Path of Exile August 16 Progress Update

Path of Exile seems to have been perpetually stranded in its beta state, but that’s not especially strange for online-only titles these days. The developers have brought another hefty update on how the Diablo-like game is coming along – a lot of work has been put into the 0.9.12 patch lately, which includes a sizable amount of new content:

We also ran a successful two-week hardcore race a few weeks ago, to test the 0.9.11 balance. This was our alternative to doing a legacy migration, and we received substantial amounts of balance data from it. We are looking at running another similar league in the near future because people enjoyed that one. The new one may be one week long. I understand there has been demand for a “time-limited” league where you only get a certain number of hours per day (to favour people like me with jobs), but there are logistics issues to solve before we can do that.

From a development point of view, we’ve been working hard on the 0.9.12 patch. This patch focuses on many areas, including:

• Adding PvP, including arenas with simple matchmaking, and dueling. Teams of up to 6 on either side are supported.
• Rebalancing minions and fixing their bugs. Yes, the ability to have multiple sets of minions using multiple gems of the same type is a bug.
• New item hover art!
• Arrows are now real projectiles rather than faked long-range melee attacks. This means they can be dodged by running out of the way, as well as by the evasion roll.

We don’t yet know when 0.9.12 will be deployed (or put on Alpha). My guess is that it’s a few weeks away from being ready. I’ll definitely post more information as soon as we know.

There’s also some discussion of a lot of the extra-game elements, including physical merchandise ranging from t-shirts, to posters, to the soundtrack included with the boxed version. The developer goes on to thank the fans for all their support, and is excited about the up-and-coming open beta version.