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Path of Exile is one of the most complex action RPGs around. Look up a screenshot of its gigantic skill tree and you'll understand its maximalist approach to character build customization. It isn't a game about leveling up and collecting loot so much as it is about using programmer logic to design the most effective monster-slaying machine possible.
Over a decade of updates has made it inscrutable for anyone who doesn't have time to study YouTube videos on how any of it works. While I can theoretically understand the appeal of a game that is effectively a box of Lego pieces, I lost interest as soon as I found myself digging through old forum threads for things the in-game tooltips refuse to explain.
And yet, I have spent almost 600 hours playing the early access sequel to PoE, a game that is already nearly as complex but one that grounds all of it in a harsh world that demands you to experiment with its many systems. Path of Exile 2 continues to channel the strengths of classic action RPGs like Diablo 2, but also incorporates elements of modern games like Elden Ring. The result is an action RPG that I feel like I've never played before, one that I'm convinced will raise the bar for the entire genre after it releases as a free-to-play game later this year.
As someone who plays a lot of these games, I don't say that lightly: PoE 2 has the juice, and its latest update is the strongest evidence that Grinding Gear Games is cooking up something monumental.
Return of the Ancients, its latest expansion, reimagines its post-campaign grind as a series of storylines where you learn more about its mysterious world. The part of many loot-based action RPGs that tends to lose people who aren't driven by the power fantasy of mowing through monsters and watching their damage numbers go up is essentially a series of mini campaigns in PoE 2 and will continue to expand as more expansions are released.
A new kind of endgame
PoE 2 is the first time I've seen an action RPG acknowledge that an endgame experience doesn't have to be a grind.
PoE 2 is the first time I've seen an action RPG acknowledge that an endgame experience doesn't have to be a grind. You're handed a sprawling world map with dozens of locations, or maps, to explore on your way to investigate a mysterious tower. Soon after, an ancient fortress rises out of the ground and you're sent on a mission to search its long-abandoned halls for anything that could help save Wraeclast from an apocalyptic end.
Much like the campaign, PoE 2's main endgame storyline emulates what I imagine it was like playing Diablo 2 before it had been completely figured out by its avid players. Pulling levers and watching stone cubes grind into place to create a path suspended above iridescent water without an NPC or a quest log telling you what to do feels like you've stumbled onto something nobody else has before. It reminds me of taking the elevator down into the depths of Elden Ring for the first time and discovering the remains of an entire civilization living in perpetual twilight. Wraeclast, like The Lands Between, is seeped in history that the main story only gestures at.
The endgame storylines are an opportunity to meet characters who can tell you about a very different era of the world and the forces that threaten its future. Early on in my endgame journey, I found a pair of purple hands reaching out of the ground and a woman who urged me to uproot them from the earth to cleanse the corruption. Back on the world map, a pale region covered in more hands opened up. Not long after, I spoke to a man who had seemingly lost his mind peering into the shattered mirror next to him and was ambushed by imaginary monsters after touching it—a glimpse of a mechanic you can repeat to find powerful crafting items.
Each of these events unlock what are known as league mechanics, or side activities, that are added every few months. They're the backbone of PoE 1 and 2's seasonal structure. Every few months a new one is introduced and eventually gets added into the game permanently. But there were several times in PoE 1 where I'd run into one during the campaign and had no clue what it had to do with anything I was doing, which didn't help them from feeling like vestigial pieces of a game that's been around for 13 years. PoE 2 saves the majority of them to uncover organically during the endgame and gives them dedicated questlines (and climactic boss fights) that take a few hours to finish.
Not even Diablo 4, a game that is largely known for being a much more accessible action RPG, is as elegant in its approach to teaching you about its endgame activities. As much as I like Lord of Hatred, the newest expansion, it doesn't try that hard to contextualize the different types of dungeons you're expected to run over and over again. It knows what you're there for and directs you to where the loot is.
PoE 2, however, treats them like sidequests as you travel around Wraeclast. New players can take them on one at a time or ping-pong between them as they see fit, and returning players can clear out their favorites and skip the rest. It's a clever way to structure an endgame that needs to please both kinds of players without turning it into a big checklist.
I thought PoE 2's campaign would be where the story effectively ends before you're let loose into the endgame—as it always is with these types of games. But GGG has delivered an endgame that barely feels like an endgame at all. Game director Jonathan Rogers says it was designed this way to give players a taste of the "infinite farm" version of the endgame with a clear stopping point before it fully opens up. You get to sample a little bit of everything before you turn the game into an exercise for buckets of loot.
It's not a revolutionary idea to narrativize an endgame in an action RPG, but PoE 2 does it so seamlessly and evocatively that I suspect it will get its hooks in players who might've skipped it. And then all it will take is finding some build-defining item that makes you rethink everything about your character, or gives you ideas for a new one, and, oops, there goes another 600 hours.
PoE 2 has shattered the limits of what most action RPGs have been doing for decades and it's still not finished.
In addition to the endgame overhaul, Return of the Ancients expands PoE 2's creative buildcrafting in ways I've never seen in an action RPG before. The scope of its systems rivals that of Baldur's Gate 3's narrative branches, and it similarly will spoil you on other games like it. The new huntress ascendancy class can tame bosses and use them as pets, and monks can pick an ascendancy that unlocks a special version of every pair of Unique gloves in the game. This is on top of intriguing items like a pair of gloves that grow more powerful as you defeat bosses and a staff that surrounds you with a murder of crows. This is what happens when the developers of one of the longest lasting PvE games get to show off in a sequel.
PoE 2 has shattered the limits of what most action RPGs have been doing for decades and it's still not finished. I was already ready to call its campaign one of the best out there, but now it has an innovative take on an endgame and a list of other things that make it hard to believe it's going to be a free-to-play game in a few months. It's almost a blessing that Grand Theft Auto 6 won't be on PC this year because GGG has something truly special on the way that will no doubt leave a lasting impact on one of my favorite genres in videogames.
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