We recently got to meet with Chris Wilson, one of the Producers and Developers for Path of Exile, to have a walkthrough presentation of what players can expect for the new up and coming expansion Atlas of Worlds. This will be the fifth full expansion for the game and promises to add a hell of a lot of content to the post-story end game content, in Chris’s own words “players get to the end game and spend most of their playtime there, they finish the main story for Path of Exile and then play through random areas; about 95% of their time is spend post-storyline and so this expansion focuses on improving that area of gameplay”. Fear not, this isn’t just an expansion catering to old players, there’s a little something else for the rest of the player base as we were shown at the end of the presentation.
The main content for the end-game in Path of Exile focuses on the idea of collecting and crafting Maps, these single use items allow you and/or a group to enter an instanced based environment that is randomly generated where the terrain, map layout, mobs and items are different every time. Each Map has its own Map boss that is pretty much an evolved version of other mobs but has some better combat tactics that require a lot more thought to defeat them. Maps come in fifteen different tiers (15 being the hardest) and players can craft and modify their maps to make them more difficult, which in turn puts them in better stead to earn more powerful rewards.
Whilst Maps are no doubt fun, and enjoyed by pretty much everyone who plays the game, they are kind of separate to the story content; they exist for the sole purpose of giving players something to do. With Atlas of Worlds this is changing and the maps now serve a purpose (whilst retaining the same core functions as to how they work), at least in a story context, and this is by tying all the maps into a discovered Atlas known as, you guessed it, the Atlas of Worlds!
Players will have access to the Atlas, which initially is a huge parchment that shows all the maps in the game, clustered together in their different regions/environment types (e.g. all the jungle maps together and all the desert maps together) with each map linked together in certain paths to other maps (a lot like how their passive skill tree works). A fog of war clouds the parchment and as you move around it collecting and completing maps it reveals more of the Atlas (a good idea in theory but this isn’t 1992 where you can’t just go online and find the full Atlas to work out which maps you need to get). At the center of the Atlas stand four Guardians protecting “the Void” where the big bad guy known as The Shaper can be found, the dude who has created all the maps for some unknown purpose. Players reach the Guardians from different areas of the map, having to start from different positions or simply work their way around (depending on what Maps they manage to acquire). Once a Guardian is defeated the player gets a portion of a key, collect all four portions and you can then enter the Void and fight the Shaper himself (this wasn’t shown to us as the developers want to leave something new for the players). These key fragments are tradeable and so a team that has managed to access one Guardian from one side of the map, but not the others, may be able to farm their Guardian map and trade gathered fragments with other players so they all get access to the Shaper.
It should be an interesting journey as the map has a total of 100 maps now available, adding 30 brand new maps to the game (about double what you normally get from an expansion) bringing in 19 new map bosses and as well as this the team have gone back over old maps to bring them a little more up to date! Getting a look at some of the new maps we think players are in for a treat, ranging from an outdoor-indoor hybrid map (previously maps could be one or the other but never both), a spider temple where the mobs that attack you crawl over the walls (creepy!) a cool map where you fight along the base of a city wall beating up enemies, only to end up fighting back in the other direction atop the ramparts themselves; pretty cool.
With the mention of the fragments being tradeable we will say a part of us thought “Well it sounds like a race to the middle and players will still try and bypass all the other maps and areas anyway”. Oh how wrong we were. New unique base items (ie. can still be modified), up to around 10 so far, have been introduced to the game and have some pretty great stats, such as a Bone Helmet that gives 31% increased damage from your Minions. Unlike other items in the game that can randomly drop anywhere these new items will only drop in certain locations, specific clusters of maps on the Atlas, and so players that want these items will most definitely want to try and play over these maps and not just their highest tier favourites or simply trying to make their way to the Shaper.
One of the item rewards gained by advancing through the Atlas are Shaper Orb’s, one use items that will increase the tier of a map by five levels, perfect for players that want to bump up the quality/difficulty of the maps they have collected. As well as this players will also be able to modify their maps with a Cartographer’s Sextant, using this item on a map on the Atlas it will draw a circle around the map and add a random modifier to both that map and all the other maps that fall into that circle. Mods can be neutral, positive or negative (you don’t know until you use the item) and the circles can cross over the same maps adding multiple mods to a map, such as increasing your Crit Strike Chance vs monsters (which is positive) or alternatively increasing monsters Crit Strike Chance against you (… not so great). The addition of the sextant allows players to change up the same maps that they have acquired to create interesting challenges for them and their friends where they must adjust their strategy to overcome them.
That pretty much wrapped up the Atlas of Worlds element of the game, but Chris then told us about a new League for all players in the game that would be introduced; Leagues are temporary game modes usually running for around three months where players make brand new characters and compete to level up as fast as possible. Each League has a different mechanic and this new League is the “Essence Challenge League” where players will be able to collect Essence from mobs in game, collectable items used for crafting. In a map players will encounter frozen enemies trapped in an essence, depending on the essence (there’s 105 of them in the game) the encounter will be drastically different. Players can also try enhance these Essences using a Remnant of Corruption item, which works a lot like the Cartographer’s Sextant in that it makes the battle more challenging and can improve the Essence unlocking more powerful essences that can give more powerful properties to gear and even some unique never before seen properties like First Burst. As with the Sextant it can also make your Essence worse, trigger the battle and force a difficult encounter!
Overall we were quite pleased with what we saw from the presentation, there’s definitely a lot that is being added to keep players busy, the randomness of the Cartographer’s Sextant on the World Atlas and the Remnant of Corruption in the Essence League add an even higher level of replay ability to maps. If you’re an old player then this should be a ton of new content to keep you occupied, if you’re a new player then it’s even more content on an already fairly feature packed MMO. The game can now be experienced by even more players as the team have overhauled the game engine to improve performance on lower end machines, meaning everyone can enjoy what the game has to offer. All in all a great move for Path of Exile, but let us know what you think from September 2nd when the expansion goes live!
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