Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Path of Not So Exile

I have added a couple more locations to my frequently visited digital worlds. One is Defiance and the other is Path of Exile. Both games are worthy of my time but for different reasons. I have been in the Path of Exile (PoE) beta for months but I was a terrible tester. After logging in for a couple hours I uninstalled it and made the decision to come back to it when it released. Yeah, I'm that guy. At least I was this time. It was finally released after seven years of development and I am really happy with the result. I played Diablo 2 off and on for the good part of 10 years. Someone wrote that PoE is Diablo 2.5 and I would like to echo that statement. It is Diablo 2 but with a much better multiplayer aspect to it.
So, that is all fine and dandy but the true appeal for sinking hours of my life into my Witch named FlameMcShockLips is the fact that I got back into it when my brother came to visit me after nearly 8 years of not seeing him in person. We visited the National Mall during the day and at night we would both sit down in my living room with my son and travel in a monster destroying trio saving the free world from all sorts of in game nasties. This bond is what I really play online games for. There is something to be said about experiencing that gamers high but it is something else altogether to do it with friends. Add the fact that I was playing with my brother in the same room after so long and I am fully hooked. My son playing with us is simply the icing on the cake and boy does that cake taste good.

Character development is extremely complex with a huge passive skill tree that simply boggles the mind the first few times you look at it. After that you catch on and understand how it works. Mostly. FlameMcShockLips is my second Witch due to not actually knowing that full respecs were essentially impossible after only a few invested points. My first character was a pet based which is fun but I wanted to try something different. The results are pretty interesting I think. For those that know the game I am shooting for a duel element DPS witch. If you didn't guess from the name she is a fire and lightning beast. There are some passive nodes in the skill tree that I am working toward and the last time I counted I was eight levels away from the key skill. The plan is to have a YouTube video up sometime this weekend regarding my witch and what my goals are with her. I'd like to turn it into a gaming vlog of sorts. We'll see though. I know better than to make promises with things like this. Maybe I can just pull a Blizzard and say that it will be up when it's up. 

These days I find it increasingly more difficult to find a game that I will stick with for more than a week. I am glad to report that I have been playing for a couple weeks now and I don't have any inclination to stop yet. Partially because it really is a fun game but mostly because of the people that I play with. Add me to your friends list if you play. The more the merrier. Path of Exile is not best traveled as, well, an exile. 

 What is the glue that keeps you stuck to your particular game?


2 comments:

  1. I think we're all experiencing the difficulty of "sticking" games. I've come to believe that it's not a problem with the games themselves, but rather that there's just too many games vieing for my attention. And yours.

    When I compare the way I gamed from childhood until now there's one powerful trend that pops up. When I had fewer games, I was much more dedicated to playing one game for long periods of time. As my library has piled up, I feel the need to divide my attention among them all. And that's impossible. And thats why I have to stop buying so many games :S

    I love PoE, btw. Its the true successor to Diablo 2 in my opinion.

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  2. You speak the gospel man. I actually help myself from doing that by occasionally reinstalling my OS and only downloading a couple games that I am truly interested in. Eventually I end up right back where I started though.

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