Hardcore Music is Great, What About Hardcore ARPGs?

I’ve only ever made hardcore characters in Terraria. Everything always started out so well, too: I’d have nearly a whole suit of copper armor and a sturdy, wooden single room shack overlooking some cliffs; it wasn’t much, but it kept the zombies at bay.  I’d start my third day full of zest and vigor. Pick in hand, I’d hop into the starting shaft of my hellevator to harvest some more minerals, only to find that I hadn’t built it quite straight enough and my unsuspecting body would splatter across the pixelated chasm I’d created (someone really needs to regulate hellevator construction). Lately, I’ve been passively watching several Path of Exile streams, just leaving them on in the background as I do my daily internetting, and in so doing, I’ve noticed a trend: every popular streamer runs characters in the Nemesis League. Why a hardcore league? Because the potential for a catastrophe to occur draws viewers! But there has to be more to it than that. There has to be something else. I’ve heard over and over that hardcore is way more fun than softcore could ever be, but why? I don’t want to lose my character when I die and the threat of death from problems like desynchronization or, in my case, a random drop of internet service is very real and no one will help recover your character if you lose it that way or any other way. Once a hardcore character dies it’s just dead. That’s it.

The best piece of advice for people looking to get into hardcore in a game like this is not to pretend you won’t die. You’ll die. The game isn’t about building up a single character in hardcore, instead, it’s about building up a stash–a small empire of sorts, the spoils of which can ideally support an entire line of successors. I’ve read that it’s best to think of the game not as an ARPG in the classic sense, but more of a Roguelike. Roguelikes are all about permanent death and working your slow path through randomly (or procedurally) generated dungeons that are generally incredibly difficult to actually finish. Sometimes you’ll win, but you usually won’t. It’s more about the journey.

I decided to give it a shot today and I still haven’t died! I am, however, only at the Ledge on normal difficulty, which I plan to farm a little bit to get some experience before moving forward. I’m running Etup’s Scion axe Spectral Throw build because it looks like a relatively safe, defensive build capable of dealing a lot of damage when necessary. I’m still at a loss for exactly what is so magical about hardcore mode in games like this, but I’ll let you guys know if I figure it out.

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Who Knew Exile Could be so Fun?

Now, with a week of experience under my belt, I can safely say that Path of Exile has swiftly become one of my current favorite games outside of the Fighting genre. What I initially took to be a Diablo clone and nothing more has swiftly proven that it can stand on its own within a genre that it certainly didn’t create, and could even prove to bolster that genre in the coming months, or even years if Grinding Gear Games plays their cards right.

Beheading hordes of undead and unraveling thousands of yards of demonic ribbon is inherently fun, but Path of Exile offers more than hour upon glorious hour of mindless slaughter through it’s incredibly deep character customization system–the depth of which can only be matched by the now decade-old Diablo 2. Now, I’m not going to rag on Diablo 3 for lacking character build customization, because it does have a lot to offer, but what it offers is very modern and, well, “softcore,” when compared to PoE. PoE takes a step away from modern gaming norms of easy respeccing, quick fixes for bad decisions and clear-cut, obvious paths of progression and forces players to–at least attempt to–map out a build for a character before making it. It doesn’t have to be anything complex: for example, I wanted to play a Ranger based around the idea of a high mobility archer (cliche, but a simple place to begin). So I took to the passive skill tree builder with this idea in mind and set out a rough path, read a couple of guides on the official forums, tweaked my build to suit what I had read and then I got started. Thus far, I have taken skill nodes that involved bow damage increases, accuracy increases, critical hit chance modification and projectile speed modification, as well as evasion nodes for defense. It’s not a perfect build by any means, but I’m having a great time launching volleys of arrows at anything that wriggles toward me from the darkness.

It’s easier to shoot these things with arrows than you might think.

Character build planning like this appeals to the mathy side of me–friends and family might note that I inherently hate math, but, for some reason, if the math involves betters my ability to fell swarms of demons with some sort of magic, it’s way more appealing. Who could have guessed? Theorycrafting has been a favorite activity of mine since the days of Dungeons and Dragons, where I would map out an entire character up until max level (and sometimes beyond, just for kicks) after one evening of play. These sort of things excite me. I have applied this side of my brain to MMOs as well: the Burning Crusade era of World of Warcraft stands out in my mind because that’s when I discovered the website Elitist Jerks and found out that I’m not entirely crazy for desiring to build the perfect character (maybe on a little bit).

If you’d rather just hop right in and get to playing, as opposed to poring over text to find the best build for you, the official forums offer an insane amount of builds that have become popular since release, as well as archives of builds that have fallen from popularity due to changes in the game’s mechanics. To give one such build a try, just for kicks, I picked (mostly at random, but sort of based on this picture) a Shadow that revolves around heavy evasion/mana shield (standard, I know) and uses a single claw weapon and a shield for forcing its way through the armies of of the undead. For new players, I’d recommend trying an established build like this one before moving on to trying one of your own. Chances are, through playing the game with a build that works you’ll learn why such a build works and will, in turn, learn what makes a build truly good within this engine.

My current main build (in progress), based on Perz’ reave Shadow

Once build choices like these are made, they do become, more or less, “locked in.” Builds can be changed through Orbs of Regret, but when a full build at max level contains 120 points which would need to be refunded in order to completely start over, it’s quite a bit more efficient to just remake a new character and try again.  To give an idea of how rare Orbs of Regret are, in a playthrough of the game on normal difficulty, I came across two of them. This can be offputting to new players, but if you’re on the fence about playing PoE simply because of the system’s lack of respec ability, I encourage you to give a popular build a shot. If you like Action RPGs, especially with a touch of different flair than Diablo 3, I can only imagine you’ll love PoE.

Path of Exile Beta Ends Tomorrow

Tomorrow, Grinding Gear Games‘ Path of Exile leaves open beta and switches over into its full free-to-play mode. I had the pleasure of getting involved with the game at a much earlier stage of development a little over a year ago. It’s a lot of fun, but the timing of the closed beta to which I was invited overlapped very poorly with the retail release of Diablo 3, a title which I had been looking forward to for quite some time. I couldn’t justify spending time in Path of Exile‘s beta when I could be slashing down hordes of undead in a game that had actually made it all the way through the development cycle (though at times it still feels questionable whether or not that’s the case; looking at you, Jay Wilson). Now, on the other side of Diablo 3, I can take the time to fully appreciate Path of Exile for what it is: a hardcore-oriented take on the isometric ARPG genre.

Path of Exile can be best described as an Action RPG that’s more Diablo 2 than Diablo 2. The inventory is clunky by modern standards–each item occupies an incredibly large amount of space–so you have to really pick and choose what to pick up; the currency works like an in-depth barter system, even when selling and trading with NPC merchants (there is no gold); the passive skill tree–which mimics the skill tree in Final Fantasy X–is positively massive and honestly a little daunting; respeccing isn’t as easy as it is in most modern games and the system in place doesn’t look to be changing at any point in the future. The developers wanted to create a game where, if you felt the need to try a different build of your character, you’d need to reroll the character entirely. Small changes can be made if you just end up not liking a recent decision in your build, but a sweeping overhaul is time consuming to the point that you’re better off just making another character and trying again. This adds to the game’s replay ability in a very old-school manner: each time you want to try something different, even within the same class, you’ll need to start back at the beginning.

It’s gritty, it’s gross. The atmosphere is bleak; monsters limp and writhe forth from shadows and do their best to cut you down where you stand. It’s a whole lot of fun. Fans of the genre would be doing themselves a disservice if they didn’t check it out.