Path of Exile 2

Path of Exile gets a major overhaul with this free, upcoming campaign.

When Path of Exile creator Chris Wilson took the stage during ExileCon late last year, I didn’t expect him to announce Path of Exile 2, a whole new campaign that overhauls most core systems and upgrades graphics. No extra costs, no divided playerbase, and every core expansion from the original will be re-integrated into the new one.

And after playing 45 minutes of the game, I can’t overstate how much it feels like a true sequel, despite technically still being the same game. 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 every deity is dead and humankind is left to clean up the corpses (there are a lot) and try and move forward.

Path of Exile 2, Wilson tells me, is Grinding Gear Games’ chance to press the reset button and tell a smaller-scale story that isn’t about 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 the original campaign, that means clicking on enemies until they explode and good loot 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 boss 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 it would frequently tunnel underground and explode, forcing me to run for my life or die. But I had to be careful, because each time its head moved it would leave behind a pool of acid that I had to avoid, slowly reducing the space I had to manoeuvre, 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 Rust King pelted me with jagged bits of metal. If I got nicked even a little bit, I could quickly bleed out. It forced me to pay careful attention to his movement so I knew what type of attack to expect and could prepare. If he levitated a swarm of knives, I had better run to his flanks. If I spent too long hacking away at his ankles, he’d trigger an explosion that would kill me if I didn’t step back.