Past of Exile - Early Alpha Screenshots

There were two phases to the Alpha - before and after we allowed selected members of the forum community to play. From 2010 onwards we had an Alpha server up for our own testing. It was very important to try playing on a real realm without cheats in another country (to test the netcode from New Zealand).

Screenshots from the Private Alpha (2010, developers only):

• Lioneye's Watch. No player shadow, it seems.
• This is the old water. We improved it pretty rapidly before people saw it.
• The waypoint screen. Did you know that Normal Difficulty used to be called "Hard"? :P
• Rare monsters used to have a randomly coloured light.
• The character screen was basic back then.
• This shows the old white DXUT chat box that you type in. Notice how the damage types used to be separated at the top of the item hover.
• Nessa used to be called Annessa.
• Orbs used to all look the same. This inventory had many different types.
• There used to be an item prefix that set quality to 20%. This was removed for obvious reasons.
• An old Unique item that was used to test the system. These were purged and forgotten.
• Brutus, recently slain. It's amazing how different this scene looks nowadays, despite using the same art assets.
• Item linking in chat worked.
• The death screen.

Some obvious bugs needed to be fixed before some forum members were invited:

• The ledge waypoint would sometimes spawn out at sea...
• Text was cut off in various places.
• Various cosmetic bugs with item hovers existed.
• Items on the ground had randomly coloured backgrounds due to uninitialised memory. Also, there was a long-standing bug that made all 2d item art blurry due to sampling issues.

Screenshots from the Private Alpha (2011, version that forum members were invited to):

• The is the login screen for Alpha version 0.8.0
• Old sockets!
• Promotional Ice Nova shot.
• The old Scavenger monsters.
• Testing weapon effects.
• Last stand on the beach.
• A promotional shot showing various skills.
• The Climb.
• Detonate Dead.
• We added some grass to the Mud Flats. This version is very close to the one that the Closed Beta launched with.

It's amazing to think that some of these screenshots are half a decade old now!