All About Path of Exile Mobile
Play even when on an island!
It’s become common in recent times for many games to have a mobile version, or at least a mobile spinoff. Path of Exile, a top-down gothic hack-and-slash MMORPG, is following this trend. After all, its genre allows it to transition into the small screen without compromising its gameplay, content, and POE trade mechanics.
What is Path of Exile
For the uninitiated, Path of Exile is, like what we’ve already mentioned, a gothic top-down hack-and-slash MMORPG. For a lack of a better comparison, it’s like Diablo III from a smaller Kiwi studio, except it’s graphically just as good, and has a completely different character growth and customization that definitely gives players more freedom and is arguably better than what Blizzard’s legacy dungeon crawler has.
At the start of the game, players have six classes to choose from, and each one is associated with certain attributes, and raising them allows these classes to perform their traditional roles better.
They are as follows:
What sets these classes apart from those in other similar games would be the fact that they all have the same passive skill tree, and what sets them apart from one another would be their starting point in the skill tree. However, because they share the same skill tree, all classes can get the passives traditionally associated with another class, provided that they take the necessary nodes to get there.
In addition to that, Path of Exile uses skill gems rather than inherent active skills or spells. By socketing them into gear, players are then able to use them. There are also support gems, which further enhance certain properties of a skill the socket it’s in is linked to. With this, players can wield all sorts of skills rather than be limited to a certain number of them.
Such a premise will ensure that Path of Exile Mobile is going to get a lot of attention from first-time players. Because the game encourages players to mix and match all sorts of POE items (including POE uniques), abilities, POE Currency, and passive skills, it will have much replayability, and mobile gamers are all about finding a game that they can play for days on end.
The Right Path to Mobile
Another difference Path of Exile has with Diablo is how it’s going to handle its mobile release. Unless you’ve been living in a cave or online games have only been your thing lately so you didn’t get any news about them in the past, you’d know how negatively received the news of Diablo Immortal was. Aside from that now-infamous taunting of players with that “don’t you have phones” remark, a mobile game – and an outsourced one at that – being the main event definitely did not help. And because its development was outsourced to NetEase, many fans can’t help but see how similar it is to the many other games of the studio.
Thankfully, Grinding Gear Games is not following Blizzard’s footsteps in Path of Exile Mobile. They’re keeping it in-house, which means that the mobile version is going to be faithful to the very mechanics and gameplay that made the game shine.
On top of not dumbing down and diluting the experience, Grinding Gear Games also aims to be different from other mobile games by not having the usual profit-oriented gimmicks found in these kinds of games. Energy bars, in-your-face ads, microtransaction items that give players an advantage, loot boxes and gacha – these things have left a taste for mobile gaming in gamers’ mouths so badly that they have stayed away from the platform as a whole. A shame, as it’s actually a great way to improve the game if only it was done right.
Path to Release
Maybe Path of Exile Mobile, with Grinding Gear Games’ vision, can restore people’s faith in mobile gaming – the same way the base game didn’t follow the same moneymaking schemes other free-to-play games of the time did. Path of Exile set an example, so maybe the mobile version will do the same as well.
Unfortunately, however, due to the CoViD-19 pandemic, the mobile version’s development has seen some delays and missed its target launch last year. Thankfully, Grinding Gear Games is working on it again. However, the studio is also busy working on Path of Exile 2, which is kind of a hybrid between a sequel and an expansion. But don’t lose hope, as GGG is still definitely working on the game, and rumor has it that it will be launched on the same date as the sequel. Whether the latter is true or not, what’s important is that Path of Exile Mobile will definitely be out soon.
So, what are you waiting for? You have phones, right? Just kidding. Jokes aside, we hope that you try out Path of Exile Mobile in the future. In the meantime, you can play Path of Exile on your phone via Steam Link.