Path of Exile: Forsaken Masters
Take a master class in monster-slaying.
Spare a thought for the losers of Path of Exile’s action-RPG loot lottery. They slay the same monsters as everyone else. They run the same dungeons and take out the same bosses, only to come out the other side with a rusty trowel and bargain-bucket plate mail.
In a random system, some will find themselves on the wrong end of every dice roll. Producer and lead designer Chris Wilson understands their pain. “There’s nothing more frustrating than knowing what you want to do and just having bad luck preventing you from actually doing it.”
Path of Exile’s second free expansion, Forsaken Masters, wants to help. It’ll introduce seven ‘masters’: NPCs who represent a powerful, idealized version of each character class. You can befriend them to unlock customizable hideouts and extra crafting options, designed to give less fortunate players ways to tweak items to suit their needs.
This is an RPG, a place where bonds of friendship, trust and love can only be forged through the completion of a linear series of errands, but the tasks will vary significantly depending on the master you’re trying to woo. For the assassin master you kill individual targets, but sometimes you’ll have to leave particular witnesses alive to send a message to their bosses, or lead targets into traps.
After a few missions, masters start appearing in towns to chat and sell you things
Elsewhere, Elreon the Templar master is busy rescuing relics from dangerous, monster-infested dungeons—a man clearly in need of a monster-slaying specialist.
After a few missions, your relationship with the master will level up, and they’ll start appearing in towns to chat and sell you things. Prove yourself further, and they’ll whisk you away to a hideout, which can be decorated with paraphernalia befitting an action-RPG superhero—artfully placed logs, impaled corpses, swarms of bees, that sort of thing. The hideout gives you access to the master’s specialized crafting bench, and daily missions.
Unlike the extra endgame activities the last update brought, all of this will be folded into lower level areas. “We wanted to make sure that everything in the new expansion could be experienced within the first 40 or so hours of the game, playing through the first difficulty level or two,” says Wilson. Grinding Gear wants to package PoE’s hero vs horde combat runs into different formats to appeal to different types of player. Dailies will offer guaranteed progression in bite-sized increments as a quick, palatable alternative to continuous re-runs of the three-act story.
Masters will also be free, a symptom of Grinding Gear’s ‘no friction’ approach to the free-to-play model. The only items you pay for are cosmetic. More updates are coming. If you’re looking for a place to slay millions of monsters in the coming year, Path of Exile makes a fine choice.