On April 8th at 1 PM (PDT), GGG will show you the first look at Path of Exile 2. And today, MmoGah will show the gameplay preview of PoE 2, which has been announced at ExileCon in November 2019 to you exiles.
Visual Changes
We're starting here at about level 11, which is around halfway through Act 1. Right away, as Jonathan place with a Graveyard, you can notice the massive improvements we've made to the Path of Exile entrance are briefly released. Environments, characters, and PoE Items all use physically based rendering, which gives the whole game a realistic look. We have new main character class models with all-new animations and completely new item-based types. Most of these have physics for many of the little details, making them a lot more awesome.
You often put a lot of work into updating the skill effect throughout PoE. For example, when you fire a Split Arrow, you really feel the individual errors because some stick in the walls, and others bounce off realistically.
The 4.0 campaign contains a variety of optional side-quests that lead to meaningful boss encounters along the way. Very soon, we will encounter Lachlann NPC, who has lost his family.
"My family… where are they? Isabel the boys were only to be gone for a few minutes, but it has been… I don't even know how long. Hours at least. Days? Weeks? What season is it? Stranger, I know we just met, but I'm so worried about them. Around here, they could have fallen into a sinkhole or been choked by gravedust. Please, could you see to their safety?"
Skill System
The game has changed a lot more than just visually. One of the things we have wanted to do for a really long time is to make fundamental changes to the PoE skill system. The skill system in PoE is really cool and versatile. Personally, it's my favorite thing about the game, but they've always been some awkward things about it. We really wanted to find a way to address all of the shortcomings while not sacrificing even a single bit of the functionality that we already have.
When you see the inventory here, you will notice something missing - all of the sockets on the items. This is because, in PoE 2, you no longer put gems into your items. Instead, the skill gems themselves have sockets, and there is a dedicated scream for socketing them.
There are some really big advantages here. For one, every single item in PoE 2 could be a 6L. This is going to cause huge changes in how players design character builds. In the past, players didn't ever want to have more than one primary attack skill because they could only have one or two 6L on a character at most. Now it's totally viable to have multiple powerful primary attacks.
The thing I'm really happy about is that you don't have to screw around with your gems all the time when you're changing items. Check out this bow here, the socket colors you get still come from your items, but now every single bow that drops will have exactly four green sockets. This means that we can swap this bow for the other one we have found, and we don't have to mess around with our gems. As we swap between the bows, we can see at a glance all the DPS values for our skills updating. It's still possible to find socket colors and items when you need to. It is easier to pick something up and put it on while leveling because everything that drops has flex sockets.
For new players, another really great advantage is that it's now impossible to socket the support gem into a skill gem that it doesn't work with. For example, this multiple projectiles gem can't be socketed into leap slam.
Some of you will be wondering about skills like auras. A lot of the time, in the old skills system, you'd throw a few gems together in a 4L with few or no support gems. How can you do that when you have a limited number of active skill slots? The answer is Meta gems. Meta gems are like super support gems that let you put multiple actives into them. For example, we want to run a few different auras on this character, then we can put this proficiency gem into the character and load up with auras. It even lets you bind a single key to enable all of your auras at once.
Shape-Shifting
Here we are on the hunting grounds. Now we're going to show you something that players have been requesting for a really long time. In PoE 2, we finally have shape-shifting. Each shape-shift form uses any regular PoE attack that makes sense. Here shows the Werewolf for using leap slamming cleave. One of the other things we thought was really important with shape-shifting is that you could just change back and forth at any time. Walk around in the middle of the skill whenever you hit the button and go.
New Grass Tech
One of the things you can see in this area is the new grass tech that we have. It's done using pre-computed ray tracing. Both ways are nice, but new grass looks in a better performance than what we used to have before.
This is only a small slice of PoE 2. We will see all of the whole game in 2022 or later. Now you can come to mmogah.com to view more PoE Guides to prepare for the new league Ultimatum, and you can also buy Cheap PoE Currency here.
