It’s a great strategy from Grinding Gear Games, keeping both Path of Exile and Path of Exile 2 alive and fresh at the same time. If you love the original ARPG and don’t want to jump ship for the sequel, that’s fine. If you want to throw all your weight behind the new PoE, that’s fine, too – you can even play both. Originally, Path of Exile 1 was scheduled to go quiet for a while so GGG could focus on PoE 2. But the opposite has happened. Thanks to an emergency, ‘experimental’ event, Legacy of Phrecia, Path of Exile 1 has just overtaken its younger sibling on Steam.
The PoE Legacy of Phrecia event is a chance for Grinding Gear Games to set loose some of the unused, too-wild-for-mainline-launch ideas that it’s had for the RPG over the years. It lasts a month, and includes more than a dozen new ascendancies, some extremely powerful and possibly unbalanced abilities (like being able to trade your entire intelligence pool for raw strength), and the option to fuse frost and shock skills together. Most notably, Legacy of Phrecia upends the Path of Exile endgame.
The Atlas skill tree, which helps you to narrow down your preferred rewards as you progress through randomly generated maps, has been replaced by a system that resembles the Trial of the Sekhemas from Path of Exile 2. It lets you find Idols, which when you place them onto your map device apply various modifiers to your map. The Legacy of Phrecia event started yesterday, Thursday February 20, and runs until Sunday March 23. Based on current Steam statistics, it’s already a huge hit.
During the last 24 hours, Path of Exile 1 has achieved a concurrent user peak of 91,977, meaning that, at one point, almost 100,000 people were playing the game simultaneously. Path of Exile 2 has come close, but it’s still just under – the highest number of concurrent PoE 2 players in the last day was 87,222.
This is the first time that PoE 1 has outperformed Path of Exile 2 since the latter was released in December. It comes after Chris Wilson, the popular co-director of PoE 1, seemingly left Grinding Gear Games.
If you’re a big PoE fan, you might want to try some of other best games like Diablo, or maybe the best MMOs available right now.
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