Path Of Exile 2 early access review: an expressive, characterful ARPG with plenty to chew on

Down in the bonehoard

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Grinding Gear Games

• Developer: Grinding Gear Games
• Publisher: Grinding Gear Games
• Release: Dec 6th
• On: Windows
• From: Steam
• Price: £24/$30/€28
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i5-12600K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

At any given moment I am in the center of a wonderful vortex of skeletons. Bones splash and rattle and burst out of the ground in sharp, horrible spurs. My weakest skeletons, sensing their death coming, explode into fire and shards. My strongest skeletons fight so hard and with such alacrity that upon dying, they drag their spirits together and keep fighting as ghosts for a while. Foul little bone scorpions skitter around on fans of legs made from human hands. Somewhere in the middle, almost invisible among the noise, is the character I am actually playing: Path of Exile 2 ’s mean-spirited, callous, and gleefully enjoyable Witch.

This is a review in progress. It has to be. Even in its incomplete early access period, Path of Exile 2 is a great sprawling mass of a game. Three meaty acts of a planned six act campaign are followed by a trickier return tour through them, before the absurd endgame kicks into gear and the real work begins. If I came to you having played everything on offer I would be wild-haired, bloodshot-eyed and possessing perfect, incomprehensible knowledge. Let’s compromise: I have toured the dark caverns and the antediluvian crypts. I have been killed by various accumulated nasties. I’ve had a great time.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Grinding Gear Games

The place to start is with the original Path of Exile , a vast and metastasising ARPG perhaps best known for its spidery skill tree. Exploding outwards from a central point like so many dropped marbles, it’s the sort of screen that first makes you say “I bet you could develop some really varied builds here,” and then, as the scale begins to sink in, “help.”

Whenever I tried to play, though, it was a different story. Path of Exile 1, this deep into its lifespan, is a dark and austere game for new players, speaking its intricate design language to a devoted base at an almost impossible fluency and speed. I could play, of course, working my way mechanically from one tutorial to another, but it was a kind of blunt and limited play borne of my own lack of experience.

It was with some relief, then, that I saw that the studio was working on a sequel, designed to be supported concurrently with its predecessor. This seemed like an opportunity to board the train while it was at a station rather than leap onto it in motion, and I’m happy to report that I was largely rewarded. Path of Exile 2 is, on the face of it, a more focused and welcoming journey through the dark. The original game launched in 2013, and in the sequel you can feel the studio setting a decade’s work and experience to one side, taking a long and ragged breath, and putting pen to paper again. Like any good sentence, the result follows naturally from its predecessor, but is sharper, clearer, and easier to read. There are fewer clauses within clauses within clauses.

Clarity is important when there’s this much going on. The spider-web skill tree has returned, but as before, it functions as something of a trap. New players stare, enthralled, in its direction and at that exact moment the true complexity of the game comes from behind and wallops you over the head. It’s time to talk about gems.

Rather than being earned, skills in Path of Exile 2 are found in gems, as pieces of loot. You’ll shred through a bunch of snakes and, alongside a new circlet or the usual “Marginally Better Shoes”, you’ll find a blank skill gem with a level attached, which you’ll then “engrave” into a skill of your choice from a delicious menu of options. These begin straightforwardly; each of the game’s six classes possesses initial options that speak directly to a particular fantasy of play. My Witch got her skeletons right off the bat, no messing around, along with a nastily withering damage-over-time miasma. The Mercenary scatters explosive grenades, the Warrior tears earthquakes through the ground. So far, so normal, but I valued such a clear set of verbs for each class given what was to come.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Grinding Gear Games

Soon after starting out, “support gems” begin to drop, and then a bunch of build possibilities come exploding out of nowhere. These attach to your skills and augment them, initially appearing blank before you engrave them with an effect, and the game is polite enough to offer some recommendations as to what you might want them to do: Maybe make something stronger at the cost of a longer cooldown, or increase an effect’s duration. The real fun, along with a sort of yawning vertigo of possibility, begins when you uncheck the “recommended gems” option and are shown all the possibilities, bright like gumdrops, ready to be sorted through and slapped onto your skills. The kind of authorship this offers is enticing; on many occasions I’d frown at some quirk of one of my skills (“if only this lasted longer”) or imagine some improvement (“what if my skeletons were poisonous”) and then, come the next opportunity to tinker, I’d go digging in the menu to see if I could make those changes.

Most of the time I could. As is so often the case when a game sets out to offer a massive field of options, in actuality there are certain guardrails put in place. To Path of Exile 2’s credit, they’re never egregiously restrictive, though I wish I could have more than one support gem of the same kind attached to two different skills. Sometimes it is as though they have presented me with a beautiful banquet and told me that I can’t eat the tables and chairs and while I understand that, I really do, the candelabra looks mighty tasty.

Still, sometimes in other games a skill tree can feel like a series of dance steps handed to you to perform. You look up the tree towards the locked skills and you think “in two hours I’ll have the fireball, and in three I’ll have the revive spell”. You close your eyes and you see yourself fighting the final boss with the meteor attack, because what else are you going to pick? With the explosion of permutations its skill and support gems (and other, spiralling sister systems) allow, playing Path of Exile 2 feels like improvising alongside the game. One thread of an idea leads to another, one build plan falls apart completely and another pops out of the wreckage. It’s a loose and expressive way of staging an RPG’s systems that, once I got to grips with it, felt extremely natural.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Grinding Gear Games

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Grinding Gear Games

And my god, this is the meat of the thing. The longer you play, the more the individual components start bumping into each other and the more authorship you start to feel over your character. There are the usual ARPG equipment systems, of course, drumming their sickly and compulsive rhythm. A better cuirass. A worse staff. An unidentified item, complete with the little inhalation of breath (“what could it be?”) and exhale of disappointment (“hat.”) Here, though, the items are often responsive to the swirling mass of choices you’ve made elsewhere, so you’ll find yourself wielding a weapon that initially makes very little sense but triggers some condition you’ve set up elsewhere. I fought the final boss of an act with a main weapon that dealt exactly zero damage by itself but passively made everything else I cast extremely dangerous.

This spirals. Each class can unlock one of two “ascendancy” subclasses that go diving back into the initial fantasies and come up with extremely violent, showy new skill options. As you approach the endgame, the skill trees start splintering into smaller, discrete trees for individual challenges or playstyles. When I put my mind into that place, I begin to understand why it was that Path of Exile 1 was so opaque and off-putting to me and so compelling to its veterans: they had built this awful, wonderful tower brick by brick and there stood I, at the bottom, head tipped back to see the top.

The way this is all carried off is wonderful. Even incomplete, this is a gorgeous game, and one that goes diving into a dark fantasy aesthetic with a wild glee. It is simply tremendous when a Count finds something in the forest, isn’t it? When he starts getting stranger and more sinister? Starts rounding up the villagers and forcing them to dig a big pit? Equally tremendous are carved ruins sunk in swamps, and statues with beams of light pouring out of their eyes, and ancient contraptions, and vast caravans dragged, leaden, across the desert by amassed yoked undead. The visual imagination on display is immense, even as it splashes around in the most well worn spaces.

So, you travel from one place to another and hundreds of unfortunates come screaming in from all directions to see what kind of build you’ve prepared for them. Their teeth are sharp, and the game is quick to punish a misplay or a lapse in attention, but the large procedural maps are littered with checkpoints, and each failure is an opportunity to dip back into your menus, adjust a build, and try again. The highlights of combat are the game’s many bosses, which take a leaf out of From Software’s book not just in showy and demanding movesets but in outlandish and evocative design. A gargoyle covered in lit candles. An undead elephant with entirely too many skulls. Despite the inclusion of an (essential) dodge roll and an emphasis on the importance of positioning, these fights are not quite as Souls-like as they might first appear. Outside of the expected escalating challenge towards the end of the first three acts, none ask for the quick reflexes and patience that From’s creations expect.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Grinding Gear Games

Right now, you have to put down around £25 to play the early access, but come the full release, the whole thing will be free. Between then and now, they plan to add three further acts and six further characters, as well as presumably start contorting the endgame into the various experimental shapes of its predecessor. As it stands, the additional monetisation is simple and unobtrusive: a shop to purchase various cosmetics and stash tabs to help you better organise your amassed items.

I’m less curious about the future monetisation than I am about the shape that the game will take in a month, three months, a year from now. While I played, the team at Grinding Gear were constantly deploying patches that tinkered with core aspects of the game. It got easier. Bits of it got harder. More loot dropped consistently. This makes my job as a critic more difficult, albeit unquestionably more interesting. Path of Exile 2 is a game built on top of a teetering, highly interconnected stack of systems and choices, and the studio’s willingness to carve away and reshape them renders the future uncertain. As more of their core players wring the systems dry over immense year-long playtimes, will the studio be able to keep the improvisatory, expressive play intact, or will the numbers get ever bigger and the consequences ever smaller? Five hundred hours into a perpetually updated live game like this, the worst thing to be—the absolute grey death of play—is an unstoppable god quibbling over a single percentage point.

But here I am, with miles to go. Around the corner come three large apes, ten small apes, and a worm the size of a house. I hold down a button and they erupt in flames, and awful skulls come wheeling out of the fire towards them. My army of skeletons goes to town. I have slotted a kingfisher blue skill gem into place, and this lets me try a new tactic where one of my own skeletons is impaled on a horrible bone spike, inspiring his remaining comrades to fight harder. My army of skeletons are terrifically loyal. For one and a half seconds a feeling passes over me and the feeling is: Is this all there is? Fights like this forever, in slightly different shapes? Then my boys fell the worm the size of the house and with a click, its body erupts into bone scorpions, and I shake the feeling off. There’s a support gem to collect. I’ve got an idea.

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Path Of Exile 2

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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