Path of Exile - Upcoming Improvements to Blight and Future Expansions
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Following the recent release of the Blight expansion for their free to play action-RPG Path of Exile, Grinding Gear Games brings us this announcement that shares some news regarding the game's upcoming challenge league expansions as well as its next major “4.0” expansion that we should expect sometime next year. Check it out:
Our team have been hard at work on a variety of Blight improvements that are coming soon. Tomorrow's news post is a roundup of what we're improving. Today we wanted to take a moment to talk about our plans for the future expansions.
In the week following the release of a new expansion, many members of the development team shift their focus to designing and creating the next one (while others continue to improve the recently-released league). We have now begun this process with 3.9.0, which will be released in early December. This particular cycle is an interesting one because of the presence of ExileCon (November 16-17), so we wanted to explain how it'll work timing-wise.
As you know, we release new expansions (which contain challenge leagues, balance changes and new game features) every 13 weeks. We do not expect to vary this timeline in the near future, so over the next year we're roughly looking at:It's important to understand that due to its scope, 4.0.0 is likely at least a year away from full release. Despite it being quite far from completion, we will both announce it and have a playable demo at ExileCon this year.
- Early December 2019: 3.9.0 Expansion (announced at ExileCon in November)
- Early March 2020: 3.10.0 Expansion (announced in February)
- Early June 2020: 3.11.0 Expansion (announced in May)
- Early September 2020: 3.12.0 Expansion (announced in August)
- And so on, with new expansions every 13 weeks until 4.0.0 is ready
In addition to the big 4.0.0 announcement, we'll also announce the 3.9.0 expansion and its challenge league at ExileCon, which is around three weeks before they launch. We expect to have this content playable on the demo machines at the event as well.
If you're not able to attend ExileCon, don't worry! We'll be streaming our keynote presentation full of announcements, trailers and gameplay of the new content from both expansions. There will be far more information on announcement day than we usually release for expansion announcements. We'll cover quite a lot of it in developer talks, which will be recorded and then released in the news over time.
It's going to be a very interesting development cycle for us, and we can't wait to show you what we've been working on. Both 3.9.0 and 4.0.0 are game-changing in their own ways.
Then, you might also be interested in this overview of the planned improvements to the current Blight expansion:
Last weekend we launched the Blight expansion, and we're happy that you've been enjoying it so far. Our team has been constantly monitoring your feedback and reports throughout this week and has outlined some things to improve as a result. Today we'd like to give you an update about the fixes and improvements to the Blight League that we're currently working on.
The following issues are currently being investigated and have high priority:The following issues have been resolved and are currently being tested:
- Crashes with the exception 'Present' error.
- Blighted Map performance. Honestly, the most realistic way we're going to get this to acceptable levels is to slightly reduce the number of monsters being spawned. We're going to be very careful to make sure that the encounters are still hectic, fun and rewarding, but it'll probably involve slightly fewer entities being tracked and rendered.
In addition, based on your feedback regarding Proximity Shields and the 'Cannot Die' aura on Blighted Monsters, we've made some changes. The 'Cannot Die' aura will no longer be able to spawn on Blight monsters now. Blight monsters that cast Proximity Shield will no longer be able to cast the skill if they're already standing in a Proximity Shield. In addition, Blight monsters that have an active Proximity Shield will now disable it if they become affected by another Proximity Shield. This should reduce the number of cases of overlapping shields. These changes (as well as the resolved issues listed above) are likely to be included into the 3.8.1 update which is currently scheduled for next week. We'll post a preview of its patch notes as soon as possible.
- The tower building UI closes if you had gained enough resources to upgrade a different tower.
- The "Cursed Concoction" passive skill causes Blasphemy Curses to deactivate.
- The Consuming Dark unique dagger does not apply Chance to Poison correctly.
- Transforming an amulet into a talisman removes any anointments the amulet had.
- Killing Uber Elder does not grant completion towards the "Complete Endgame Grinds" challenge.
- Server lag with the Necromancer Ascendancy passive Essence Glutton and Discipline skill gem.
- The Blighted Rhoa boss can become immune to damage when revived if it died while Petrified.
In 3.8.1 we're also planning to improve rewards from Blighted Maps by adding additional multipliers to the chests at the end of each lane.
It's also worth mentioning that the new Ice Shatter sound has received some changes, and we're planning to include them in 3.8.1 as well. While we're not going to restore the old sound (as it had some significant technical issues), the new one has been significantly improved from the version that shipped in 3.8.0.
Thank you for your continued feedback and support. We really appreciate it!
