Path of Exile 2 Preview

It’s often hard to find a game or developer that has built up enough goodwill, understands its loyal community, and is willing to constructively take on feedback from players to improve things. Many big RPGs or multiplayer projects struggle with this. Bungie has spent years facing criticism that its player onboarding in Destiny 2 is terrible. Grinding Gear Games has faced similar comments from players who found themselves lost in Path of Exile or bricking their builds.

Well more than half a decade ago, the New Zealand-based developer decided it wanted to try and fix that, while updating some of the older aspects of their action RPG. Now in 2024, that effort has become Path of Exile 2, a huge, incredible action RPG that keeps the depth fans love, but presents it all in a delightful package that makes it easier for people to jump in and see what the playerbase loves so much about the experience.

I got to go hands-on with an early Alpha build of Path of Exile 2 for about a week. This had all the content available during the game’s Early Access launch, but was running off a dedicated game build for reviewers, not the live servers. This did however, make the experience really unstable. I ran into many server hitches, disconnections, an issue where a few of my skills vanished and remained unusable after the build was patched, and in the final day or so before the launch of the game I was completely unable to start the client despite the build still being accessible.

Therefore, these impressions are unscored for now due to the Early Access nature of the build until we play the final version. I will just be touching on the content I did manage to play, which was notably excellent, and how also on how Grinding Gear Games has streamlined everything on offer in Path of Exile 2 exceptionally well.

A Feast For Fans

Simply put, Path of Exile 2 is incredible on the content side. I haven’t seen an early access release of this nature that was as packed with content. With three of the six campaign acts planned included, most of the endgame in place, challenge dungeons and trials for Ascension here, and tons of small side activities, quests, and bosses, Path of Exile 2 is bigger than the size of some triple-A RPGs already.

Grinding Gear Games has promised to double the size of the game content over early access and given the brand loyalty they have built up, I am inclined to believe them. That content has some drastic improvements, including a smooth campaign experience that guides players, without pulling them along a leash.

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Everything about exploring the world and learning how Path of Exile 2’s systems work is significantly improved here.

There are far more tooltips, explainers, and tutorial messages in Path of Exile 2 that do a much better job at telling players how to play the game, what items do, and what they are used for. This means the actual campaign serves its purpose here guiding you through the mechanics of Path of Exile, slowly expanding the depth and breadth naturally, rather than dropping you in the middle of the action and saying “good luck”.

But, veteran players won’t feel dragged down by this tutorialization as it is non-intrusive and easy to skip or ignore if you want.

Throughout the campaign you travel across several maps, visiting individual levels marked as nodes. Within these levels you can find side quests to complete, loot to find, optional world bosses, and more. Some of these are fairly traditional. However, in my time playing I ran into some really exciting encounters. One of those involved a chase across a section of the map to catch a boss that moved when he lost 33% and 66% of his health.

This fight took place in different shaped arenas: from a field, to a condensed cornered off area between two fences, to a tight crater that had been left in the ground. Other bosses saw big transformations mid-fight that upped the difficulty and looked fantastic. Path of Exile 2 was constantly shaking things up to ensure the grindy, repetitive aspects of the genre were mitigated to the best of Grinding Gear Games’ ability.

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As you would expect, boss fights are some of the standout moments. during the campaign.

Exploring is also just as good as those encounters were engaging. I spent 20-30 minutes exploring each and every level or area, combing it for loot, potential world bosses to take on, side quests, and puzzles. The varied locales even within the same campaign act look fantastic and the game covers everywhere from a dark, blood-filled manor to a burning village, and a seafront. It all looks spectacular too and is supported by excellent voice acting, sound effects, and music.

Time to Grind

As with the rest of the game, progression here has been somewhat streamlined to make it easier to understand, although it is still complex enough for fans of the series. All your stats have been transferred over to armor and gear, making everything way easier to manage and see at a glance. But, this gear can be stacked with stats upon stats.

Health and mana buffs, health regeneration buffs, individual stat increases for Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence, armor improvements, energy shield increases, elemental resistance tweaks, elemental damage increases, damage boosts, stun threshold enhancements that allow you to stun enemies quicker, and so much more. Although everything has been streamlined into one section of your character build, the same level of depth and options are still there.

Using Orbs of Augmentation, which you find throughout the game from killing enemies, you can add these stat affixes to each individual piece of armor or weapon, with more room for more buffs as the rarity of the gear you find increases.

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Gear can come in various forms, and golden items are the rarest, besides unique drops from named bosses and foes.

Similarly, skills for your build work like this too, with support gems allowing you to stack skills on top of skills, giving them additional effects and bonuses. I was never scrounging for this currency or having to frustratingly hunt for it, but it also isn’t plentiful either so choices matter.

Being able to respec easily is also a huge improvement in Path of Exile 2. Costing a small bit of gold in your camp, you can respec individual nodes in the expansive passive tree, if you ever make a choice you don’t like. However, the tree has been reformatted to avoid this happening early on.

Every option around where you start in the tree is useful for your class, before branching out to skills that would benefit a specific build for your class. Then, you will reach some skills within clusters that aren’t too useful, but by that point you will be familiar with the game’s stats and how combat and progression works. It’s pretty hard to brick your build unintentionally in Path of Exile 2.

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The Passive skill tree is huge, but for the first 15 or so levels, you don’t have to worry about wasting your points.

Combat is flexible, and not necessarily reliant on just a skill or two. You can play that way if you like, but the variety of skills on offer for a weapon type and class mean there are really three to four strategies you can adopt. For example, I played a Warrior and could either play a Shield-using defensive tank. Or, I could use a variety of area-of-effect skills to place totems and earthquakes that wipe out hordes of enemies.

I could also craft a build around procking Stun on enemies so that when I killed them, my skills and upgrades would cause them to explode, damaging enemies around them. That can then be amplified with additional elemental effects like Rage and Combustion or passed onto totems I placed to damage enemies without ever swinging my two-handed mace. You can also combine these playstyles to create a mega-build of sorts that does everything, but perhaps isn’t particularly strong at any one thing.

It’s all impressively flexible and fun to figure out how you want to play your class. You can even use other weapons like a Bow on a Warrior or a a giant greathammer on a Witch if you have the stats for it. They won’t necessarily play into your classes’ strengths but it is possible and not many games allow you to break from the confines of a class in this way.

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The Warrior can conjure totems, spikes in the ground, and shockwaves to damage enemies continuously.

That solid progression and flexibility combines with the excellent combat, exploration, and gameplay to create a masterclass in action RPGs. It is clear that Grinding Gear Games know what they are doing at this point and their ability to toss out some ideas that complicated things in the original Path of Exile while also reworking systems to improve the overall experience here in Path of Exile 2 has to be commended.

Path of Exile 2 is simply a phenomenal action RPG. It really doesn’t get better than this if you are looking to check out the genre. If you are frustrated with the decisions some of the competition might be making too, then chances are Path of Exile 2 won’t be giving you the same headaches.