Path of Exile

Path of Exile appeared on PlayStation 4 in March 2019, more than a year and a half after the Xbox version and nearly six years after its PC debut. In the meantime, Grinding Gear Games had polished the gamepad controls to perfection - radial menus for quickly selecting spells, flasks, and items work on the DualShock just as smoothly as on Xbox, so new players didn't have to deal with the growing pains of the first console port that the Xbox version went through two years earlier.

The game arrived on PS4 with all the systems of the time: the same passive skill tree, the same system of skill gems and support gems, seasonal leagues, and the endgame Atlas of maps. Trading between players works the same way as elsewhere, through currency items like the Chaos Orb instead of gold. However, the PS4 version, too, runs on its own servers separate from PC and Xbox - progress, currency, and gear aren't shared between platforms, and an account must be maintained separately for each of them.

Given the later release date, the PS4 version also benefited from the start from several years of refinement of the control scheme, which PC and Xbox had to gradually go through themselves, so players on PlayStation received right away a more mature, less clunky version of the console interface. Just like on other platforms, the choice between the calm standard league and the hardcore mode with permanent character death is preserved here as well, and the game remains completely free, funded only by cosmetic microtransactions and storage slots.

For players who came to Path of Exile for the first time via PlayStation, there was no need to work through the transitional versions of the controls - they got the polished standard right away, one that Xbox had to earn the hard way back in 2017.

Why play it: For PlayStation owners who want the most complete and most polished console version of this free ARPG hit - the cost of entry is zero, and the depth of the build and crafting systems is nearly unlimited.