Path of Exile Opens Up

Path of Exile.  I have written a bit about it before.

It looked, for a while, to be the third horse in the “Heir to Diablo II” race last year, but then never quite got there, leaving the field to Diablo III and Torchlight II.

Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It might have gotten a little more attention going up against one of those at launch, but it likely would have suffered for it as well.  So the other two have had their launches and… have gone somewhat quiet since.  Diablo III shipped without any post-launch follow up plan it seems, while the team at Runic that did both Torchlight and Torchlight II is reportedly tired of working on that franchise and want to do something different. (Where is my Mac OS version of the game?)

So it is a quiet time in the click-click-click RPG niche, which might be just the right time for Path of Exile to go… well… a little more public with their game.  And so open beta has been announced.

According to their latest press release, open beta starts… tomorrow.  Not that the previous year of closed beta was tough to get into.  You just had to sign up and wait for a few days or a week and eventually you got an invite.

Now though… or tomorrow… you should be able to go to their site, sign up, and get access to the game right away.

This will also be the last wipe of the player base.  Or so say the developers.  This effectively means that the game launches tomorrow, as any progress you make with your character after that point is yours to keep.

And since this is a free to play, cash shop supported game, the transition from “open beta” to “live” seems to me to be more philosophical than anything; very much in line with every Facebook game being flagged as “beta” for most of their success.

As for the game itself, it has been about a year since I last logged in for a look.  But even back then I gave it high marks for capturing the essence of Diablo II.

And a year later, after playing Diablo III and Torchlight II, that clip still “feels” a lot more like Diablo II than either of those other games.  It might be time to patch up and give Path of Exile another look and see what has changed in the last year.