Five years since it was originally announced, Path of Exile 2 is finally a few weeks out from its early access launch. Developer Grinding Gear Games dumped four hours of information yesterday on a stream, including what classes you can play, the length of the campaign, and what you can do at max level in its meaty endgame.
Unless you've dropped hundreds of dollars into Path of Exile 1, you need to buy one of its new early access supporter packs to play it in early access. The basic pack is only $30 and includes some shop currency for buying extra stash space, but you can also spend $460 on the 'Liberator of Wraeclast Supporter' pack which includes a bunch of cosmetics, a t-shirt, hoodie, and a physical art book. GGG says you can upgrade at any time and that these packs will only be around for the six months it needs to finish development.
The build of the game launching on December 6 (with pre-loading available a couple days earlier) is hefty, with three of its six campaign acts and six of 12 classes available. The truncated story will take around 25 hours to finish and you'll have to do it twice to reach the level 65 cap for early access. You won't repeat the same acts in the finished game—where the level cap will grow to 100—but it'll roughly emulate what the journey to PoE 2's endgame will look like when it's done.
Witch and ranger are the two classes returning from PoE 1, and warrior, monk, mercenary, and sorceress are the new bloods for PoE 2. Each of them will start somewhere different in PoE 2's skill tree—which is just as gargantuan as the first game's. And they'll each have two of their three sub-classes, or "ascendancies," available. People are already picking them apart on Reddit and trying to suss out potential builds. I don't need to bother with analysis; I see that the witch can become a bloodmage who casts deadly spells that drain her life, and my starting class is already locked in.
Endgame is where things get pretty complicated if you're not a devoted PoE player. PoE 2 will expand on many of the systems in the first game, and GGG plans on bringing back seasonal, or league, mechanics over time. One returning system is similar to 'mapping' in PoE 1, but has you jumping into a wider variety of randomized dungeons and boss encounters to earn permanent upgrades for your character. All of it is designed to keep you blasting for hundreds of hours even in this early version.
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