Path Of Exile’s next expansion is called Echoes Of The Atlas, as announced earlier this evening on a live Twitch broadcast. He’s adding the usual mix of new features to the free hack-and-slasher, including new maps, game-ending content and a new challenge league. You can play it on January 15th, but you can go down right now to watch the ad and read some more details.
Here is the official trailer:
Update 3.13 for Path Of Exile is called Echoes Of The Atlas, and is introducing eleven new maps, redefined ancestry, passive skill trees for the Atlas game map and new endgame bosses.
I’m not sure if I ever looked at Path Of Exile and thought, “What it takes is more skill trees.” And yet: the new passive trees in the Atlas are skill trees that are on the game map, with a different skill tree for each area. If you are already an experienced player, it is a way to introduce a lot of significant new decisions into your journey through the game.
Each Path Of Exile expansion also features a new challenge league, in which players compete to advance through the levels with a new character. This time it is the Ritual league, in which players trigger rituals that summon a large number of enemies to kill, and each triggered ritual also summons all enemies from each previously completed ritual. It seems that the number of enemies will increase to absurd numbers, but there are systems that allow you to adjust the risk and the reward of each fight before starting it.
The final new content focuses on a scary new character called Maven, who likes to watch you fight. By defeating bosses, you will eventually gain the ability to summon her to any part of the map so that she can watch you fight other bosses. Success in these the fights eventually lead Maven to invite you to her kingdom, where she created copies of the previously defeated bosses so that you can fight in groups of them simultaneously in increasing numbers, up to a maximum of 10.
There are a lot of other additions and changes, including previous challenge leagues, like Harvest, being incorporated into the base game, which you can see by watching the full content revealed on YouTube.
Path Of Exile developers launched a new expansion every three months for years, almost without fail. This latest expansion is a rare case of one of the release dates slipping, but it’s not because it wasn’t made. It’s because they didn’t want to launch at the same time as Cyberpunk 2077. Who can blame them? Everyone got out of the way of the cyber beast.
We consider Path Of Exile one of the best RPGs for PC and one of the best free games for PC. If, like me, you have an occasional desire to immerse yourself in an action RPG, you might want to try it – but I’ll wait for Path Of Exile 2, which the last time we heard was to enter the beta sometime this year.