PC Gamer has posted a hands-on preview of Grinding Gear Games' upcoming free-to-play action-RPG, Path of Exile.
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Some basics up front: Path of Exile will be completely free to play (all character classes, quests, chapters, abilities and items are available to everyone). The lads at Grinding Gear say they’re committed to only charging for content that alters aesthetics–pretty armor, special particle effects like a dragon head-shaped fireball animation, or changing your character’s name. That won’t include any items or profile buffs that boost your rate of experience earning, which Grinding doesn’t plan to put up for sale. “Some of the free-to-play games out there aren’t actually free to play the way you want to–they’re free to tolerate,” said Wilson. “You can tell some of the games definitely want you pay money at regular intervals, and they’ll punish you by having long grinds that you could be skipping–we just skip that entirely by not having the ability to buy those things. You can dress up your character if you’d like to. The other thing is that our game is made by western developers for a western market–hopefully that counts for something.”
Has Grinding Gear perfected the Diablo cloning process?
Blizzard said the reason they went non-dark graphics for D3 was cause they had tried that art style, with the 3D engine and it was very hard to tell the enemies apart from the terrain at all, and it just wasn't very fun to play. And I believe it, that video looked pretty drab and brown and murky.
People just bitch about art direction cause all they wanted was a high resolution version of Diablo 2 without fuzzy interpolated pixels on these large widescreen monitors.
As for this actual game, kudos for the devs on separating actual free-to-play and their moniker, free-to-tolerate. If the EQ2 extended and the LOTRO free service actually were free to play (everything the subbers can experience, maybe just an expansion pack or two behind) and not just "extended free trial with super restrictions", you'd have alot more people excited about it.
It looks like it doesn't have enough animations or something. The art just seemed low quality to me for some reason.
Like the exact same swing happening 10 times in a row really fast. It just looked weird.
It looks like it doesn't have enough animations or something. The art just seemed low quality to me for some reason.
Like the exact same swing happening 10 times in a row really fast. It just looked weird.
I noticed this as well, it looks very...weird, which made the game a lot less awesome in my eyes. Sure, Diablo 2 did this as well [I mean, you can't expect them to animate 5 different ways to do one skill] but it just wasn't as noticeable as Path of Exile.
Compared to the faster action of diablo II or torchlight, this just seemed very "meh."
^ Really? Doesn't look all that different from Diablo II in terms of speed - some of the attacks were being spammed at a ridiculous rate. Also I love the leaping attack.
I quite like it so far - The animations are a little bit samey, but this is a preview so it might play a little different.
Other than the animations being a little "samey" I think it looks pretty fun. I will play it. Graphically it looks very solid to me.
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"...I had to be convinced that this EA... was an EA that we would be happy as a partner with going forward." - Mark Jacobs on EA purchasing Mythic, 7/28/06
