Path of Exile Open Beta Begins

If you’ve been looking for a quality free-to-play action-RPG then today is your lucky day as the Path of Exile open beta is scheduled to begin this afternoon. Path of Exile is from New Zealand developer Grinding Gear Games and will be open to the public beginning at 1pm PST. A final character wipe from closed beta will be taking place and all existing characters will be reverted to level 1 and all their items will be destroyed. This should be the final character wipe the game will ever have.

Players who have participated in the closed beta client need only launch the game from their existing client, and it will automatically patch and bring you into the open beta. The patch will be made available approximately 2 hours before the Path of Exile open beta begins.

If you’re going to be trying Path of Exile for the first time during the open beta, you can create an account and download the client over on the official site.

Grinding Gear has already warned us that their website has been seeing dramatically increased traffic over the past few days, so as we draw closer to the actual open beta launch don’t be surprised if their are a few hiccups in the system as the devs work to accommodate a large player load.

Along with our first look at Act III and some incoming balance changes, the micro-transaction store will be introduced in this patch. There will be several cosmetic items available for purchase, including pets and item effects. These cosmetic items will be bound to your account and not tradeable with other players. Grinding Gear holds a strict policy against pay-to-win and their micro-transactions should never provide any sort of actual game advantage.

The introduction of Act III will be the City of Sarn and will include 21 areas based on 8 new tilesets, 18 completely new monster types and over 90 monster variations. We should also be seeing another slight improvement in the artwork of monsters and items in this patch.

There are a ton of balance changes and bug fixes coming in the Path of Exile open beta patch, and you can check out the full patch notes here. All the fun begins soon, so get ready for some awesome action-RPG goodness!