Path of Exile's Echoes of the Atlas expansion comes out next week
Absolutely boss.
The Path of Exile: Echoes of the Atlas expansion comes out on PC on 15th January, developer Grinding Gear Games has announced. Echoes of the Atlas then hits the console versions of the action role-playing game on 20th January.
The 30 minute new content video is below. There's a huge amount to this expansion - there are 11 new maps and associated boss fights added to the Atlas, including new locations such as the Dry Sea, Forking River, Frozen Cabins and Grave Trough.
You get to specialise each region of your Atlas with its own passive tree, craft Watchstones to refine your rewards, and select up to 10 map bosses to face simultaneously under the watch of the Atlas' new pinnacle boss: the Maven. If you defeat three map bosses in the Maven's presence, you get invited to her realm, where she tasks you with defeating these bosses simultaneously. After you complete that challenge, the Maven tasks you with defeating four bosses, then five, then six and finally 10 at the same time. Manage that and you get to fight the Maven herself.
Then there's the new Ritual League, a wave-based mode enclosed within a ritual circle, 19 improved Ascendancy classes, new items and the return of Harvest.
The Echoes of the Atlas expansion is the one Grinding Gear Games delayed from 11th December 2020 in order to dodge the gargantuan 10th December 2020 launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
"We do not want to put our players in a position of having to choose between these two games, so we have decided to step out of the way and delay the release of Path of Exile 3.13 until January," GGG said at the time.