Path of Exile

Path of Exile from the New Zealand studio Grinding Gear Games launched on PC in October 2013 as a free alternative to the Diablo series and quickly earned a reputation as one of the deepest action RPGs on the market. The game is financed exclusively through cosmetic microtransactions and additional storage spaces called stash tabs – no gameplay advantage can be bought with money, something the studio openly describes as the fundamental principle of its monetization.

The core of a character is a vast circular passive skill tree with thousands of nodes, shared by all classes, along with a system of skill gems and support gems that can be socketed together in almost any combination – it is precisely from the combinatorics of this building-block system that the game's legendary depth and the endless number of possible builds arise, still discussed on forums to this day. Trading between players, moreover, does not run on gold but through a hierarchy of currency items such as Chaos Orb or Exalted Orb, which are also used to improve gear.

The game continues to run on a model of seasonal leagues: every three months a new league launches with its own character and economy starting from scratch, and with a temporary mechanic that sometimes becomes a permanent part of the game. The endgame is built around the Atlas of maps system, where the player assembles both the difficulty and the type of rewards themselves, and on top of all this there is also a choice between the standard mode and a hardcore league, where a character's death means a definitive end and a move to the standard league.

On PC, this was from the start the leading, default version, controlled with mouse and keyboard, which the studio treats as the reference platform for all new content – new leagues, skill adjustments, and bug fixes are tested and deployed here first. Console releases arrived only several years later, with their own control scheme and on their own, separate servers with their own economy, so progress and trading do not carry over between PC and consoles.

Why play it: For players at their computer who want the most complex free-to-play ARPG on the market and are not afraid of a learning curve – the reward is a build and crafting system that, even after more than ten years, hasn't stopped growing.