Path of Exile

Path of Exile rewards curiosity in a way few action RPGs manage. The early acts feel familiar at first, but the moment you start experimenting with support gems and the passive tree, the game opens into a giant sandbox of ideas. A single skill can become a completely different tool depending on how you route your passives and which supports you pair with it. I went from glass cannon mapper to tanky boss hunter without rerolling, simply by rethinking links and a few key passives. That sense of agency never really fades.
The league model is the engine that keeps it fresh. New mechanics arrive regularly, but the knowledge you build carries forward, so coming back never feels like a reset. Endgame mapping is where the design really clicks. Atlas choices, crafting decisions, and bossing routes layer together, and you can feel the impact of your planning in your drops and in your fights. There is a lot to learn, no question. The community tools are excellent, a good loot filter turns noise into signal, and the game gives you room to grow at your own pace. Monetization stays in the background. Stash space is the clear quality of life buy, cosmetics are optional, and nothing leans on pressure tactics.
If you enjoy theorycrafting, tinkering, and the satisfaction of seeing an idea turn into a build that melts a map you once tiptoed through, this is a long term home. Give it a weekend, and it has a way of taking over your evenings.

You'll hear that you can only play this with a guide. That spending skill points wrong will cause the heat death of the universe. That rolling your own gear is a waste of time because you couldn't possibly comprehend the machinations of PoE crafting.

You can ignore all that. You can ignore basically everything anyone with 1000+ hours says. You can play this game just fine on your own if you want. It's a fun video game behind all the elitism, and most of the community are actually quiet types going about their grind quite happily.

I think "veterans" forget how the game is for your first 250 hours. The sense of adventure and learning and progress. They're so focused on "finishing" the League in a week that their advice is no longer compatible with an actually new player.

So take it from a 250 hour newbie, the game is great.

This game could be good if they'd just introduce some complexity, y'know? LIke, maybe give us some options on the skill tree. Where's the variety? I ran the numbers, and there's only 3,916,742,971,342 ways to build a unique character, and that's counting the new ascendencies they just added for free to their already free game that they're still actively developing for after over a decade. Lazy devs SMH.

Game's good, despite what the recent review bombing would lead you to believe. Anyone having a meltdown about the recent announcement needs to touch grass.
No new updates suck (specially if you don't like PoE 2), but some of the takes in the community have been absolutely insane and it's a major part of the reason GGG cut near all direct community interaction.
If you're new, you still have a wonderful game with thousands of hours in content.
If you are an old player, relax, game something else. Stop acting as if GGG scammed you, or is killing poe1 for good. Do it if it actually happens, not based on speculation from a delay announcement. Be rational, please.

Played this game for over 5000 hours, might as well give it a thumb up at this point, it deserves it.
Not exactly new player friendly, but very much worth your time playing it. juste be careful you don't actually take the path of exile and neglect your real life if you start playing this game, it could happen.
Not truely free to play, don't let anyone tell you otherwise, but very agreeable commercial model.
More importantly, very good game, frequent and free top-quality updates, insane amount of content and very deep systems.
What more can a nerd ask for ?
Just be careful to not let it ruin your real life

I started playing this game in February of this year. As you can see, I've already sunk in...a lot of hours.
This game is *good*.
I could talk a lot about how much fun I've had with the endgame of POE, how I've already tried out something like 9 or 10 builds (most of which were pretty scuffed but at least somewhat functional), how I can't wait for 3.26 and all that - but instead I want to talk about something else.
I want to address anyone who has ever thought Path of Exile LOOKED potentially really fun or interesting, but found it too intimidating or dense and ultimately decided against playing it.
Path of Exile has a long and storied history of being "overly complicated" and you hear so many memes, jokes, but also serious advice about how you "NEED to follow a build guide" to enjoy this game, how you NEED outside tools and resources like loot filters and how if you don't go do hours of research and watch guide videos and read a Leaguestart Build Guide on Maxroll.gg before even installing the game you're going to have a bad time and not understand anything.
THIS IS ALL 100% FALSE.
Or, at the very least, HEAVILY over-exaggerated.
Is Path of Exile a complex game with a lot of interlocking systems that take time to learn and understand?
Yes.
Does Path of Exile do a good job tutorializing these systems adequately within the game itself?
Not really.
But - crucially - is a robust understanding of these systems necessary to try the game out and enjoy it?
NO.
Path of Exile is no more or less complex than any other isometric RPG out there - I would easily compare the first-time playthrough of POE to something like Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, or one of Owlcat's Pathfinder games in terms of system complexity - although certainly not in narrative design. Path of Exile's strength is certainly *not* in its narrative but that's not a bad thing!
So if you are an RPG enjoyer, if you enjoyed the MECHANICAL COMPLEXITY of the above or similar games and want to try something more real-time, action-combat focused - PLEASE DO YOURSELF A FAVOR, IGNORE EVERYONE TELLING YOU THAT YOU NEED A BUILD GUIDE AND A LOOT FILTER AND THIS AND THAT AND THIS OTHER THING AND JUST PLAY THE GAME.
The campaign of Path of Exile, the first time you play through it, assuming you're not trying to speedrun it for some reason and you take your time to just enjoy the game for what it is, will last you somewhere between 20 and 35 hours.
For FREE.
And it's GREAT.
As long as you have a *baseline understanding* of how RPGs work, how to generally understand things like stats from your passive skill tree and items, and you put in SOME amount of effort to actually engage with the *basic* systems the game presents to you like the skill gem system, you can 100% beat the campaign without any sort of build guide as long as you're not just allocating your passive skill points by essentially throwing darts and hoping for the best.
You don't even need to "decide" what kind of "build" you're going for, really, until you're done with the first two Acts of the game. You have plenty of time to experiment with the variety of different skills in the game, because Path of Exile's variety MOSTLY comes from its Skill Gem system - something you can easily experiment with and swap around freely in the early game with little to no opportunity cost. Even in the later stages of the campaign you can still experiment and play around with swapping skills - it might take a bit *more* effort than in the early stages of the game, but as long as you're not trying to swap to something that's the polar opposite of what you've been doing for the last 15 hours, you'll be fine.
So - pick a class that seems to have a power fantasy you enjoy. Do you like throwing lightning bolts and fireballs? Play the Witch or the Templar. Do you like being a sneaky, stealthy ninja or assassin? Play the Shadow. Like killing enemies from a whole screen away with a bow? Play the Ranger. Do you like being a jack-of-all-trades of martial combat, able to use any weapon to a reasonable degree? Play the Duelist.
Do you like bonking things really hard with a big hammer/mace/insert other two-handed big weapon here? Play the Marauder.
Then, when you see the passive skill tree for the first time, *don't panic*. It seems VERY intimidating at first - but I promise you, it isn't. The reason the passive tree is so big is because it's the SAME TREE for EVERY CLASS - each class just *starts* somewhere different. So zoom in to *your class's* section of the passive tree, and just take a look at what the class has easy access to. You don't need to make any decisions yet - just take a look and start feeling it out. For now, all you need to do is start putting your skill points on a path to things that give you stuff that will serve you well on any sort of build - for example, it's NEVER a bad idea to path towards more Life with your passive skill points until you've filled out the two or three clusters of Life skills closest to your starting location in the tree.
Meanwhile, try out all the different skills the game throws at you in the first two acts! You can buy more skill gems from Nessa or Yeena, so try try try! See what *feels good* to play. By the time you start running out of "generalist" passive skills, hopefully you'll have settled on a skill that feels fun and good - and you can start investing your precious skill points into passives that are a bit more specialized. Don't just abandon investing in things like Life and Resistances - but you can start really "building" your character a bit here!
That's it. As long as you have some semblance of a *plan* for your character - like you should in any RPG - you won't screw up your "build" to the point where you can't even beat the campaign. And it doesn't have to be a very specific plan - you just have to have a solid idea of what you want your character to DO, even if that idea is as simple as "throw fireballs until the whole screen is dead" or "do my best Mario cosplay and stomp on heads Really Hard". Trust me. My first playthrough of POE was on this same advice - no build guide - and, well...clearly I had a good enough time to end up here.
If you hit any roadblocks or if the game starts feeling too difficult - it's probably NOT your passive tree, or anything you can't fix. In fact, the problem will usually be your gear - something that can *definitely* be fixed. If you feel like your damage is too low, if you're dying too much, checking and upgrading your gear will fix 90+% of your problems. A good rule of thumb is to always prioritize gear that has high Life and at least one Elemental Resistance stat - except on your weapon, where you want high damage. A pair of gloves that only has two stats, but those stats are +70 Life and +26% Fire Res, are better than a pair of gloves that has 5 stats but only +10 Life and no resists.
By the time you beat the campaign and reach the endgame, with maps and the Atlas Tree and Crafting and Pinnacle Bosses and all that - the parts of the game that DO need a build guide, that DO need a more robust understanding of its more complex systems - you will already have had 20+ hours of a fun RPG experience to inform you if the game is something you enjoy enough to be *worth* all the legwork.
So - do yourself a favor. If POE looks fun, or interesting, and you've always *wanted* to try it - but everything *surrounding it* sounds really intimidating?
Try it anyway.
You might not like it. You might get halfway through Act 3 and feel like the game still isn't meshing with you, and you're not having fun. That's okay! At least you can say you tried!
You might only play through the campaign once or twice and have a good time, but then move on to other games. That's great!
Or you might end up like me, and find your new favorite game to pour 1,000 hours and counting into.
Besides, it's free. And in this economy? What do you have to lose?

It's ok. (best game I ever played, truly a dream come true for grinders and fans of ARPG's)