Free Game of the Week: Path of Exile

On the 23^rd of October Grinding Gear Games released Path of Exile, a free-to-play top-down action RPG in the vein of Diablo or Torchlight.

In Path of Exile you take your created character through a dark fantasy world, fighting monsters, collecting loot and levelling up. The games ‘click to attack’ formula is bolstered by an impressive array of interesting skills to find, from magic spells to the ability to summon allies, all of which can be levelled up and combined to create new effects. The game was in development for seven years and it shows, with an incredibly nuanced and complex skill-tree being the earliest and most obvious indication.

At the start of the game you choose your class, which determines where on this massive board your character starts. Each level up grants you one extra move, with each node granting new stats or skills, any character can travel anywhere on the board with enough levels but you’ll have to think creatively, and plan carefully, if you want the best possible build. The system isn’t as intimidating in practice as it first appears though, since planning a build turns out to be a pretty enjoyable part of the game in itself, and since levelling is fast (and the game is fun) enough that if you mess up too badly starting a new character from scratch isn’t too painful a prospect.

All in all, Path of Exile is probably the best example of this type of game to have come out in the last decade. But that’s not why Path of Exile is significant, or it’s only part of the reason. The truth is, at this point in the landscape of the games industry, where alternative monetisation models are being increasing employed (some of which are quite insidious), Path of Exile serves as a shining beacon of Free-to-Play done right.

For those unfamiliar the Free-to-Play business model, initially exploding in Korea and now becoming more common across the world, is an alternative payment model for games, rather than a onetime purchase. Instead of paying from £20 to £40 for the content of the entire game, the game is free to download and play, but items, levels and features are available to purchase in-game with real currency. Now there’s nothing inherently wrong with this business model but recently we’ve seen too many examples of games where it has been used to justify questionable design.

Not so in Path of Exile. The biggest difference between Path of Exile and the host of other, bad free-to-play games is that Grinding Gear are actually ok with you playing for free. It’s viable and it’s fun. There are so many games where, technically, you could play for free – but if you do then the game isn’t basically playable. This is often achieved through things like an excruciatingly slow gain in experience points in a game where that matters, but offering temporary, paid for experience boosts (sometimes in increments of as little as one or two hours) for those who want to play with well designed and balanced systems. See Tribes: Ascend, Blacklight: Retribution, and Battlefield Heroes for recent examples.  Path of Exile doesn’t do this – the balance of the games systems that Grinding Gear fine tuned over its seven year development time is the same for paying and non-paying customers.
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Players also can’t purchase power in Path of Exile. You can’t pay your way to a competitive advantage by buying more powerful weapons and items. What players pay for are purely cosmetic, cool new effects for their spells or costumes for their character. Basically, if you feel like you’re playing something well crafted and fun you can kick some money Grinding Gear’s way and they’ll give you back something cool in return. Already with a player base of around 2 million and climbing, their strategy seems to be working. Happy players are players that get their friends to download and play too, and are also more likely to pay and not feel cheated.

Path of Exile is a legitimately fantastic game, one that would be worth a £20 price tag. It’s respectful of the player’s intelligence, time and money. So download it and give it a go, it won’t cost you anything.

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What do you think of the Free-To-Play model used in Path Of Exile? Tweet us at @BoarGames