April Fools: Programming typo fills Path of Exile with cats

Suddenly, cats! Thousands of them!

Ozzie Mejia

April 1, 2015 6:00 AM

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Typos are the devil, I tells ya! They can make any news post on a site like this one look downright ridiculous. But what's worse than a typo plaguing a run-of-the-mill article, tweet, or Chatty post? How about a typo in a line of programming? That's the worst, as the poor folks at Grinding Gear Games are finding out.

Yes, sadly, Path of Exile currently has a major problem with its Trigger Gems. Some careless programmer was rushing through some of the changes for the game's upcoming expansion, meaning they slammed the 'T' key before the 'S' key. A couple of hundred copy-pastas later and "cast" has been replaced with "cats" across the board. As one might imagine, this has led to some major im-purr-fections.

Any condition that involves casting spells is now summoning cats into the game. Trigger Gem conditions involving "cast upon death" is now resulting in "cats upon death." Any Trigger Gem that activates when taking damage is now summoning cats. The issue is everywhere, as indicated in this forum post from the overwhelmed developers.

Path of Exile players will be relieved to know that a fix is imminent and expected to be released by the end of today.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?