The Path of Exile 2 team is back from the holiday break, and kicking off the new year with a massive update whose tendrils reach into much of the game.
Image credit: Grinding Gear Games
The early access launch of Path of Exile 2 late last year has been incredibly successful. Not only did it arrive with a sizeable endgame for fans of the original PoE to sink their teeth into once they’re done with (what exists of) the campaign, it also served as a fresh start for new players and anyone who’d been curious about Path of Exile but never managed to get into it for all those years.
I liked much of what I played of it, but you could tell that the sequel is designed to offer an experience altogether different from its predecessor, something many of the older fans weren’t happy with.
Developer Grinding Gear Games has been incredibly responsive to feedback from all sections of Path of Exile 2 players from the day the early access build went live. Even before we said goodbye to 2024, the team managed to put out a couple of big patches. Now, it’s time for the first one of those in the new year.
Once again, Grinding Gear isn’t looking to make the game appealing for everyone, but the developer has clearly spent the last few weeks tweaking what’s already there to address some of the most common complaints. Patch 0.1.1, which arrives sometime this week, is another step towards that goal.
GG is tackling the endgame mapping experience in several ways. Mapping is what longtime PoE players call the act of running several dungeons/zones back-to-back to farm items and grow their character. To begin with, endgame maps have had their monster density, number of magical monsters, essences, artefacts, available chests and more rebalanced. The developer expects maps to be more rewarding, especially as each one is designed to offer certain rewards.
More maps will have bosses now, too, at a rate of about one boss per four maps. In fact, players who really want to challenge bosses will be happy to know there’s a new type of Tablet that lets you add bosses to your maps with their own modifiers. As for Towers, the new patch adds four new Tower maps, as well as a redone Lost Towers map.
Now onto the stuff I am really excited about as someone who’s still going through the campaign. The patch is making several fixes to collision across the board, which should hopefully result in your character getting stuck far less often. This is part of an effort to reduce environmental clutter, which will itself help boost visibility.
It’s also, finally, doing something about visual effects. Skill effects, though amazing to look at, often obscure enemy attacks, and, considering how challenging the gameplay is, can/will get you killed because you simply couldn’t see an attack you needed to dodge. This also goes for elemental explosions, which have a longer fuse time now, too. The big one, though, is that they won’t explode if a rare monster dies, which immediately makes fighting the tanky buggers much less of a pain.
Elsewhere in the patch, you can expect faster load times when bringing up the Atlas map. The map’s zoom level has been increased as well. The biomes for each one will be listed if you hover over them, which is going to make it easier to quickly see what you’re about to jump into.
It’s important to keep in mind that all of these changes can be done within the existing League, and without altering the in-game economy too much. For some, they won’t be enough, but it’s clear Grinding Gear is working on larger changes that could end up arriving with a new League. For now, there’s plenty here to get excited about.
The full changelog has not yet been published, but you can watch the video embedded in this story for an overview of everything else coming with 0.1.1.
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