Path of Exile - Celebrating Seven Years Since Open Beta

Posted: 28 Jan 2020 02:43 PM PST

Last week was the seven-year anniversary since Path of Exile entered Open Beta in early 2013. To celebrate, we want to take a walk down memory lane and revisit some of the highlights of the past seven years.

We'll kick off our look back at the last seven years by starting with the most-watched Path of Exile trailer of all time. The Open Beta Trailer has two million views to date, and at the time of its release, became widespread across gaming forums, journalist websites and the internet at large.

One of the key things that's always defined Path of Exile is how varied the gameplay can be and the unique build creation possibilities. When you think back to early Open Beta, it's hard to forget how Spork Totems took the community by storm.

Also around this time, Kripp's burning discharge build was considered one of the strongest of its time and was extremely popular.

During this first year there was much speculation about when, or even if, someone would make it to level 100. Havoc achieved it in Standard league and later that year, Baker was the first player to achieve this in Hardcore.

At the time it was a huge achievement and had the community buzzing!

While Path of Exile was budding in growth, we encountered more new milestones as people became interested in what Path of Exile is and the culture of the game. When this high quality Witch cosplay was posted by Mirakat, it had the whole development team talking about all the small details that made it what it was.

In addition to Path of Exile entering Open Beta and bringing in a flurry of new players, it's also the year that we officially released Path of Exile and introduced the Scion as its seventh class. The cherry on top was when GameSpot announced us as the PC game of the year, a triumph for the team and solid encouragement to know we were well on our way.

While Chris and the development team have always had a cheeky sense of humour, this was certainly amplified by an April fools joke when Path of Exile became Pay to Win for the day.

Later that year, Chris made this iconic video where he shaved his head after raising $25,610 for the Child's Play charity. This benevolent ultra villain look is one that he keeps to this day and the video was the birth of several community memes.

A little while later, Joe Duncan appeared on the scene with his witty comics, a pleasure that we've continued to enjoy ever since.

Shortly after we released Act Four in the expansion called The Awakening, Chris joined professional baseball player Hunter Pence to play through the new content. Yeah, that really happened.

After The Awakening's launch we held a competition to see who could beat Malachai, the most difficult boss at the time, on the hardest difficulty. This caused a huge buzz at the studio where the whole team crowded around a set of monitors to watch the competitors on Twitch. It was a close call but ultimately Angry Weasel took home the crowner and a brand new laptop! (RIP Helmannn)

If we're looking back at iconic builds, you really need not look much further than the Wormblaster build and its many iterations that followed. We tried to keep it down but it's like the build itself was a writhing jar of worms that just kept coming back.

If you played prior to 2017, you'll almost definitely remember the frustration of navigating through Lioneye's Watch and having to run the long way round to sell your items to the vendors. The community asked and we answered!

In the past seven years, we've had the pleasure of watching many new gamers discover Path of Exile and enjoy their various reactions to the game. One particular highlight was when DansGaming[clips.twitch.tv] joined the community and discovered our sprawling Passive Skill Tree.

Speaking of streamers, does anyone remember when sunderboi went by the name Raiz[clips.twitch.tv]? Neither do we.

In our tongue-in-cheek April Fools tradition, we introduced an actually playable PATH OF EXILE: ROYALE for one day only. This was one of the most playful days we've had. We really enjoyed hanging out with the community as they realised that it wasn't a joke and we'd actually made this version. Watching players take each other out as they learned the best strategies was a great way to spend the day.

Since we're speaking of meme Path of Exile builds, you can't look past the Spellicopter build. Despite its server melting capabilities, it happens to be our Technical Director's favourite build.

While this round up of highlights from throughout the years is by no means comprehensive, it's still best to end on the highest note possible - when Mathil started cosplaying[clips.twitch.tv] for league launches.

The last seven years have been an absolute blast. Thank you so much for being here with us, whether you've been here since the beginning or you're just starting out. It would not have been possible without you talking about and supporting Path of Exile. We appreciate it very much.

The time has flown by so thank goodness there's much more to come! We look forward to even more iconic moments with you in the year to come and in Path of Exile 2.