Following the release of the Echoes of the Atlas expansion, free to play action RPG Path of Exile has reached a record high number of players on Steam. Although Path of Exile is active across both PlayStation and Xbox, it first emerged on PC way back in 2013 and retains its largest audience there. Serving as an alternative to a version of Diablo 3 plagued by the now-erased real-money auction house, Grinding Gear Games' release has arguably passed Blizzard's famous franchise thanks to its nonexistent barrier to entry. For many, it's now the go-to game for clicking various demons and rats to death.
Echoes of the Atlas is the tenth expansion for Path of Exile, emerging late last week after a reveal only a week before that. The new update continues the story introduced in Conquerors of the Atlas with a new Epilogue campaign. It also introduces passive skill trees and a new Maven NPC that challenges players to a series of boss rush challenges. On the loot side of things, there are thirteen new items to snag out in the world and eleven new maps to explore. As with all the other Path of Exile expansions, this is a free update that's available to everyone.
Perhaps it's that dedication to huge free updates that has ensured Path of Exile's continued growth as a game even after seven years. The team at SteamDB has harvested the data to show definitively that the game reached its peak player count four days ago upon the launch of the expansion. It also shows that Twitch viewership for the game reached over 200,000 unique users, which is another record-breaking number. All this doesn't even factor in the user using the standalone client for the game on PC rather than Steam, making the stats even more impressive.
After launching this tenth expansion across three platforms and receiving this level of response, the future looks bright for Path of Exile. The team at Grinding Gear Games has already confirmed that native versions for Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 are coming in the future, although the game already runs on backward compatibility on those machines. The developer is also hard at work on a full sequel campaign that will live alongside the original game. Managing director Chris Wilson has said that players should expect a release in 2022, although they will be showing new footage of what they've been working on this year.
While it seems that the main content of the original Path of Exile is coming to a close in 2021, it's still an exciting time to be a fan of the game. The upcoming upgrades on current consoles should give players a hint at what type of technical wizardry they can expect from 2022's sequel. That's not to say that PoE is a slouch in the graphics department by any means, but it's always exciting to see a long-running game with so many updates hit the reset button and iterate on what made the original such a smash success.
Path of Exile is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. The game is backward compatible on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, with native versions currently in the works.
Source: SteamDB