Path of Exile Live on Xbox One, Further Harbinger League Changes

After two years of development, Grinding Gear Games’ action-RPG Path of Exile is now available on Xbox One. The game is completely free, and the microtransactions it sells in order to stay profitable are exclusively cosmetic and stash-related, so if you have an Xbox One – there’s little reason to not give it a go. And if you wonder how the game plays on a console, check out this well-made launch trailer:

If you have questions about the Xbox One version, perhaps this FAQ can answer some of them:

How do I start playing?
Simply browse to Free Games on the Xbox One Store and either search for Path of Exile or find us on the list.

What countries is Path of Exile enabled in on Xbox One?
Everywhere apart from South Korea, China and Japan. There may be small delays with Brazil, Australia and New Zealand – we have received age rating certificates for these regions and are trying to get them processed quickly. We expect to add Japan as a region over the coming weeks.

What languages is Path of Exile available in on Xbox One?
Currently, English, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese. We plan to add German, French and Spanish alongside the PC version in the near future.

What’s the First Blood Bundle?
It’s a copy of Path of Exile and the First Blood Pack, which contains 200 points, an Extra Stash Tab and the First Blood Weapon Effect. It’s the same price as 200 points would be and is limited to one per account. We plan to release it on PC in the near future too, as it’s great for new players.

What Supporter Packs are available?
All of the ones for The Fall of Oriath are available. The prices are adjusted slightly because they don’t come with physical goods like the PC versions do. We’ll add the Harbinger packs in an update soon.

What Leagues are available?
The Harbinger Challenge League launched today, including Hardcore mode. Solo, Self-Found mode is optionally available for new characters upon rescuing the Scion.

What exact version of Path of Exile is being launched on Xbox One, compared to the PC version?
The release version is pretty close to 3.0.0b. We intend to update it to 3.0.1b (which has both waves of Harbinger league improvements) as soon as we can.

And if you’re playing Path of Exile already, there’s also an announcement that outlines the upcoming changes to the Harbinger Challenge League, among other things. An excerpt:

Harbinger League Improvements

We’re going to reduce the length of most Harbinger encounters, as we felt that the increase to the cast time for summoning minions was too great at higher levels. We will increase the speed that Harbingers can deploy minions and have them deploy additional sets of minions earlier. It is worth noting that because Harbingers now summon faster, they’ve got more time to use their abilities, which makes them more dangerous for characters that previously would have killed the packs very quickly.

We’re also going to concentrate the currency stacks from the final Harbinger encounter, so you won’t need to spend as long picking up the currency pieces after the fight.

Many players have asked why we modified the level of drops and experience from the Beachhead map. This was because we more than doubled how easy it is to access. Because of this, and the high power/value of the uniques that it yields, we do not plan to increase its drops/experience. The two changes above should also further increase the efficiency of running the map, as it was already significantly higher yield than a well-rolled rare map.

We’re also slightly increasing the number of shards dropped throughout the game.

We’re going to reduce the frequency of Harbingers dropping the less-valuable currency shards in yellow- and red-tier maps, so that repeating easy content isn’t a faster way to gather valuable shards than playing through more challenging content naturally.

We’re changing The Beachhead final fight so that it now drops basic items from bosses. Animated Weapon characters have ammunition for the extended fight.

Our expectation is to deploy these changes within a week. Thank you again for your ongoing feedback regarding Harbinger. We hope these changes help address the issues you have identified.

[…]

Future Release Schedule

Since late 2015, we have stuck to a schedule of releases every thirteen weeks, alternating between expansions (with attached small challenge leagues) and standalone challenge leagues. This schedule worked really well until the release of 3.0.0 shuffled it around, but we plan to get back onto this schedule with our next big release in the first week of December 2017. Rather than just a challenge league, this release will be a full expansion (though of course, not quite the same size as The Fall of Oriath!) Many members of our team are of course continuing to work on improvements to the Harbinger league and 3.0.0 content, which you’ll see rolled out over the coming days, weeks and months. Thanks for your support and for being a great community.