New to Path of Exile

Greetings.

I am new to this community and to Path of Exile itself.
I started a few days ago, i have a Shadow class character and i'm just learning the ropes as i go.

I have a couple of questions if you don't mind me asking.

1- How big is this game? I know that is divided in acts like Diablo 3 and that there are bosses to kill etc, but i have read somewhere that there is a final boss that can take along time to come across, is this correct? I'm just wondering about the longevity of the game.

2- Is this a open world hack and slash type of game? I'm loving PoE so far but i wonder if anyone here could recommend a good or very good hack and slash game with an open world setting? If possible a recent one.

I'm a big fan of this genre, personally i came from games like World of Warcraft that recently as grown to the point of being a stale MMORPG for me and i don't see any out there that would make me want to play it.
With this adventure in PoE i'm trying to find new paths in gaming, embrace new genres as i did with WoW and PoE was an awesome finding.

I look forward to be an active part of this community, it is a free to play game without P2W policies which is even more awesome and so welcome to me and the player base numbers are very positive.

Thank you for taking some of your time to read this.

Hi friend,

Welcome to Path of Exile!

So to touch on your questions;

Path of Exile's primary storyline ("campaign", if you will) consists of ten acts. As an ARPG it's more about the killing & looting than the story, and most people spend the majority of their time in the end-game "map" system. You can only begin using maps after you've completed all ten acts on that character, and it is where the true longevity comes from.

I'm not sure if I'd refer to Path of Exile as being an open world game - when I think of the term, PoE isn't really what comes to mind. I'd be inclined to think of something more along the lines of Witcher III. Grim Dawn might be closer to the mark on that one. I'm not really feeling too certain about this answer, so maybe wait for others to take a crack at it. :)

I've been playing for over 5 years and there are many "final" bosses I haven't ever encountered. I play a pretty restrictive playstyle, so I'm kind of gated out of them by my own play. The game is plenty big to keep me busy. The one thing this game has is longevity. You can play this game for years before you're really "through".

It's not an "open world". You create instances where you or a party can interact... but there's no "hack and slash" with everyone all at once. I don't think there is an ARPG which has an open world... you're looking for a MMORPG. The combat systems in MMORPG are necessarily simple by comparison to PoE. They look the same, but they're really quite different.

You really seem to think this game is MMORPG. Let me explain the difference. The key difference is that here we're focused on the combat system. It's not click on a monster and have the game decide if the monster dies. There's strategy and skill involved. It's not about raids. Monsters can't be beat by overwhelming them with players, or by some trick you read on the internet. You have to learn to play. It's different.

Technically it gets open world in the end-game phase, when you have the Atlas of worlds to explore, which is a collection of 157 maps.

If you get to maps, you may satisfy that itch, also as the lead dev put it: "When we get a player into the atlas we own that players soul". More or less.

"

pr13st wrote:

Technically it gets open world in the end-game phase, when you have the Atlas of worlds to explore, which is a collection of 157 maps.

If you get to maps, you may satisfy that itch, also as the lead dev put it: "When we get a player into the atlas we own that players soul". More or less.

Not what "open world" means in gaming. "Open world" games are where all players interact in the same world. Think WoW or DaOC.

The term you're looking for is "non-linear".

Thank you all so much for the replies.

About the open world theme i was thinking on the lines of this game that also has me very interested.
Allow me to post the link here and maybe clarifies what i mean:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/424370/Wolcen_Lords_of_Mayhem/

Also i know that PoE is not an MMORPG and i'm loving this game, as i said WoW became stale to me even with the good changes that they are implementing to the game and the new announced expansion, i'm having much more fun with PoE.


It's funny and kinda "weird" that this game has had such a huge success knowing that it is a free game, and that many of the free to play games out there have known some kind of failure along the way, this doesn't seem to have happened with PoE to my relief :)

One of our regulars, 鬼殺し, is a big fan of Wolcen. You might find his commentary in Off Topic.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1715240

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Not what "open world" means in gaming. "Open world" games are where all players interact in the same world. Think WoW or DaOC.

You're thinking of the "massively multiplayer" part of MMORPG, which refers to people connecting to servers capable of supporting hundreds or thousands of people in one copy of the world.

Some of the most celebrated open world games of all time are Skyrim (Steam) and The Witcher III (Steam), and they're both offline single-player games. It just means that a game's world is open or accessible, unlike, say, corridor shooters such as the Wolfenstein games where most doors are closed and locked, preventing you from straying too far from where the designers intended you to travel. It's not fully synonymous with "sandbox", but the two often overlap.

Exactly this is what i mean by open world, not the MMORPG open world, but the one where the world is accessible to explore and interact with.

I noticed that the game Wolcen is referred in the description of the game by being open world.

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Splat_86 wrote:

Exactly this is what i mean by open world, not the MMORPG open world, but the one where the world is accessible to explore and interact with.

I would absolutely not describe PoE as an "open world" environment. You can, for sure, proceed faster or slower than expected through the linear storyline. Once you hit maps you can choose a bit of pathing, and play maps basically at will, but...

...none of it is really connected meaningfully in the way an open world is. Think of each location or map as a separate zone in WoW terms, and you are pretty close to how they feel in PoE.

If what you want is to explore a huge, open world where difficulty ramps up and down without explicitly going to a "high level zone", you won't get it here.

That said ... I don't mind the WoW zone model, and the endgame has more variety in some ways (eg: more settings) than WoW does. (Less variety in the sense that it is an ARPG, so it is really just kill / loot / repeat, but if you play any ARPG, that is what you do. Not, uh, that WoW was that fundamentally different on that front.)