Niyeaux

Path of Exile: It's pretty much a Diablo 2 sequel, but it's not Diablo 3!

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If you played Diablo 2 back in the day, lost a substantial chunk of your life to it, and then bought Diablo 3 hoping it would be more of the same...there may be hope for you yet. A developer from New Zealand just released their game into open beta, and it's pretty much everything you wished a sequel to Diablo 2 would be. It's called Path of Exile, it's free to play, and it's really, really good.

The skill tree alone in this game is absolutely astounding. It's like the Final Fantasy X skill tree, but it's entirely composed of passive attribute improvements, and all your active skills (spells and attacks and all that jazz) come from equippable skill gems that you find as loot drops. There's also no gold, which is an unexpectedly awesome idea. Vendors will trade you commodity items like identification scrolls for your leftover loot, instead of giving you arbitrary amounts of gold. It's a handy way of avoiding the problem most ARPGs face, where the ingame currency inflates so much that it becomes useless, as people find more and more loot.

Anyone who has played Diablo 2 will be pretty at home in Path of Exile. The UI, quest structure, loot mechanics, etc. are all pretty similar. They've made a lot of key improvements, however, and they've avoided all the pitfalls that Diablo 3 fell into (RMAH, shitty loot system, etc.) The story also won't drive you crazy nearly as much as Diablo 3's shenanigans.

Best of all, there's no pay-to-win nonsense; the only things that cost real money are cosmetic stuff like weapon particle effects, increased stash pages, and additional character slots (and they give you like 24 slots and a huge stash to start with, so you probably won't need more).

I'm like 20 hours in already, and I can't believe how it feels as exciting as Diablo 2 did over a decade ago. If anyone else is playing, add me up! My in-game name is the same as my forum name.

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I was sold at "skillgrimage". That IS a nice tree and a great way to allow for crazy permutations!

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As someone who plays games for systems, this game is my wet dream so far. There's just so much to it. The combat-feel could be little better but I trust GGG to continue to improve in that department. It's easy to overlook this with the amount of freedom and flexibility the game gives you.

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Post character names up in here so we can get some Thumbs parties going. I'm just past the beginning of Act 2 right now, on both of my dudes.

As someone who plays games for systems, this game is my wet dream so far. There's just so much to it. The combat-feel could be little better but I trust GGG to continue to improve in that department. It's easy to overlook this with the amount of freedom and flexibility the game gives you.

I think a lot of the poor combat feel is a result of some server-side latency. They're getting slammed pretty hard right now (they said they were over 50k concurrent users yesterday!), so I imagine that will go away once things calm down.

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I was in the closed beta, it was awesome. Been playing it off and on a bit since the open beta started. I am more than willing to play with thumbs if wanted.

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I wore this game out during the closed beta. I'm at the point now where even with friends I can't bring myself to play it anymore which is really a shame because I want to see act 3 and I have a million builds in my head. I'd certainly be up to play with some thumbs if sessions were ever organized.

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The servers are currently down unfortunately, the amount of players has exceeded their wildest imaginings apparently (already up to 70K concurrent players before stuff started crashing again if reports are to be believed).

I'm playing a hardcore minion witch at the moment (Twitchcrafty), it's a lot of fun.

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Man, I just got to Act 3, and they really stepped it up with the environments in these areas. All of Act 3 is one huge city!

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I'd love to play, but there's been a bug since the closed beta where the game will BSOD if there's another program running that uses the sound card, which includes my antivirus for some reason. Since it only affects Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium cards, which have been deprecated by Creative, the developers have said they're in no hurry to fix it. Makes me sad, I had a lot of fun in between restarts.

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I'd love to play, but there's been a bug since the closed beta where the game will BSOD if there's another program running that uses the sound card, which includes my antivirus for some reason. Since it only affects Soundblaster X-Fi Titanium cards, which have been deprecated by Creative, the developers have said they're in no hurry to fix it. Makes me sad, I had a lot of fun in between restarts.

You could just get a USB DAC and bypass your sound card entirely, if you don't feel like upgrading your sound card. You can get a cheap USB DAC for like $30.

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I'd love to play, but there's been a bug since the closed beta where the game will BSOD if there's another program running that uses the sound card, which includes my antivirus for some reason.

A couple of things:
  • lol pc gaming am I right?
  • Sounds more like a sound card driver bug than a game bug – a game shouldn't be able to create blue screen all by itself.
  • Either your antivirus sucks, or it's fucking amazing.

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A couple of things:

  • lol pc gaming am I right?
  • Sounds more like a sound card driver bug than a game bug – a game shouldn't be able to create blue screen all by itself.
  • Either your antivirus sucks, or it's fucking amazing.

Yeah, avast! has cute little noises that play when you find a virus, to make you feel like you're a cool sysop in a sci-fi movie, but apparently disabling them does not preclude the program from accessing my sound card drivers.

Anyway, apparently it's something to do with how the game uses XRAM and OpenAL, so when you switch to another program that accesses the sound card driver, the system service associated with it goes down and takes the OS with it. I think. I'm not terribly learned in the language of BSODs, but SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION seems pretty self-explanatory.

This is a good game though, really. Just update your drivers and maybe wait until release if you have a Creative card?

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Yeah, avast! has cute little noises that play when you find a virus, to make you feel like you're a cool sysop in a sci-fi movie, but apparently disabling them does not preclude the program from accessing my sound card drivers.

Anyway, apparently it's something to do with how the game uses XRAM and OpenAL, so when you switch to another program that accesses the sound card driver, the system service associated with it goes down and takes the OS with it. I think. I'm not terribly learned in the language of BSODs, but SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION seems pretty self-explanatory.

This is a good game though, really. Just update your drivers and maybe wait until release if you have a Creative card?

Isn't two things using a sound card at once, you know, one of those things that should be checked before anyone releases a sound card? That would be like a computer exploding when you check your email while using the internet.

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Isn't two things using a sound card at once, you know, one of those things that should be checked before anyone releases a sound card? That would be like a computer exploding when you check your email while using the internet.

Yeah, the devs coded the audio engine to use OpenAL in a way that makes Creative sound cards, which use a proprietary OpenAL variant called ALchemy, crash the system. They don't have a Soundblaster in their office (and can't afford one, maybe?) so they aren't able to work out a solution, except to force the game to use software audio with a modified shortcut.

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So this is out on Steam now, and it looks significantly improved from early beta. That is to say, it looks stonking.

My newb's account has the same name there as here (no space) (can't sync to Steam version yet due to email account issue). 4 gig re-download: initiated.

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Never played the beta but downloaded on steam. I am super early in (haven't even completed first quest from first village), but I really like the way healing pots work.

Aesthetically, I am a weirdo and prefer the cartooniness of torchlight 2, but this seems better in most other regards. And it's astounding that it's free. If they are making enough to keep afloat on just cosmetic/character slots/stash size, that's amazing.

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I tried this briefly and intensely, and ok I'm not the biggest Diablo type fan, but I played Diablo 1 and 2 enough "back in the day".

 

And this is slick, with solid mechanics and controls, an interesting item system that heavily relies on sockets, an interesting skill tree or rather "graph" that allows you to build into and towards any set of skills you want, it even runs perfectly well and good looking on my Intel ULV Core i5/HD 4000. And for all that I just couldn't get into it. I clocked sixty+ hours on Borderlands 2, but I couldn't bring myself to even care with this game despite really wanting to.

 

I'm not sure if it's a lack of... atmosphere or any sort of connected story, no matter how thin. Or if the weird socket system kind of hampers the joy of loot. Or if the minute skill system makes it so leveling up uneventful because you get "+5% damage to..." whatever, rather than "ultra cool war stomp what crushes things!" But, there we are. Maybe I'll give it another go sometime, maybe.

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Just started to play this game.  Working my way through Act 2.  So far I think it's fantastic, especially for a free game.  Though initially terrified of the skill tree when I first leveled I spend some time reading it and now I think it's the game's highlight.  And again, it's free...

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I'm going to have to download and try this, I would never have guessed it would get such glowing recommendations from so many thumbs.

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I'm amazed that this game manages to get me coming back so consistently. They're just doing things so right. The only gripe I have is the occasional desync issues but that just means I don't play on hardcore.

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I seem to have completely missed this game, but in light of this thread getting resurrected and some GOTY stuff thrown its way, I'm going to give it a shot. If nothing else, I'm hoping it'll keep me away from buying Van Helsing on PC and Diablo III on PS3 for a little while longer.

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Yeah, we all know the incredible lure of anything connected to the superlative Van Helsing IP.

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<_<

 

I actually heard pretty good things about it and enjoyed watching the Giant Bomb quick look:

 

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Well, then I stand corrected, sir. I thought I'd read somewhere it was bad. The GBA (!!!) game was apparently atrocious.

 

Van Helsing had a GBA game. And now a 2013 Diablo 3 clone. How did this happen.

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