Path of Exile Preview

The editors at eGamer continue a week of action RPG previews with a hands-on set of impressions for Grinding Gear’s Path of Exile. Here’s a sampling about the fixed camera, in-game currency, and classes:

The game play itself is exactly what you’d expect from the genre: a great fixed camera angle view, decent graphics for it’s detailed terrain with a variety of monsters spanning, for the moment, two acts. The game is particularly dark lighting wise, sometimes too dark for my liking. I’ve suggested a gamma slider on the forums and I’m almost sure the final game will probably have one.

One particularly unique aspect of the game is its game currency. There is no gold. Profound I know, but basically monsters drop orbs, items and scrolls (portal or identification). Scrolls are your bread and butter for item identification and easy transportation to and from town and are fairly common. However since there’s no gold to use to buy them you just have to pick them all up as you go since you really will need them at some point. Orbs are used to perform various upgrades on items. There are orbs to do almost anything to an item. I would list them all here but you can quite easily read about them on the Path of Exile site. Anyway orbs are used to buy items from vendors and items generally sell to vendors for pieces of orbs or a full orb if it’s a goodie. Also since all the orbs serve some sort of useful purchase they translate into a perfect currency for inter player trading (just like runes in Diablo 2).

There are currently five playable characters with a sixth character scheduled for release soon hopefully. Three of the characters specialize in pure Strength Dexterity or Intelligence, with the other three Characters being a hybrid of two of each these attributes.

Seriously, that picture of the passive skill tree is just crazy.