Path of Exile: The Fall of Oriath Launched

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play a hack ‘n’ slash action-RPG without going through the same content multiple times before you got to the end game? Well now you don’t have to, because The Fall of Oriath expansion for Path of Exile is available and you can experience a seamless 10-Act playthrough for yourself. Here’s how to get in on this action, along with a couple of quotes from the Grinding Gear Games’ managing director, and The Fall of Oriath’s feature list:

Auckland, New Zealand – August 4, 2017 – Grinding Gear Games has announced today that its highly anticipated massive expansion, Path of Exile: The Fall of Oriath, has officially launched for PC after a very successful beta. Players interested in joining can go to:https://www.pathofexile.com/oriath to sign up. Path of Exile: The Fall of Oriath is completely free to play -but never “pay to win.”

“We invited our community to play the Beta for The Fall of Oriath and received lots of valuable feedback, said Chris Wilson, managing director of Grinding Gear Games. “Systems such as the Pantheon Powers, balance of Power and Frenzy Charges and monster variety in the new content have been directly improved as a result of the communication between our community and the developers during the Beta. We’re extremely happy with how the Beta went and are excited to open up The Fall of Oriath to a broad group of players upon release!”

Path of Exile: The Fall of Oriath is Grinding Gear’s largest launch of new content since the original game debuted in October 2013. The game features six brand new acts – doubling the size of current game. The Fall of Oriath also introduces a new Pantheon character-customization system that lets players wield the power of the gods themselves.

Path of Exile: The Fall of Oriath Features:

• Act 5: The Fall of Oriath: Return to Oriath. Home to the oppressive templar theorcracy. Explore frozen mountaintops, pristine temples and anarchic city streets. Leave a trail of furious destruction as you seek vengeance for your exile.
• A Single Playthrough, A Complete Story: The previous difficulty level system has been removed to make room for another five brand new acts, bringing to the total to ten. In these five acts, you will weave through both new and familiar locations and witness the drastic results of your past actions.
• Claim the Power of the Gods: Path of Exile’s new pantheon system provides you with potent powers taken from the gods themselves. But beware, the gods won’t go down without a fight.
• New Ways to Play: With dozens of new items, new skills, new locations, new boss fights and more, Path of Exile: The Fall of Oriath will keep even the most die-hard fans busy for many months to come.

Also worth mentioning are the v3.0.0 patch notes, and this official announcement that assures us that the server issues that coincided with the expansion going live have since been identified and fixed:

We’re proud to announce that The Fall of Oriath and Harbinger Leagues are now live! Initially the launch went really well but we unfortunately encountered an issue that caused the realm to crash. We’ve now fixed that issue and hope that it will be smooth sailing from here on out. We’ll be continuing to keep a close eye on everything throughout the day and expect to make some minor fixes to small problems as they arise. Thank you to everyone who has joined us! We hope you have a great time playing the new content.

The realm crashes were caused by a misconfigured instance router. The misconfiguration resulted in a packet storm in the game’s backend network which disrupted normal traffic to the point that the game servers could not function.

Unfortunately the packet storm occurred several times (each requiring a realm restart) before we were able to identify the cause of the problem. Since identifying and correcting the offending router, the servers have been stable.