Path of Exile - 2013 Summary

Grinding Gear Games has a new post with details on the progress of Path of Exile in 2013, and wishes you a Happy New Year.

Path of Exile: 2013 in Summary

It's just about to become 2014 in New Zealand, so we've decided to post a short retrospective on what has been the most exciting year of Path of Exile's history. PoE's success in 2013 is almost entirely due to our amazing community. Your patience, support, feedback and dedication have allowed us to grow Path of Exile into the game we always wanted it to be. Thank you for an amazing year - we're looking forward to making 2014 even better!

In 2013:

• Path of Exile evolved from Closed Beta to Open Beta (late January) and then to full Release (late October).
• We deployed 87 patches, ran over 1000 race events, posted 286 daily deals and 222 news posts.
• Grinding Gear Games expanded from 20 people to 55! While our core development team doubled in size (to 35) we also scaled up our customer support department by a factor of ten.
• We had three sets of supporter packs for sale at different times during 2013 (the tail end of the Closed Beta packs, the Open Beta packs and the current Release packs.
• Over 3.7 million new players signed up to play Path of Exile.
• We hit a peak of almost 70,000 people playing Path of Exile at the same time. We expect to beat this record as we localise the game to more countries next year!
• We had the pleasure of meeting several hundred fans at meetups in various countries.
• Zero Unique Fish were caught.
• 1 in every 500 people alive visited www.pathofexile.com.
• Path of Exile won numerous awards including GameSpot's 2013 PC Game of the Year.

Have a great New Year, guys. Thanks again for everything.

More information.

In all honesty, I got to congratulate them for creating this gem of a game and taking it from a rough gem to a pretty polished one. There's still a lot of potential clearly there, so I'm looking forward to new acts and updates.

Anyone who hasn't tried it yet, I recommend it. Especially if you like dark fantasy and refreshing gameplay mechanics in roguelikes/ARPGs.

Think I'm going to give this a try again. I tried out the beta a LOOOONG time back and I did indeed see potential, but also a lot of spreadsheet-like tedium. So, here's hoping the release is more about fun than it is about min-maxing.

Way I see it now, 50 hours in, you can make almost any kind of build work if it suits your playstyle, so there's no need for min-maxing. Maybe not make it work extremely well, but make it work nonetheless. There's no 'optimal build' really. The huge passive skill tree is still there, that may be daunting at first, but it's great fun actually.

Originally Posted by Soulbane
Way I see it now, 50 hours in, you can make almost any kind of build work if it suits your playstyle, so there's no need for min-maxing. Maybe not make it work extremely well, but make it work nonetheless. There's no 'optimal build' really. The huge passive skill tree is still there, that may be daunting at first, but it's great fun actually.

I my experience you can steamroll with any build on first 2 difficulties but on last weaknesses in build really start to show especially if you play solo, lot less if you are in group.That is where you need good build and good gear to back it.But there is no need for cookie cutter build, there are many strange builds that work they just have to be well thought out.

Some classes are naturally easier to build than others, on marauder you just get blood magic and any hp and hp regen nod and you are fine no matter what build you go on him, templar on other hand is more difficult.

The final boss is very difficult without an optimal build.

I definitely had more fun with this than with any other Diablo clone in recent years (of course including the horrible D3).

Certainly going to play it again this year.