Grinding Gear Games' Path of Exile is fast approaching the end of the current League, Ultimatum, which launched back in April this year. As such, a new expansion will soon make its debut during one of the studio's live streaming sessions. Ultimatum as a League had its moments, such as the great community engagement from the first few weeks. This was shown via the posts about the successful gambles with the Trialmaster, as well as the ones that had gone horribly wrong. With the 3.15 update likely coming in around three weeks from now, fans are wondering what the teaser trailer from yesterday was all about, especially because the focus seemed to be more on new skills rather than revealing too much about the League.
However, the new teaser for Path of Exile's upcoming League did show a terrain patch filled with skulls that had glowing symbols and were mounted on spikes. Both in motif and color, the skulls recall Fairgraves and the various microtransactions associated with this theme. Then, the teaser trailer concludes with a few new NPCs standing in snowy terrain, looking like a mix of pirates and Night Watch warriors from Game of Thrones. One of these NPCs seems to be sporting a peg leg, and with the overall pirate-esque theme of the teaser, it's not surprising that many long-time fans started obsessing with the "boat League" meme that was especially dominant when Heist was first announced.
Path of Exile Memes, Boat League, New Skills, and What Could be Coming
GGG has been building a huge community for Path of Exile over the years, and with the ever-expanding game that it created, it became natural to engage the community with memes and jokes. The boat League meme is not the only one that the community still clings to, with other honorable mentions including the toucan and fishing secrets, but with Heist, the possibility of ships and sea action actually seemed plausible. For this reason, what looks like a pirate theme for the 3.15 update is a big deal, despite the official Twitter account for Path of Exile stating that ships are not a thing next League.
It should be noted, however, that Path of Exile would need to undergo huge engine changes in order to allow GGG to work on water-related content and player interactions, and this is more likely to come with Path of Exile 2. In fact, one of the trailers for Path of Exile 2 does show a character moving around on the deck of a ship, and that means that boat Leagues could finally be a thing in the future.
As for the new elements of the trailer, there seem to be at least four new active skills coming to Path of Exile, with one of them looking like the love child of popular Skill Gems like Cyclone, Reap, and Bladestorm. The others seem to be spells, with two of them looking like Chaos-based abilities due to their purple glows. Another is basically confirmed to be a lightning skill that resembles Doryani's Touch, only with a more squared pattern for its area of effect.
Little else is shown, so it remains to be seen what the League will actually be about. While this is speculation at this point, GGG is known to sow seeds for what is about to come to the game through otherwise meaningless comments or posts. Circling back to the Tweet with the checklist of things not included, each item of the list not appearing in the game is marked with an "X," and what could this mean? Pirates, and maybe buried treasures to unearth.
Path of Exile is available to play on Mac, PC, PS4, and Xbox One.