Path of Exile Coming to PlayStation 4, Private Leagues Announced

Grinding Gear Games brought their hack ‘n’ slash action-RPG Path of Exile to Xbox One back in 2017. And now, the game is also set to be released on PlayStation 4. Which means that come December 2018, a whole new subset of players will get a chance to explore the deadly shores of Wraeclast, fight plenty of tough monsters, and get showered in loot. Here’s the official PlayStation 4 release trailer:

And if you’d like to play through Path of Exile with a couple of friends and no one else, or if you’re interested in drastically increasing the game’s difficulty, according to this announcement, you will soon be able to do so thanks to the so-called Private Leagues. Here’s how they will work:

Next week we’ll announce Path of Exile 3.5.0, our largest expansion this year. In the meantime, we have a smaller announcement to make today. Ever since the start of Path of Exile’s development, we planned to add support for players to pay for the creation of a private league for them and their friends to play in. We’re pleased to announce that we will start making these Private Leagues available for purchase next week. These leagues allow you to add mods that make Path of Exile more challenging for you and your friends.

We designed private leagues with the needs of two groups of players in mind. The first group is players who want a more challenging Path of Exile experience. The second is players who want to see how far they and their friends can get without outside influence from the rest of a league.

Private Leagues will be fun for content creators who want to create an entertaining stream or video by playing Path of Exile on obscenely difficult settings, potentially alongside members of their communities.

Philosophically, it’s important to us that Private Leagues don’t make the game easier. That’s what special events like Flashback, Turmoil and Mayhem are for. We’ll continue to run special events like these in the future.

Pricing

Private leagues cost 120 points to create. By default, they last 10 days and have 10 player slots.

• Additional blocks of 10 player slots can be purchased for 60 points.
• Additional blocks of 100 player slots can be purchased for 600 points.
• Additional blocks of 10 days can be purchased for 60 points.
• Additional blocks of 30 days can be purchased for 180 points.
• Additional mods that make the game more challenging can be added for free at league creation.

You can add additional player slots and days at any time once the league has started.

Currently you can’t extend a league beyond two months in length, as the system is new and we are still experimenting with it.

League Difficulty Mods

During league creation, the following mods can be added at no additional cost:

Mods that separately increase Monster Damage, Life, Speed, Elemental Damage and Number of Projectiles: These mods often come in several tiers, and make monsters harder in various ways. You can add whichever combination of these various mods you desire to increase the challenge of monsters in the league.

Reduced Player Resistances: Having a blanket resistance penalty not only makes combat harder, but also increases the difficulty of finding a set of perfect gear that meets all your resistance needs.

No Stashes: This one’s for the true masochists. Without the ability to store items for later, characters in a No Stashes league need to live off the land with constraints that make completing Path of Exile a lot more challenging. You can parent to an SSF league to disable trade, guaranteeing that your characters are fully self-sufficient.

No Magic or Rare Items Drop: In leagues of this type, you can only find normal and, at their usual drop rate, unique items, so you have to use every currency item you find to add mods to your gear. You’ll find yourself actually using Orbs of Transmutation, running out of Essences and treasuring every Chaos Orb for its intended purpose. Trade values of currency items will likely be extremely different in leagues like this, due to opportunity cost.

No Vending: In a No Vending league, you can’t buy items from or sell items to NPCs in town. You’re still able to complete quest objectives, but can’t rely on vendor recipes or NPC shops to gear up.

Famine: In Famine leagues, your life, mana, energy shield and flasks do not refill when you go to town. This can be added alongside other mods to create the ultimate live-off-the-land league.

We have plans for even more mods to add to this system, such as item durability (where item quality can become negative with use and the item is destroyed when it hits -20%).

Many of these existing mods can be designed to create leagues that are like the “ironman” modes that players enjoyed with old-school Action RPGs in the 90s. Adding durability, turning off vendors, flask refills and stashes lets you test yourself using only the items that Wraeclast serves up to you. Alternatively, you could add a pile of punitive monster mods and experience extremely tough combat in a fresh economy. With mods like these, even the existing campaign and low maps can be made extremely challenging for our best players.

Once a league has started, the mods cannot be changed. This is so that players who complete difficult objectives in the league can easily demonstrate that all the mods were present at the point that it was achieved.