Grinding Gear Looks Back On Path Of Exile's Growth Since Fall Of Oriath

ExileCon is almost upon us, and Grinding Gear Games wants to make sure everyone knows what it took to get there. In particular, the Path of Exile developer has shared with us a number of statistics and stories from the last few years of the game, detailing the pace of content releases and its community outreach efforts since its last mega-expansion launch, 2017's Fall of Oriath.

In those two-plus years, Grinding Gear has added 190 new items and 85 skill/support gems, which averages out to one new unique item every four days and one new skill/support gem nearly every nine days. New additions need to be balanced against the near-1,000 unique items, 247 active skill gems, 127 support skill gems, 19 ascendency classes and 150 ascendency notable passives already in the game -- so hey, let's cut them some slack if A doesn't work perfectly with B (and occasionally outright breaks C) some of the time. When that happens, GGG is usually willing to do Q&A's and communicate other important points with players to get things sorted out.

Each Path of Exile expansion since Fall of Oriath has also added a new challenge league -- nine total -- each with a new mechanic for players to explore for fun and exploit for profit. The 4.0.0 expansion, which will be announced next week and release in late 2020, is likely to reshape the way the game is played, like Fall of Oriath (3.0.0) did in adding six new Acts to the game and The Awakening (2.0.0) did in adding a new Act, jewels, divination cards, and a ton of other changes.

Meanwhile, the community is as strong and clever as ever, developing intricate builds with fancy names like "Weapon-swapping Spellicopter"...

...and (legally) exploiting beast-crafting mechanics to come up with the very rare alternate-art Alpha's Howl. And then did it again.

ExileCon takes place next week, Nov. 16-17, and we'll have coverage of all the major announcements here.