Path of Exile: Echoes of the Atlas Expansion Released

The Echoes of the Atlas expansion, and its accompanying Ritual challenge league, are now live for Path of Exile. The expansion shakes up the Atlas of Worlds endgame, re-introduces the Heist and Harvest systems, and adds a bunch of fresh content, while the challenge league introduces the new Ritual system with its own challenges and rewards.

The link above has all the details, while here’s a quick trailer to give you a better idea of what to expect:

Also, here’s a quick message from Grinding Gear Games’ founder Chris Wilson regarding this new expansion:

Hey everyone,

As you know, tomorrow we will release the Echoes of the Atlas expansion. At the moment we’re putting the finishing touches on our preparations for the launch.

As you know, 2020 was a difficult year for our team and for the world at large. Echoes of the Atlas is the first expansion we’ve developed under our new development principles. Our team has worked really hard in an effort to make this expansion one of our best yet.

It has been very helpful to have the extra month for polish, as it has given us time to find problems that normally might slip out in the released version. Just yesterday we added a bunch of new rewards for the pinnacle fights based on our internal feedback that they needed to be more rewarding, for example.

I can’t wait until tomorrow when we get to see how players react to the new content. Watching developers playtest the multi-boss fights has been a lot of fun, so I’m really looking forward to having some streams going tomorrow (as the team handles so much of the launch stuff so I hopefully get to sit back and relax, right?) and then getting to play some of it myself.

When I was writing this post, Bex asked me “What are you genuinely feeling right now about this launch?” The first thought that came to mind was “We finally came up with a league that deserves the awesome Ritual name.” It’s true, though. We have come up with so many league ideas that tried to be Ritual in the past, but it was only when we found this one that we knew it was worth that prestigious name. For how simple the league is conceptually, it’s a total blast to play.

I just wanted to say a special thank you to you for being here with us – for your continued excitement, feedback and support. And thanks for your patience over the last month. 2021 is going to be a great year, and it starts tomorrow.

Thank you,
Chris