Corona and Chill™: at least that’s what I’ve been using Path of Exile (Steam) for. Self-isolating, staying away from the sickness living and breathing outside of the safety of my house, and… maybe I had an ARPG (Action RolePlaying Game, Wikipedia) itch to scratch.

Jumping into Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile (PS4, Xbox One, PC) doesn’t cost me a penny… but will it eventually lead to me reaching for my wallet?

The Free-To-Play (f2p) Gaming Model

Is It Actually Pay-To-Win?

Free to play games have been a thing for a while now, even before kids wanted to play Fortnite and use their parents credit cards to pay silly for dances. Honestly, I’ve avoided f2p games like the plague and prefer to pay real money — sometimes in Steam sales — for all of my Steam collection. If it’s a good game I’d rather pay the money up front than have to figure out what purchase options in f2p games are worth it.

Why have I avoided f2p? Well, there’s usually a catch: “pay to win”, right?. At least that’s the perception I, and many of my friends (gamers of my generation, 28–40) have. We don’t want any of that toxic model; figuring out what to buy, getting done over by paying for the wrong thing… having to keep updated on what offers are on… what’s good in a certain ‘season’. Just… no thanks. Look, game developers: make a good, proper game, with clear options into what — if any — versions you’re selling — and I’ll happily pay full price for it (or wait for a sale and pick it up a bit cheaper). Don’t make me as the consumer figure out what to buy… Am I getting old?

You see, I envisaged games utilising a f2p model desperately trying to suck you in. Once you’re enjoying the game, the challenge will come, and you’ll realise you’re trying to play the game with a straight jacket on, and the only way you can compete is to start forking out money… and end up spending more than what a title using a normal traditional selling model would set you back… and then you’ll have to put in all the work into what items and “season passes”, DLCs, and whatever the hell else you have to buy in order to actually get anywhere. No thank you… And you can forget all the cosmetic stuff you can buy. I couldn’t care less what stupid hat my character is wearing, nor do I want to pay real-world currency for it.

Path of Exile: The Game

Wait, How Do they Actually Make Any Money?

Path of Exile is an action roleplaying game, a hack’n’slash. A clickfest, a loot grinder. You’re constantly wiping out mobs of monsters, demons, and whatever else you can, in search of a loot drop: that better weapon, that shiny armour, gems, currency, whatever. Hopefully it’s good for your character, or you’ll sell it to an NPC vendor. Rinse and repeat.

PoE is a Diablo clone (simply because Diablo epitomised the ARPG hack’n’slash genre), and it’s not interested in appealing to any sort of casual player, which Diablo III definitely did. The thing is, when it comes to this genre of game — I’d say I am the more casual gamer here.

The game itself throws you onto a beach, in the cold, the wind, and of course the dark… in a world full of gothic monsters, insects, demons… (and whatever other foul creations fit the setting) found roaming around the countryside. They dwell inside dungeons and crypts, desolate wastelands, and the odd forest. You? You’re an exile, because, uh… it’s in the name? …And that’s about all you’ll end up understanding — or wanting to — if you’re anything like me.

PoE’s f2p model is a strange choice. It’s like they want to appeal to those hardcore Diablo II players who didn’t quite like Diablo III. I mean, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem (Steam link) is a current Diablo clone released last month, and it’s a Steam top seller right now, selling for £30.99… despite currently having mixed reviews, it’s done well for itself. Yet, PoE has positive reviews, and is free… So are they even trying to make money? More on that later.

Loot, Items, and Stats

As I’ve mentioned, in a game like PoE, the game is all about acquiring and selling loot… to make money… to buy more loot so you can kill monsters easier to get loot to sell loot to —

You’ve got to know what items are worth picking up amongst the thousands of things that drop. The issue here is the transparency of the items. Their stats, their other qualities like rarity, magic, normal types, …, it requires a bit of thought with the interface design — so how does PoE handle that? I mean, it’s essentially what you’re playing the entire game for: to gain loot. It might help to be able to discern the wheat from the chaff.

One example is looking at armour. You’ve got mention of: armour rating itself, evasion rating, and energy shield rating. Uh… Right, so the way I see it is, I’m a rogue-dagger-wielding-type (what the game calls a Shadow: you’re good with daggers, you’re quick, mobile, and you can set traps). Evasion Rating sounds about right to me — suitable. I then look in that massive network node graph… and I see mention of evasion rating %age increase stats in the other adjacent nodes around me, meaning that it’s got to be the more relevant stat for my character. Armour rating itself must be for more close-quarters players, and energy shield? No idea. Sounds like a magic thing, for magic casters that use the intelligence stat.

An Aid To Helping You Filter The Loot You Want

You see, the game itself makes mention in loading tooltips, and is tucked away in its UI game settings — that you’re supposed to configure yourself a lootfilter: a configuration set in which you can filter out the loot that you want to concentrate on: be it item worth, rarity, and abilities. A friend of my with who has clocked a few hundred hours on Steam playing PoE told me that a loot filter is an essential thing to have when playing PoE.

When you Google “PoE lootfilter”, this is where it gets completely maddening — overwhelming, even — and even now I worry that I’m missing out on items because I don’t have the time — or even patience — to pick them up (I say worry, but I don’t really care at the moment).

Inventory space is limited, so you’ve got to be selective in picking up the plethora of items that drop on the ground after killing monsters. The thing is, these loot filters aren’t solely configured in the game. You literally download a file from the Internet and put it into your game directory and configure it that way. That’s right, instead of having the configuration, explanation, or ability to understand or do something in the game, you’re landing again on some wiki to make head or tail of anything.

There’s even a GitHub lootfilter. I just want to play a game and kill minions. And the thing is… I can. I more than can. Even if I get a lootfilter installed, I wouldn’t know what to filter out anyway. Also, interestingly, I have no idea how you would get a lootfilter working on console platforms.

Rule of thumb: pick up anything that’s got a yellow name, pick up anything that’s a ring or amulet because they take up one inventory slot, and anything that’s a gem or a scroll. You’ll begin to appreciate the amount of gem slots on items, and whether they’re linked, but again, that’s far too fidly to hover over every item, let alone look at the few pixels the game UI uses to convey that information.

Did You Really Want Storytelling Prowess?

The story in Path of Exile is pretty barebones… or at least it comes across as being, because it’s not delivered to you as something that you are required to understand, nor does it engage with you on any level. The aforementioned friend told me that this story was thrown together during the alpha stages of the game, and I guess that shows.

As the player, I’ve got no real interest in whatever is going on, as I don’t feel like I’m involved or engaged in anything meaningful, be it storyline or world building, because none of it feels like it has anything to do with my character. There are no dialogue options, little to no choices to be made. I’m probably doing your standard “fetch quests” in the story, but I don’t care. I just travel to the area I need to go to, leaving a trail of corpses and unwanted loot in my wake, burst into whatever dungeon, cave, crypt, or building, murder everything in there, and pick up whatever item shows on my minimap. I’ll then go back to town, dump whatever items I don’t understand the stats of into my stash “for later”, sell whatever looks rubbish to a vendor… and continue to get the next quest.

I don’t even know who or what I am. I’m just a bloke slaying anything that attacks me and forking back loot that I don’t even know if I should be selling. It’s fun enough, and I don’t even want anyone talking to me or giving me some historical account, or trying to impress me with their character backstory. It’s nice that it’s there, but this game is solely about gameplay, and the sooner you realise that the better. It’s more fun and productive to ignore all of it and concentrate on the gameplay.

Even if you want to give the story a punt, it’s quite funny when you click on these audio book type icons, you try and give the story stuff a chance, yet some little gremlin or whatever starts hurling crap at you, so you click off listening to the book, then end up getting into a fight with a mob and you can’t hear or concentrate on whatever the character was saying anyway.

It’s actually quite charming to see the developers realise they aren’t setting out to win any writing awards here. The story elements don’t push themselves upon you, unlike some AAA games of today with unskippable cutscenes, this game knows it’s all about the gameplay.

The Difficulty: Where’s The Challenge And Incentive?

I’m not even experienced in these sort of games, yet in Path of Exile (I’ve just entered Act 3, of a total 4 Acts(?)) I feel like — for most of the time — I’m just holding down one ranged attack bound to my middle mouse button with my ‘Shadow’ character, and obliterating everything in one hit. I sometimes try and place one of my traps, but the thing starts firing at enemies way after I’ve quickly butchered them with throwing knives. I know my character is a rogue type. I deal high damage per second, but I’m quite fragile. Fragile? I feel untouchable.

The thing is, apart from the occasional boss, I’m just slaughtering anything put in front of me. I forget that I have healing potions. Mana? I have mana? Oh, right. Even though I’ve been spamming an ability that consumes it, I don’t ever recall needing to drink a mana potion.

It’s fun enough, but this could get tiring if the difficulty doesn’t pose more of a challenge in later Acts in the game story. Again, with me having no incentive to buy items and improvements for the game with my real world money, it seems a little strange from a business perspective.

A casual stroll through the woods, with casual genocide of the local wildlife in action

An example of a mob that approached me: I killed them all by clicking just once, using ‘Ethereal Knives’, an ability bound to my MMB. My mana will recharge itself quickly enough that I’ll never notice it being utilised. I’ve got Viper Strike, bound to my RMB, which is my highest damage dealing attack, yet 90% of enemies never get close enough to me to unleash it, and the ranged attack is far quicker and one-shots most of what I’m running into anyway.

There’s an NPC that wants you to capture beasts with him so you can slaughter them in some sort of arena bloodsport sacrifice. Capturing the beasts is a little tougher, but nothing I still can’t make short work of.

What About The Roleplaying, Building My Character?

Oh, Christ, have a look at this glorious skill tree. It looks like a network graph for the most complicated underground subway system, or something out of a Computer Science graph theory course.

The complexity of the passive skill tree makes the London Underground network look simple

PoE doesn’t care if you think it’s skill tree is complex. It takes pride in it, and expects its player base to think so too. After all, you can traverse and unlock any node and respective ability/buff/skill/spell in any which way you so choose.

Feeling overwhelmed yet? To be fair, that’s what it looks like when you scroll all the way out of that skill tree view. Whatever character class you chose to play actually starts within a starting node in there, so you’re only even really choosing between a few different paths and not having to travel very far at all, so it still feels like you’re playing an actual character class. It’s transparent enough with what each node unlocked gives you: it could be critical damage, better physical damage, chance to deal electric damage with your physical attacks, absorbing or regeneration life or mana… but, for example… chaos damage vs physical damage is something I’m still getting my head around, especially when it comes to investing in one trait over the other.

PoE doesn’t really explain to me what the difference is. A lot of games of this ilk allow you to hover over the words “chaos magic” as if its a hyperlink, and provide a tooltip explanation. That can also be information overload, and I’ve experienced a lot of games putting you in a ghastly starting tutorial to explain it all, or just remove the complexity entirely and roll out a much more dumbed down solution.

Even if I click my character screen, I don’t understand what’s on screen. One, it’s scrollable. And there are tabs. Does it also have hover over? I dread to know. Where is any mention of ‘chaos damage’ or anything else that compliments — or even helps me — choose a node in the character skill tree.

Shadows need dexterity, right? I’ve gone all in here and it seems to be working, anyway!: 42 INT, 43 STR, 196 DEX.

I’ll be honest and fair: PoE does have a help section within the game (it’s that yellow icon on the right next to all my skills) explaining a few core game concepts and mechanics, but this seems to be a cut-down version of their respective wiki pages, and after browing through the in-game help, it hasn’t really helped feel comfortable in my understanding, because it’s not drip fed to me. A bigger budget title, for example, would give you information on gems, when you first pick up a gem, and probably start highlighting the areas on your inventory items.

Whilst that information is there, and while it may be debatably may be so overly esoteric, at the current moment, I feel I don’t really require the knowledge in those PoE wiki pages to play and enjoy the game.

Game Currency

Gold, right? That’s what we had in Diablo. That’s what we had in any RPG game we’ve ever played. Even in real life, we pay for things using one currency when we go to the shop. The thing is, no, again, PoE wants to make it more complex that currency alone warrants its own detailed, in-depth wiki page, and then further pages for each currency type.

There are so many different orbs, scrolls, item and armour improvements… and they all do their own thing if you use them on an item: upgrade a normal to a magic, a normal to a rare; improve the quality (what does quality improve?!) of a weapon or armour; reroll the gem slots, links… the list goes on.

The thing is, even when you sell, say, a sword to a vendor, it feels like you’ll get back whatever they feel like giving you. Some blue squiggly things, some scrolls that identify items, a glass bottle, a chunk of rock… As a newcomer to the game, you’ve got no understanding of how you’re going to pay for a new dagger, or sell anything, because you don’t know the value of anything.

If you casually go and give currency a Google, you’ll then bump on to the wiki page and a gigantic currency conversion matrix with what looks like hundreds of types of currency.

Some of these currency items that perform a certain roll on items, such as giving it new properties, new gem slots, etc, also seem to have some randomisation behind them, and there’s even a matrix for that so you can see how it’s going to effect the item. Want to actually use that currency item for anything other than buying-selling? What it’ll do to that pair of gloves is anyone’s game. It could give them a dexterity increase, or intelligence, or change the gem slots to gem colours you’re not using… God only knows (or perhaps you could memorise that item effect randomisation matrix?)

Here’s an overview of the higher level currencies. You get even smaller currency that merges into an orb, and some are base 20 and base 40. Why did they make currency so complex?

Oh, yeah. It Is Actually A Multiplayer Game! What Are These Different Game Modes?

I actually chose not to mention this game is an online, multiplayer game at the beginning of this post. When you start Path of Exile, you’ll see something called “Delirium”, “Standard”, and “hardcore” game modes. Delirium is the current “league”. I believe leagues have certain challenges, but again, I’ve had to go and look that up, despite them pushing this Delirium thing on me, I’ve got no real understanding of a league — let alone the ‘events’ and noticeboard stuff going on in this game, you can ignore all of it. Who knows how many hours you’ll have to put into PoE to eventually have any interest in understanding of it. I stuck with Standard.

There are also some acronyms alongside the other game modes, I’ve no idea what they stand for, as the game never says, but apparently, they’re to make the game single player only. That’s what makes me laugh. Usually in online role playing games, when you are in a town where there are NPCs (Non-Player Characters), you’ll see other players mulling about at the stash box and selling and buying from the vendors. I’ve caught glimpses of other players… but about 3–4 at a time, max. You can actually trade items with each other, and message each other. At least at this level of the game, no one’s interested, and probably for the same reasons I’m not: I don’t have any knowledge of game items, value, or the currency itself. And here I was thinking I’d gift a low level player I spotted some items to help them. I wouldn’t know where to start.

A Unique Approach To Skills And Abilities: Gems

Gems come in three different colours that make it a nightmare if you’re red-green (most common) colourblind: red, green, and blue.

Throughout the game, you’ll acquire and find gems of different colours. These gems all have their own skill abilities that allow you to perform spells, attacks, buffs, debuffs, etc. You simply slot them into the respective colour node of an item.

Here’s a bow that takes a gem of each colour.

If you look at the bow weapon in the above image, you’ll see that the gem nodes are linked. Some gems are support gems. This means, when a node is linked, a support gem can be placed, and it improves whatever gem in a node that it’s linked to.

The abilities from gems, if you’re using them in the correct weapon, will then be available for you to cast, and will be bound to your mouse buttons and QWER, and QWER with CTRL Just… good luck reading the description of a gem and understanding if it’s a suitable ability for your character.

Each gem actually levels up. You don’t just level up your character, but those gems as well. It’s quite fun performing gem rotation and trying out other skills and spells, and then figuring out your favourite skills are, and optimal route to take with support gems to boost those skills.

Unfortunately, your stash, where you store all your items, usually becomes overloaded with gems and numerous currency stacks (which don’t seem to stack automatically), and having to hover over each one becomes a chore, but inventory and stash management become a vital part of the game, and something you’ll soon realise PoE monetises through real-world currency. You may even end up buying those once you understand it, eh?

The gem system is really unique, and I think it’s something the game does really well, but again suffers with lack of clarity. I couldn’t understand why I could no longer use Cobra Lash, a gem I had been spamming the ability of for hours. I thoroughly read the gem description, and the item requirement stated there that it needed to be used in a dagger. My item was a dagger. In fact, I went back and dug out from my stash my old dagger, I then put the Cobra Lash green gem back inside the same green gem slot in my old dagger. Nope, skill still showed as unavailable. I couldn’t figure out why, I started Googling the game message. I definitely had the requirements for it, the weapon is the right type, come on, this is my highest level gem and I can’t use it now, is the game bugged? It turns out because I was dual wielding, and my other weapon is a one-handed sword, and not a dagger, that the gem couldn’t be used. It was easily rectified when I dual wielded both weapons that were daggers. As I mentioned: lack of clarity.

Conclusion: Is This Game Actually Any Fun?

Path of Exile does certainly seem to appeal to the more hardcore of gamers, but somehow chose to be a free to play game. There is unnecessary complexity here, and this is reflective in a lot of the items they sell for your real money in the game, to help you manage and organise your stash, such as a stash tab for currency amongst many other stash upgrades, such as tab naming and colour customisation. Each of these stash items, for example, works out to be about $5–10USD a piece, but right now, I wouldn’t justify buying one because my understanding of the intricacies of the game don’t warrant me buying, and that’s a shame, because they’re currently on sale, as the game likes to advertise. The thing is, you can imagine how obnoxious a mobile game would make this — but PoE doesn’t do this at all. If you want to buy something, you need experience and hours in the game to understand what you’re buying, and this certainly keeps your wallet at bay.

And hey, I’m not exactly struggling in the game, as I mentioned in the difficulty section.

Path of Exile seems to use these complexities I’ve mentioned in it’s game design to help sell items to generate Grinding Gear Games money, but I feel this works more against it from a mass market perspective, as only the niche of core PoE gamers (i.e. those that are approaching perhaps the 100hr mark) will end up forking out for such purchasable options.

I’ve played just under 20hrs in Path of Exile, and still don’t feel like I need to spend a penny (not that I’d understand what I’m buying!)

For a game that has been as much fun as the mainstream hack’n’slasher Diablo III and hasn’t cost me a penny, it’s a great way to have fun without forking over any money, and you can safely continue to ignore all of its complexities until they may eventually start to make sense.

Throughout the campaign, you’ll solve trials which test your movement ability, such as this super hot floor that’ll kill you quickly if you step on it when it’s in the scorching phase

Just remember that other modern games in this genre like Diablo III, Wolcen, and Grim Dawn cost £15–40, so if you do start spending money, compare your investment to that of those titles.

PoE is a great game of its genre, it’s easy to pick up and play, yet difficult to master due to its aforementioned complexities. Best of all, it’s free, so if you’ve never even tried a game like this before, go and try it!