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I've taken a break from my Nintendo Switch... to play Path of Exile on PC. Technically, that's accurate because although I'm inputting my commands on an ancient iMac (we're talking early 2010s here), the game itself is being run on a high-end PC somewhere in a data centre owned by Nvidia. And then I'm streaming the game to a nice screen, basically. So yeah, cloud gaming.

At the risk of losing my readers by going into details on the hours I spend playing Path of Exile... there's a new league out. See, every three months or so, the developers of PoE release a new mini-expansion to the game, with new content and new challenges to complete. And they've been doing this for years now, and some of the new temporary content gets added permanently, so after all this time there's actually quite a lot to do in the game. But this also makes the game more and more complex. I hadn't played for years (because you need a decent PC to have any hope of playing it) until I rediscovered it with cloud gaming, and I was barely able to make my way through because of all the new content that had been added since I had last played.

Path of Exile is an ARPG, which stands for Action Role Playing Game. It's isometric, so you're controlling your dude or dudette from above. If you're familiar with the Diablo series, it's a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 (but way better!). There are a bunch of classes, and each class has 3 sub classes, but the key to customization is the massive "passive tree" where you allocate one point per level. So you run around killing monsters and collecting loot to upgrade your character to tackle harder content. And you can trade with other players using the game's currency system which, unlike many other RPG games, avoids gold altogether by utilizing a massive variety of "currency" that you can spend to craft items, modify the content you're running, or use to buy items from other players.

So I'm playing a Poison Seismic Trap Saboteur (Seismic Trap is the main skill I use, and I'm using it to inflict poison damage from the physical damage it causes; Saboteur is the "Ascendancy" (or sub-class) of the Shadow class). And this particular combination is really powerful, and really popular for the current patch (played by 13% of players at the time, which is massive considering there are literally hundreds of possible main skill/class combinations). So I'm part of the "meta".

Often, the more advanced players will start with a "league starter", and then make a whole new character once they've accumulated enough wealth on their 1st character, and all this within the 3-month league window. They'll make multiple characters, even, to tackle different content. Me, it's too much of a time investment to do that (and it takes me too much time to level the characters up through the boring part of the game for veterans; the campaign/levelling section), so I'm still on my 1st character and I don't plan to make another one until we move on to the next league and this current character doesn't matter anymore.

Okay, so that was a rough overview of Path of Exile, and I will end it here with a screenshot so you get some semblance, visually, of the game I'm talking about:

 

The dude with the fiery wings is the guy I control; you can see some zombie things blinded by one of my skills to the left of my character.