I was recently watching Cohh Carnage on Twitch.tv, who is one of my favorite streamers to watch when I have time. I highly recommend watching him, if you are new to Twitch, or if you are a longtime fan of the site. He has an amazing community, and his streams are usually very enjoyable and fun to watch because he seems to have a genuine love for his community, and the games that he plays.
Well, one morning I tuned in to watch what he was playing that day, and he happened to be playing this game called Path of Exile. As I watched him play it, it became apparent that this was not just another dungeon crawling, Diablo clone. So I thought, “Hmm…the game’s free…it looks interesting…I’ll give it a try.” Now unlike some, I am very picky when it comes to a lot of things—games not being one of them. When it comes to games, I generally like playing just about any genre of game, with survival horror being my only exception, because I am not a fan of horror in general—it’s just not my thing. Having said that, RPGs and MMOs are games I usually play on a regular basis, though I do dabble in Diablo 3 from time to time, so I do have experience with dungeon crawlers.
So I chose to go to the Path of Exile site to download the game and create my account, instead of going through Steam, because unlike a lot of PC gamers, I don’t particularly care for steam. I once used Steam in order to play Skyrim, Secret World, and Civilization, but the more I used it, the more it bugged me that even though I downloaded the game either from a disc or from the developer’s site, I still had to have Steam loaded up and logged in, in order to play the game. I wish it didn’t, but it did. So after trying out Firefall (a game that I actually liked, it just needed the lore of the world to mean more to the gameplay for me), I uninstalled Steam, and haven’t used it since.
Upon first logging into to Path of Exile, I went in completely blind and ignorant of the story and lore of the world that encompasses PoE, as the game is called by its many players. The lore of this world and the reasons why my character is sent into exile is very apparent from the character select screen because as I looked at each class, the Templars standing around them regaled me as a player with the reasons why each character has been sentenced to exile. That is actually very different from most games I’ve played in the past. Usually in MMOs, the reasons and wherefores of the world and your character’s journey are usually fleshed out within the first few quests of the starting/tutorial areas of a game. In PoE, your character’s vague back story is given to you when choosing which character to play. I will say though that this is where I ran into a bit of a con with this game.
In Path of Exile, each class had a preset gender. There is no choice to choose the gender of your chosen class at all in this game. If you want to play a Templar, you will play a male character. If you want to play a ranger, you will play a female character. This kind of bugged me, because as a longtime MMO player, I like my characters at least vaguely resembling myself in-game, which means as a long time melee player, I wanted the Shadow that I chose as my first character to be a female, but that isn’t currently possible in Path of Exile, because Shadows are male. I really hope that the devs at Grinding Gear Games in a future patch decide to give their players the choice of gender in this game, in order to make the game more immersive for MMO coggers like me.
After choosing the Shadow class, I log in to find my character washed up on the shore of Wraeclast. The graphics in the game are adequate, though I did notice some pixelation when there are a lot of other players on the screen, like in town. As I began to play, I did find the starting area, and the gameplay to be fun. It is top down dungeon crawling at its finest. As I ran away from the shore, fighting pack after pack of enemy mobs, inevitably I leveled for the first time in-game. Upon leveling, I received a quest that ordered me to open my passive skill tree and put a point in it. This is where this game blew my mind, and where it excels over most other dungeon crawl games. This is what was presented to me when I opened my passive skill tree menu.
PoE’s skill tree is massive. In fact, even if you zoom completely out, you still can’t see the whole skill tree on your screen. It is by far the most massive talent tree I’ve ever seen in a dungeon crawl game. In fact, the skill tree in Path of Exile is more deep and expansive than what I’ve seen in most MMOs, except for maybe Skyforge—but I doubt it. There are so many choices that a player can take, including reaching into other class’ domains in order to garner extra stats. Man, this tree is crazy. I honestly didn’t really know which path to take or where to start with this tree. There were two options to choose from for my very first point, but after that, I was actually a bit overwhelmed as to where to go next.
Once I chose to put my point into gaining an energy shield, and I entered the first main town of this game, Lioneye’s Watch. Once entering the main city, I quickly realized that Path of Exile is more of a hybrid between dungeon crawling and MMOs. Though the story of this game doesn’t really pull me in like most MMOs, PoE does allow you to congregate, party with and meet other players like an MMO, and is one of selling points of the game. Besides very fun gameplay, even when playing alone, it’s the gathering together and defeating a common enemy that drew me into this game, as much as that massive skill tree. The ability to take your character wherever you want to in terms of the skills you choose is a breath of fresh air for this long time WoW player. In this game, I am not confined to a cookie cutter build, in order to be able to participate in endgame content.
Though I have just started playing the game, I do recommend that any lover of dungeon crawl games, RPGs or MMO should give this game a try. It’s a lot of fun, and the replay value for this game is very high, because of the randomly generated nature of the maps in dungeon crawl games.
