Descent Races

Path of Exile's Race Season Three starts next weekend! We've designed a new signature event for this season - the Descent league that PC Gamer announced over the weekend. Today's news post goes into more detail about the development of this league and how it works.

Path of Exile race leagues are short duration events where players compete in a fresh economy to win prizes. With durations ranging from minutes to one week, they allow players to demonstrate mastery of the game. We group them into Seasons and have run two of these Seasons since entering Open Beta in January. For more information, please check out the announcements of Seasons One and Two.

After the last two seasons, we surveyed our racing community and took a lot of feedback on board. During the design of Descent races, we tried to take into account the following pieces of feedback:

In the first two seasons, players competed by racing through the standard Path of Exile game as quickly as they could, trying to gain more experience than other players. We occasionally added interesting properties (special game modifiers, super fast monsters, random ancestral totems) to these races. These events have been very popular, but when designing Season Three, we wanted to offer an experience that differed from running through the core Path of Exile plot.

Our random level generation system allowed us to easily string together a new set of levels and build a minigame around it - the Descent league. It's an alternate shorter version of Path of Exile designed specifically for our race events.

In a Descent event, you start in the outskirts of the Phrecian Forest and must search out a forgotten cathedral. As you descend into its depths and explore dungeons, caves, ruins and more, you encounter challenging combinations of monsters and bosses from all areas of Path of Exile.

In Descent leagues, the normal hardcore rules (where hardcore characters just become non-hardcore ones on death) do not apply. Characters and their items are permanently destroyed once a Descent event ends, regardless of whether they survived or died. We wanted to design Descent as a standalone experience where we don't have to worry about items making their way back into the regular Path of Exile economy. This freedom allows us to structure how characters receive items so that there are interesting choices as they progress. We're able to give out complex crafting items at certain levels without it being unfair to players who don't play the Descent events.

Because the goal of Descent isn't to accumulate wealth, we've designed it almost like a traditional single player RPG where the fun is working out what character build for each class stands the best chance of surviving through the difficult content.

Because there's no backtracking or repeating areas in Descent, there are many tough choices when deciding which monsters or bosses to kill on each level. We provide support for skipping areas by having a choice of Quicksilver Flasks early on and by not restricting entry to the next level based on any criteria other than discovering the entrance. The higher levels are very hard and scale up quickly (as well as technically being designated as Cruel and later, Merciless), so you're going to want all the experience you can get from previous levels.

Note that because Descent races are the Signature Events of Season Three, there will be alternate-art Demigod's Stride items given to the top-three characters of each class at the end of the season, based on overall experience. Only the highest result of each character class on an account is compared.

Race Season Three runs from Saturday June 29 (New Zealand Time) for approximately six weeks. We'll be posting a schedule on events within the next few days!