Path of Exile updates and how the game has changed

An exile's hideout

I've been playing PoE for a long time it seems (not as long as some!) It's a great game, and I highly recommend it, but I think it deserves an overview for those who might have heard of it or played it a while back, but not kept up on what's going on.

The game has evolved substantially in the past year or so and there's lots you should know. For starters, the amount of content in the game increased dramatically.

Rift: Ways to level, 1-60

Leveling in an MMO is always a challenge. Often,  it's more of a challenge just to stay awake than it is to actually succeed, but more often than not I find myself poking around to see if there's any cool ways to level. In EverQuest, grinding was all there was. Quests weren't really a way to level and instanced dungeons didn't really exist (they were added late in that game's evolution).

In WoW, your options were: dungeons or quests. If you had some friends with lots of spare time to help you, there was also a grinding method that worked well, but it required a tolerance for boredom that was nearly superhuman. Later on, PvP also became a lesser, but viable option.

In classic Rift, the options exploded. You had rifts, quests, PvP, dungeons, zone events and the usual grinding strategies. Then Storm Legion landed.

Has Blizzard given up on WoW?

Perhaps I'm spoiled by a shockingly productive development and design team on Rift, but I was stunned today when I read the patch notes for the upcoming 5.0 patch that's going to land for WoW. This is the first patch since 4.3 which introduced a bunch of new features including a new raid, 3 new 5-man dungeons and the Raid Finder feature. That was a good, solid content patch. Then, eight months later, you would think that they'd have something new to throw to the players while they wait for the September patch, no? Yep... a world event involving Theramore.

Rift: And now an expansion

Storm Legion logo
(c) Trion Worlds

Just a quick note on Rift: it seems like yesterday that I posted an article talking about how Rift was blowing the doors off content expectations, producing more new content than anyone else had in just one short year. Well, they continue to set the bar high for patches, but have raised it for the upcoming expansion. The expansion, which is now known to be called Storm Legion, is set to come out this fall. This is a smart move. Trion is counting on some people being a bit disappointed by the other offerings like Mists of Pandaria and Guild Wars 2, and they want to be the one to scoop the refugees as they did with Star Wars.