If you can't wait for Diablo 3...

[Marius]

Path of Exile has its open beta weekend this weekend.

What's Path of Exile? Well I didn't know until 5 minutes ago, but it's basically a Diablo clone made by a New Zealand company.




http://www.pathofexile.com/

[Mythor]

That screenshot's a bit out of date. Here's one from the latest patch:

Very fun game.

[Marius]

Thanks - I replaced the outdated shot with yours.

Downloading the client now - is 3.65 GB.

[Marius]

And here's another shot of the game. Graphics are pretty good for what is essentially a F2P game made by an indie NZ studio.

[Mythor]

I wrote some words about the skill system of the game for Player Attack, Chienne's gaming site if anyone's interested in some more details: http://www.playerattack.com/news/2012/0 ... e-pc-beta/

Is anyone else going to try it? You can form groups and stuff, might be fun to get a GON group or two going over the weekend, if we have some more people coming?

[revengous]

yeah i might give it a shot - see how I go for time

[Helelix]

I got a beta key for PoE at the end of last year and from memory it was pretty fun and a little repetitive. The main thing that I remember is the extensive Passive skill tree.

[Serval]

There are half naked women chained to your health and mana orbs.

[Marius]

Played it for a bit now and this game can best summed up with this is what Diablo 1 would be if released today.

Pretty fun game that captures the atmosphere of the original Diablo perfectly.

[revengous]

downloading the client now

edit: getting ~1mb a second, better than my normal 600kbs

[lucassot]

Fantastic! Looks and sounds promising, thanks for the thread Marius. Gonna go get it now

[Mythor]

The first ladder race event is kicking off in 20-25 minutes. To participate you have to join the "Event #1" league, instead of the Default league, when creating a new character.

I've been playing a Witch again, using lots of Ice skills this time, freezing lots of things.

[Marius]

Few points:

- You can turn off the global chat - useful as with the number of people playing, it gets a little spammy.

- Remember to set the graphics options before you go into game, as they seem to default to med.

- It's harder difficulty than the Diablo games, overall.

- It's less RSI inducing, however, because you can map skills to the QWERTY buttons

- It feels more like Diablo 1 with running and modern UI features than anything else.

And here's a shot of me getting chased by an undead horde.

[lucassot]

Hahaha RUN!

Is this game in open beta now? I signed up & downloaded but not sure if I'm only gonna access the stress test weekend they got going now since I have no beta key.

[Marius]

It's open public access for this weekend only. If you have an account and the client you can sign in without a key.

Afterwards they're considering increasing the number of beta key invites. I don't have a key either. This is just something to do this weekend plus keeping an eye on it for future, as game seems fairly complete now. And it's the 0.98 patch, which indicates it's fairly close to release.