The product of a wasted youth, wasted prime and getting into wasted middle age, Dominic Tarason is a freelance writer, occasional indie PR guy and professional techno-hermit seen in many strange corners of the internet and seldom in reality.
The bad news is that Path of Exile 2’s early access debut won’t be the full game, as initially hoped. The good news is, even limited to half of the main story and six of the planned 12 classes, this is shaping up to be one of 2024’s best action-RPGs.
The tail end of my time with the Monk saw me picking up a skill that made my dodge rolls drop ghostly after-images that also conferred Power charges if destroyed, encouraging risky attack-baiting combat. And that was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of character building. I’ve not even seen what build-warping options the Monk’s ascendancy sub-classes will offer, and I was only playing with the first eight of maybe 20 skills intended for the class.
So, character-building is intuitive, fun and fast, and the process of smashing monsters into loot-studded paste is satisfying too. But without a narrative hook or interesting places to go or monsters to slay, that could all be undermined. Fortunately PoE2 is no slouch there either.
They’re a beautifully varied set of encounters, from the aforementioned Count and his gnarly monster-wolf form to an Aztec-styled guard captain that you have to fight in a shifting ring of spear-and-shield wielding soldiers that contract or thrust at you at their commander’s barked orders.
You can freely trade one currency item for another, but it comes with a gold tax, and gold can also be spent on quickly and easily respeccing parts of your sprawling passive skill tree. There was even some talk of letting players sell items to one another through trading NPCs in their customisable hideouts, albeit with a gold tax to prevent this major ease-of-use feature from completely obliterating direct player-to-player item trading.
While not in the preview build I had access to, the studio was hard at work completely re-working the Flask system, a part of Path of Exile which has remained almost unchanged since the first game’s beta release.
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