Path of Exile
The reward loop established by Diablo has inspired quite a few terrific games, but the best one in the free-to-play space is inarguably Path of Exile. In fact, fans disappointed with the initial PC release of Diablo 3 wound up looking for and finding what they were after in New Zealand developer Grinding Gear Games’ action RPG.
If you know Diablo 2, then Path of Exile will be familiar pretty quickly – an isometric hack ‘n slash that has you knocking apart skeletons, finding and upgrading gear, and leveling up your character. But it’s the character leveling system where Path takes its own… uh… path. Picking one of several classes, you spend skill points on a maze-like character progression tree.
You can branch off in a strength-based direction, say, but that might cost you the opportunity to learn dual-wielding. Or you could choose to increase your health, neglecting a chance to boost your speed. It’s a fantastic new take on character progression, and it means that you’ll be faced with genuinely hard decisions to make when it’s time to level up – in other words, completely the opposite of how Diablo 3 handled matters.
Add to this the fact that the business model is among the fairest in F2P, and that multiplayer is a cinch (you hang out in hubs with other similarly-leveled players and set up a dungeon instance to explore together), and Path of Exile is a real winner.
