If you've ever seen Path of Exile you probably noticed that all its gear has red, green, and blue circular sockets on them. Those sockets are the basis of its character build customization: You don't learn skills in PoE, you pick up skill gems and insert them into your gear. Skill gems–and multi-colored sockets—have been core to PoE ever since it was released.

They're also the first roadblock for new players who aren't coming into every new league, or season, with a plan. I remember playing PoE years ago and getting annoyed that I couldn't fit a skill gem into any of my items because the colors didn't match. There are ways to get around this, of course, but it's a struggle for everyone at the start of the campaign and a constant bit of friction as you upgrade your gear.

In PoE's next expansion, Curse of the Allflame, socket colors, a system that has been synonymous with the action RPG for the last 13 years, will be removed. Most items will have gray sockets that will work with any skill gem you find, saving you the busywork of having to swap the colors around until they're just right.

The decision to ditch socket colors (with some exceptions) wasn't easy, but developer Grinding Gear Games felt it was necessary to keep PoE relevant for new players.

"I'll admit I've been biased on this because even before I joined the company, when I was playing the game for a number of years, I never really found socket colors to be all that engaging of a system personally," game designer Octavian said in a group interview with PC Gamer. "I've had a bit of an axe to grind for a number of years now."

Game director Mark Roberts added that removing socket colors came out of discussions on how to bring in new players and to "allow people who tried the game and found it too complex to come back and try it again." Despite Path of Exile 2's imminent release, Roberts said the team still wants to remove barriers-to-entry in the original game where they can.

Similar discussions already happened when designing PoE 2's simplified skill gem system, but the developers decided the colors were too inseparable from PoE 1's DNA at the time. But when it came up again, they all agreed that it needed to go.

"We've run it by dozens of people in the office and usually the response is, 'What, you can change that? That's a good change, but you can change that?'" Octavian said.

Another helpful change coming in Curse of the Allflame is access to a crafting bench in every town. You can think of the crafting bench like Minecraft's Crafting Table, except the recipes are for adding crucial stats onto your gear, like elemental resistances. New players often neglect to use it because it's normally sitting in your personal hideout, but soon they'll show up everywhere alongside your stash.

"We're 100% questioning now things that are sacred, but also we are trying to—and this is an important thing that there's a bit of a misconception about in the community—bring in a new audience, we are still trying to grow our community and grow our audience for PoE 1 as well," Roberts said.

Curse of the Allflame won't just be the end of socket colors though. The new league will also bring substantial reworks to both Abyss and Legion, two activities that haven't been touched in years. Abyss, for example, will work a lot like it does in PoE 2 where you follow green cracks in the ground and slay whatever foul creatures come crawling out of them. These won't be the last reworks either. Roberts said to expect more in future leagues while not-so-subtly hinting that the monster-hunting Bestiary mechanic will probably be next.

Curse of the Allflame will drop on July 24.

Thanks to his lead role in Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey, which hits theaters this week, a Matt Damon skin has come to Fortnite.

The news led us to wonder if Damon had ever appeared in a videogame before. No, as far as I can tell, but he did get close-ish when he was asked to lend his likeness to The Bourne Conspiracy, a 2008 console game based on the novels behind the film series he starred in.

Damon rejected the offer for the endearing reason that they wouldn't make the violent action game—which is what you'd expect from a Bourne game—more like classic puzzle-adventure game Myst.

"I lobbied hard to not make a first-person shooter game but to make it more like Myst, which was a great interesting puzzle you tried to solve—you know, to play with his amnesia or his memory," Damon said in a 2008 interview with The Boston Globe. "They weren't interested. They made the video[game] anyway, without my likeness."

Damon also recounted the story with a laugh on an episode of Hot Ones in 2021.

"They offered me a bunch of money," the actor said. "But it was like, a little more thought had to go into it. You know, like Myst, I love that game. So I was like, 'You know, more like Myst.' And they were like, 'no,' and just went and made it without me."

I couldn't find any examples of Damon's likeness appearing in a videogame before his new Fortnite skin, though he did say he was interested in the medium during a 2016 Reddit AMA, when he was asked if he'd ever consider doing voice acting or motion capture work for a game.

"I've never been approached to do that, I'd totally be into it," Damon said. "I'm really interested to see where entertainment heads as these videogames, the graphics are getting so good, and VR is getting so good, and you know, what's going to happen to movies? What are the implications for movies, and does this morph into a new kind of storytelling, and what is that, and can I be a part of it? You know, ultimately those of us who make movies are storytellers and we want to gather you around and tell you stories. If gaming is the way to do that I'm all for looking into it, but nobody has asked me as of yet."

How things have changed in just 10 years. Damon's 2016 comment would come across as out-of-touch today, when the industry's biggest players have mostly moved on from discussions that center authors, actors, storytelling, or competition with Hollywood.

Instead, execs and investors are excited about things like user-generated content, AI, and "the metaverse." Genres focused on emergent storytelling, such as multiplayer survival and comedy co-op, have boomed, while story-focused RPG hits like Baldur's Gate 3 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 tend to be viewed as anomalies (even if it seems just as hard to release a live service hit). A new Fallout game is reportedly in development, but the biggest new Fallout thing of the 2020s has so far been a TV show.

That shift is perfectly encapsulated by Damon's first videogame role: Rather than a prestige console exclusive action adventure game or Kojima epic, he's a Fortnite skin promoting an old-fashioned Hollywood blockbuster.

In another universe, we might be prepping to review a big Odyssey tie-in game right now. No such game exists, but our Chris Livingston did dig up an old adventure game based on the epic poem, which saw him spend an hour trying to figure out a loom.