Path of Exile

Overview

The High Templar of Oriath sends his undesirables across the sea to Wraeclast, a continent of ruins, sleeping gods and older sins, where the Eternal Empire was destroyed centuries earlier in a great Cataclysm. The player washes up on its shore as one of them. Path of Exile, developed and published by Grinding Gear Games of Auckland, New Zealand, and released for Windows on October 23, 2013, is an isometric action role-playing game in the tradition of Diablo and especially Diablo II: a darker, grimier, vastly more complicated game made by fans who felt the genre had been abandoned. It is free to play, and it earns its money without selling power. With quarterly leagues that reshape its endgame, it has run for more than a decade and spawned a sequel.

Origins

The founders were a small group of action RPG enthusiasts frustrated by the lack of new games in the genre in the late 2000s. They worked on Path of Exile quietly for three years before announcing it on September 1, 2010. Lead designer Chris Wilson named its influences: the Diablo games, Titan Quest and Dungeon Siege; Magic: The Gathering, for its combinations of cards; Guild Wars; and the Final Fantasy series, in particular Final Fantasy VII's Materia, gems slotted into equipment to grant abilities, and Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid.

The studio committed to what it called "ethical microtransactions." The game would be genuinely free, with revenue from cosmetic items, extra storage and similar conveniences. An alpha ran from 2010, a paid closed beta followed, and supporters had contributed US$2.2 million by January 2013, when an open beta began. Version 1.0 launched on Steam and the studio's own client on October 23, 2013.

How it plays

Players pick one of seven classes, the Marauder, Duelist, Ranger, Shadow, Witch, Templar and the unlockable Scion, tied to combinations of strength, dexterity and intelligence. That choice matters less than in most games, because every class shares the same enormous passive skill tree, well over a thousand nodes, and simply starts at a different point on it. Active skills are not learned but socketed: skill gems go into sockets on weapons and armor and level up alongside the character, and "support gems" in linked sockets modify them, adding projectiles, chaining hits, triggering spells on critical strikes. The number of possible combinations made build planning a hobby of its own, conducted in spreadsheets and third-party planners.

The economy is unusual. There is no trading gold; instead, players barter "currency items," orbs and scrolls with their own uses such as rerolling an item's properties or upgrading its rarity, so the currency is constantly consumed and inflation is held in check. Levels outside towns are procedurally generated and instanced. After the campaign, an endgame "Atlas" of maps offers near-endless Grinding for better Loot & loot tables.

Most important are the leagues. Every few months a new challenge league launches with its own mechanics, a fresh economy and its own ladder, alongside permanent Standard, Hardcore (where a character who dies is exiled to Standard, a variant of Permadeath) and Solo Self-Found modes. When a league ends, characters move to Standard and the most popular mechanics are folded into the core game. The cycle keeps the game new and gives players a reason to start again together.

Reception & impact

Critics praised its depth and atmosphere; Destructoid wrote of its "grimy, grungy, uncomfortable feel." Others warned that it threw a great deal at players with little direction and lacked the polish of Diablo III. GameSpot named it PC Game of the Year for 2013, and IGN called it the best PC role-playing game of the year. By February 2014 it had five million registered players. Its restrained free-to-play model, built on cosmetics rather than power, set it apart from the aggressive monetization of many free games.

Content arrived through large free expansions, including The Fall of Oriath (2017), which extended the story to ten acts. Consoles followed: Xbox One in 2017 and PlayStation 4 in 2019, and a macOS version in 2020. In 2020 it won the BAFTA Games Award for Evolving Game.

Legacy

At ExileCon in November 2019, Grinding Gear Games announced Path of Exile 2, first planned as a huge update to the original and then, from 2023, as a separate game. It entered paid early access on December 6, 2024, for Windows, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, with a new campaign set about twenty years after the first game, twelve classes, a dodge roll, harder and more deliberate boss fights, and weapons such as spears and crossbows; it remained in early access as of September 2026, with the original game still supported alongside it. Among action RPGs, Path of Exile is the game that most fully carried on Diablo II's legacy of deep itemization and character builds through the 2010s.