels into chaos orbs. I turned orbs of alchemy into chaos orbs. I collected divine orbs, regal orbs, blessed orbs, and orbs of regret in small enough quantities that they just sat in my stash. I turned chaos orbs into exalted orbs. And I did it all because I had to for the sake of inventory space. This isn’t even all the currency types. There are sacrifice fragments, essences, cartographer’s sextants, offerings to the goddess (don’t ask which goddess), splinters of xoph, tul, esh, chayula, and uul-netol. And apparently there are items called mirrors of kalandra which are 1500 times rarer than an exalted orb, which must be rare indeed because only three times in my many hours of playing did I see an exalted orb drop from a chest or slain enemy.
“I assume that most of who plays Path of Exile... are professional economists.”
Despite the quantity and the annoying physical space limitations of things like two-handed weapons, the loot in PoE isn’t as bad as other games like The Witcher 3 or Fallout 4. That’s because, amazingly, a larger percentage of what drops in PoE has value compared to those games. PoE is sitting at about 0.1% of what drops being significantly valuable. Those games sit at a much much lower percentage. The real struggle with the gearsplosions of Wraeclast is in the identifying what is worth anything. Without understanding implicit modifiers, what constitutes an item prefix or item suffix, top end rolls, valuable modifiers, and socket potentiality, one can’t know what is worth a damn. To understand that, you not only have to do a ton of outside research, you have to be playing the game constantly, currently, and be an active member of the community so that you know what builds and classes people in the community are commonly playing. Something that would be fantastic for a necromancer, for example, has no value if the current balanced or imbalanced state of the game makes playing necromancers nonviable. Too much supply and not enough demand. Bladeflurry-tuned amulets with cast speed and increased physical damage that have mediocre rolls might go for ten chaos because everyone’s rolling those builds at the moment because frenzy charges are OP OP… or something. The loot led me to wonder who out there is having fun with this system? I assume that most of who plays Path of Exile at the highest possible level (which because of the complexity and inaccessibility to new players should be most of their player base) are professional economists. That or people that have a weird fetish for digitial order. “This page is all gloves that have armor, energy shield, and a tier three lab enchant. This page is for just energy shield gloves. This page is for gloves that are good rolls but need to be four linked. This page is for gloves waiting to be sold to vendors unidentified with the chaos orb recipe. This blank page is for pants because no one in Wraeclast wears pants.”
There were many times that I liked playing Path of Exile, and yet I feel it’s a pathetic game in far too many respects to have been worthy of my time. Grinding Gear Games should be ashamed of the product they put out. They struck gold in the sense that the gaming community was, apparently, so starved for an action RPG in the spirit of Diablo II that they were willing to take a clone with performance issues, no graphical improvements, and somehow a worse story all thirteen to sixteen years after the classic’s release. So desperately supportive is this community that they make up for pathetic omissions on behalf of the developers, doing the work themselves, most notably an auction house. You heard that right. In a game where everything is tradable, there’s no central place within the game to trade items. Were it not for the psychopaths that wrote the Procurement program and run the poe.trade servers, the game wouldn’t function in the slightest. Unbelievable. I know the genre promises more murder than any other in the world of gaming, but come on my fellows. We deserve better.