With over 16 million registered users and 1.1 million monthly active users on PC . During E3 2017 we sat down with Managing Director Chris Wilson to check out the latest expansion for Path of Exile: The Fall of Oriath. The largest expansion to date, Fall of Oriath includes six new acts with a port for Xbox One launching with the expansion as well. Since its launch in 2013, Path of Exile was only available on PC.
The Xbox One port will include everything available in the PC version, with each platform getting separate servers. Actually porting the game over to Xbox from a technical standpoint wasn’t too much of a challenge, “From a control point of view, it actually came together pretty smoothly,” says Wilson. “It’s easy to port to Xbox because the game was already a Windows game.”
Path of Exile will even be available on Microsoft’s newest console the Xbox One X. After they got a dev kit a few weeks ago, it only took an hour, yes an hour, to port the Xbox One version of the game up to Xbox One X running at 60 fps in 4K.
Despite the ease of porting the title form the technical side, there are still balance issues that must be considered when taking a game primarily played with a keyboard and mouse and altering it to work on a console controller. Even though the game will be the same story-wise on both platforms, several smaller details revolving around gameplay had to be tweaked to fix balance changes that effect the Xbox version in particular, making the two versions subtly different.
The biggest features that required adjusting were skills that had players use the mouse to choose the placement of their attacks on PC, whereas on Xbox using the analog sticks would leave the you vulnerable while enemies continued attacking as the player paused to consider a placement. A prime example of this is the use of the totems, which are sedentary creatures you can use as an ally to fight and distract enemies who come within a certain radius near its location. On PC, you can just click and choose where you want to summon it, but for the Xbox One port, Grinding Gear Games had to come up with a way for it to intelligently pick a place for it to spawn near you automatically
Like on PC, the Xbox One version will be free-to-play. Cosmetic items and storage space that grants you more room to store your loot are purchasable, with Support Packs also available if you want to fund future development and also get some in-game gear and physical merchandise .
Sources :
http://twinfinite.net/2017/06/path-of-exile-the-fall-of-oriath-xbox-one-port/
http://www.ign.com/