It’s important to understand that before I got my hands on Path of Exile 2 I had been travelling for 15 straight hours, including a long plane delay and then an aborted landing attempt that made me genuinely fear that I was going to feature in the next Boeing horror story. As a newcomer to what will soon be the Path of Exile series, I was already daunted by its famous complexity. Compounded with stress and sleeplessness, I was starting to worry that I might not be able to get a footing at all, and find myself completely adrift.
Path of Exile 2Publisher: Grinding Gear GamesDeveloper: Grinding Gear GamesAvailability: Coming to Early Access in 2024 for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox X/S.
But within a few minutes of picking up the controller, I realised I was relaxed. I had been deftly onboarded, and, despite the chaos of the day, figuring out what loot and passives I wanted to use to pick my way through rotted wolves, crawling forest imps, and fleshy underground slugs was unwinding, not intimidating.
“[Path of Exile 2] should certainly be a lot easier to get into,” says game director Jonathan Rogers, although he stresses that this isn’t at the expense of potential depth for your character once you get the hang of things (or if you’re a long term player coming from Path of Exile 1). The key, he says, is that actions like equipping new abilities are streamlined, and the opening areas are designed so that you will run into key tutorial aspects no matter what you choose to do first.
In early playtests, for example, “a lot of people…didn’t happen to get good RNG for the item drops, or they kind of picked the wrong skill…and they didn’t end up having a good time,” says Rogers. In more recent builds, things are nudged so that you should be able to learn the ropes and get your character at least powerful enough to survive. “All that stuff requires a lot of very subtle massaging of things to get it right,” says Rogers.