• News

Path of Exile Mobile announced, promises uncompromised gameplay

As Grinding Gear Games prepares to bring Path of Exile to mobile devices, they promised the game will be uncompromised by usual mobile and free-to-play trends.

TJ Denzer

November 15, 2019 2:55 PM

1

As ExileCon 2019 continues in full swing, there’s plenty to enjoy about the future of the Path of Exile franchise. One of the latest announcements is that Path of Exile players will soon be able to enjoy the game on the go with mobile devices. Path of Exile Mobile has just been announced, and the team promises that there will be no loss in quality as they prepare to port the game over in a full and enjoyable form.

Grinding Gear Games announced Path of Exile Mobile during the events of ExileCon 2019 and via the Path of Exile YouTube channel. A new trailer was launched with gameplay and commentary from the development team. Grinding Gears Games Co-Founder and Path of Exile Technical Director Jonathan Rogers is unabashedly not fond of trends he sees in mobile games, but conceded that many of the problems he has with the mobile gaming market were also issues in free-to-play games when Path of Exile launched. And so, the team set out to do something similar with a mobile version of their dungeon crawling experience. You can check out the trailer just below.

“Mobile games are kind of bullsh**, right?” Rogers cut to the quick in his introduction of Path of Exile Mobile. “Pay-to-win microtransactions, time gates, energy bars, random nag screens, notifications, video ads… there’s really a lot of evil garbage going on with mobile games today, but in 2012 when we first released Path of Exile on PC, you really could have said the same thing about a lot of free-to-play games there too. Back then, we really felt like we could do free-to-play on PC without all of that player-hostile stuff. So we thought, ‘you know, maybe we can do the same thing for mobile.’”

In that spirit, Path of Exile is meant to be a nearly one-to-one port of the Path of Exile experience to mobile devices with a little optimization to make it good and fun to play on a mobile interface. The game is also designed fully in-house at Grinding Gear Games to ensure that the vision for a quality mobile version of the game is maintained.

No release window has been given for Path of Exile Mobile at this time, but Grinding Gear Games CEO Chris Wilson assured players that it’s a experimental title not meant to interfere with any other projects like the recently announced Path of Exile 2. Continued development will be based on fan feedback.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.