Path Of Exile’s next expansion is called Echoes Of The Atlas, as announced earlier tonight in a Twitch live stream. It adds the usual mix of new features to the free hack-and-slasher, including new maps, endgame content and a new challenge league. You will be able to play it on January 15th, but you can immediately step below to see the announcement and read some more details.
Here is the official trailer:
Update 3.13 for Path Of Exile is called Echoes Of The Atlas, and it introduces eleven new maps, rebuilt rise, 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 needs are more skill trees.” And yet: the new passive trees of Atlas are skill trees that sit on the map of the game, with a different skill tree for each area. If you are an existing experienced player, this is a way to introduce a bunch of new meaningful decisions in your journey through the game.
Each expansion of Path Of Exile also introduces a new challenge league in which players compete to race through levels with a fresh character. This time it is the Ritual League, in which players cause rituals that summon a large number of enemies to kill, and each activated ritual also summons each enemy from each previously completed ritual. It seems that the numbers of enemies will increase to absurd numbers, but there are systems with which you can adjust the risk and reward of each battle before you start it.
The new endgame content is focused on a creepy new character named the Maven, who would love to see you fight. By defeating bosses, you eventually gain the ability to summon her to any part of the map so she can see you fighting with other bosses again. Success in this battles eventually prompt the Maven to invite you to her kingdom, where she has created copies of the previously defeated bosses, so that you can fight groups of them simultaneously in increasing numbers, up to a maximum of 10.
There are a bunch of other additions and changes, including previous challenge leagues like Harvest folded into the base game, that you can see by watching the full content on YouTube.
Path Of Exile’s developers released a new expansion every three months for almost three years. This latest expansion is a rare example of one of their release dates expiring, but it’s not because it was not done. This is because they did not want to release at the same time as Cyberpunk 2077. Who can blame them? Everyone left the path of the cybercrime.
We consider Path Of Exile to be one of the best RPGs on a computer and one of the best free PC games. If you, like me, occasionally fancy an action-packed RPG, you can give it a try, but I’m going to wait for Path Of Exile 2, which we last heard would go into beta somewhere. this year.