Path of Exile is one of the most popular dungeon crawlers and live-service action RPGs in recent memory. The game boasts a gameplay loop that feels both like a panacea for Diablo fans looking for more content and its own beast that embraces some old-school design concepts. Path of Exile has embraced the approach of brutal difficulty of older ARPGs while acknowledging the need for new players that any live-service game goes through. With its newest expansion Expedition, Path of Exile may be looking to reach out a little bit to both veteran and incoming players.

Game Rant was invited to a prescreening of the recent livestream that announced the new Expedition expansion. This will be the first expansion for Path of Exile since Ultimatum was released. A short Q&A with Grinding Gear Games' Chris Wilson and other publications revealed a lot of excitement about the new expansion, and a large part of that was how the team at GGG is looking to help shake up the challenge of Path of Exile going into the future of the ARPG.

Balancing out the beginning learning curve of any game that features an online or multiplayer component is vital. Fighting games are a prime example as that community has expanded, games with incredibly high learning curves are being balanced out to help newer players like what's happened with Street Fighter 5 and the more recent Guilty Gear Strive. Path of Exile, and other RPGs with PvP and endgame PvE, is no exception to that rule. It seems like developer Grinding Gear Games has taken a hard look at that fact are shaking up Path of Exile in a big way with its newest expansion.

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Brutal difficulty isn't something new or even something that dissuades many video game players. Games like Bloodborne and Ninja Gaiden shown that an intense period of skill development isn't something that will scare off a lot of potential players. Every new dungeon-crawler hopes to surpass the one before, something Diablo is surely taking note of, and Path of Exile is in a unique position to climb the proverbial ladder by rebalancing key elements of its gameplay like resource management, core movement speed, and new defensive mechanics.

Many games that have a huge emphasis on multiplayer PvE can have steep learning curves, especially true with player versus player. Fans have gotten excited about Path of Exile's newest expansion already but shifting some key concepts and adding new ones could work well. The developers have mentioned a system that will simultaneously limit the usage of flasks in an exploitative way while maximizing their usage. The new livestream, embedded below, shows off a new management system for flasks that will make their usage a much more tactical choice than before.

Expedition for Path of Exile will also be taking a new look at player and enemy base speeds. In an attempt to make the game more palatable to newer players, many enemies in the first few acts of PoE move considerably slower than the player. On its face, this may seem small, but in a game so focused on action economy and specialization like Path of Exile it could quickly mean the difference surviving an encounter and a certain respawn.  This aims to make the initial learning curve a little steeper, but players will also have access to a new defense attribute alongside blocking, energy shielding, and dodging.

The ward mechanic is the more ambitious change to Path of Exile's core attributes that will be coming to Expedition. Ward serves as an immediate defensive stat that isn't judged against anything else. If something does 100 damage to your character with a ward of 100, that first chunk of damage will be negated. This is another addition that seems minute but could shake up the meta of Path of Exile by a lot. If players at earlier levels are given access to equipment that provides ward, then it could be yet another in the multitude of ways that Path of Exile is looking to shake up the long-running ARPG.

Expedition releases for Path of Exile on PC and macOS July 23, 2021, and for Xbox One and PS4 on July 28th.

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