One of the most exciting things about a new Path of Exile update is that you never quite know what to expect. While both Diablo 4 and the full launch of Last Epoch are still in their early stages and working out exactly what new seasons look like, PoE is now more than ten years old and Grinding Gear Games continues cooking up all manner of fascinating ideas for each league. Path of Exile 3.25, titled Settlers of Kalguur, packs in all manner of upgrades and improvements, along with a whole new city-building side.
Path of Exile Settlers of Kalguur features four returning faces from the Expedition league. Dannig, Rog, Tujen, and Gwennen are Kalguurans looking to establish trade between the eponymous nation and the land of Wraeclast. To achieve this, they’re establishing a new city called Kingsmarch, and as you go about your regular business in the action RPG you’ll help build out this small village into a bustling hub of commerce and crafting. Ahead of the reveal, I sat down with game director Mark ‘Neon’ Roberts to discuss the many new features.
“Honestly, it’s an idea that’s not exactly new,” Roberts tells me of the theme. “It was actually really surprising that we hadn’t already done this.” Once the idea of building out and managing the upkeep on your settlement began to take shape, however, Roberts says the team began to joke that they were making “the Palworld league,” given the recent prominence of the creature-collecting survival and management game.
As you construct Kingsmarch, you’ll fill it with all manner of people and buildings. Each of these has a purpose, from improving the satisfaction and efficiency of the locals to offering you all manner of new facilities including item disenchantment, farming, and shipping routes to trade for specific rewards. You can even set them to run maps for you (at risk to their health), or take advantage of some big features that center around the addition of something that Path of Exile has long avoided – gold.
Now a regular drop alongside all the everyday loot and currency, gold can be used for some new tools. Its first function is to pay the wages and upkeep for the workers you hire in Kingsmarch, but it can also be used for a couple of much more dramatic additions – to respec points on your passive skill tree, to pay for a new system enabling player-to-player currency trading, and to gamble for items at a Black Market vendor.
While the ability to set marketboard-style currency trades with other players is a huge leap forward for PoE, it’s the Black Market gambler that Roberts calls out as the “dark horse” to watch. The items it’s capable of producing can, at their peak, be “equivalent to generating hundreds of rare items on the ground and effectively picking the best one – you don’t have to run some obscene loot filter that’s hiding 99% of items.” If it’s successful, Roberts hopes the system can help GGG to “cut back on bad items and allow gold to be a source of delivering good ones.”
With gold absent from PoE since its launch back in 2013, Roberts says the decision came as a result of improvements to itemization in Path of Exile 2. “We landed on gold being the right answer [there] – so, if it’s the right answer, why would we not do it?” He is keenly aware that the introduction of these features is a big deal and something that is tough to put back in the box, however. While GGG isn’t afraid to pull the plug if any of these truly destroy the game’s economy, Roberts estimates that, in all likelihood, gold will be here to stay for the long run.
As for how the automation aspects of Settlers of Kalguur work, the general idea is that once you get systems up and running, they will continue to chug away in the background in real time. That continues as you play, but also rolls along while you’re logged out altogether. Roberts estimates that it should be reasonable to get a good amount of progress that might last a couple of days from a casual weekend’s play, but that it’ll be very tough to keep everything up and running at full tier-ten efficiency all the time.
At times, you might fall foul of a new antagonist, Sasan the Bandit Lord. Sasan can show up and take your workers hostage from time to time, forcing you to make a tough choice to either fight him, pay his ransom demands, or simply abandon the workers to their fates. Of course, there’s plenty more reasons to take on Sasan’s bandits and bosses, with some powerful new uniques up for grabs if you’re able to put them in their place.
There’s a lot more to look forward to beyond that. That includes a colossal number of quality-of-life upgrades in PoE 3.25, such as an increased pickup range (another addition from PoE 2, where it’s all but required for players using WASD controls). A rework to melee sees many skills getting “approximately 75%” stronger at level 20, with less demand for uniques to make builds work and the removal of melee totem skill gems altogether. “You will deal the damage yourself, and you should be rewarded for doing so,” Roberts explains.
Elsewhere, the Gladiator ascendancy has been heavily reworked, and makes use of new ‘retaliation’ skills that typically require certain conditions to use, such as having an active shield or having recently blocked an incoming attack. The Raider ascendancy, meanwhile, is gone altogether, and is replaced by the Warden – a newcomer based on the Wildwood-specific subclass from the PoE 3.23 league. That’s accompanied by the return of Tinctures, which again sit in your flask slots and can be applied to melee weapons for powerful bonus effects.
The Wildwood itself also makes a return as a new map modifier, where it is joined by a range of other updates including new endgame encounters. You’ll also gain the ability to unlock a sixth slot in your map device, which Roberts tells me is “just more” than before. The system has felt a little flat since the scarab rework in 3.24, he explains, and this upgrade along with some additional scarab changes should help bring back the variety of endgame maps.
All told, Path of Exile 3.25 is looking to be an exciting follow-up after a league that, by Roberts’ own admission, “didn’t go as I hoped.” It’s also a resounding statement that the original Path of Exile isn’t going anywhere – GGG intends to run the game alongside its successor long past the Path of Exile 2 release date. “I am certainly not ever going to be in the mindset of putting all our eggs into PoE 2,” Roberts says. “Honestly that is my biggest struggle day-to-day in the office – I love both games, but I only have 24 hours in the day.”
Path of Exile 3.25 and the Settlers of Kalguur league arrives on Friday July 26. You can play Path of Exile for free on Steam, or via the standalone GGG launcher. You’ll be able to check the full patch notes courtesy of Grinding Gear Games ahead of launch, if you want to pore over every last minute detail. As a Path of Exile player, there’s a good chance that’s exactly what you’ll want to do – and I’ll be right there too.
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