Path Of Exile: Heist expansion gets the crew together for a big score today

Fine free-to-play action-RPG Path Of Exile today launches its squillionth free expansion, Heist. As the name suggests, we'll be breaking into secure places to rob them blind. And in true heist tradition, we'll recruit a crew of rogues with unique skills to bypass security. I'm in.

This update was supposed to also to introduce a Mac version of Path Of Exile, though that has been slightly delayed by last-minute technical problems.

As the video and expansion page explain, players will buy their way into the Rogue Harbour, a heisthub where you'll set about recruiting NPCs, doing jobs, and training up your crew and acquiring info to ultimately pull a Grand Heist. Crew members have classic heist skills like lockpicking, dancing through lasers, and brute strength that can all help in a job. You want to keep the heat low for as long as possible, because you'll earn nothing if you don't make it back out with your haul. Heists are not something I'd expect in an action-RPG but it sounds great fun.

We had a wee chat with lead designer Chris Wilson when Grinding Gear announced the expansion earlier this month.

"We were running out of ideas because we'd done about 40 of these things by now, and we were inspired by the fact that Magic: The Gathering continues to come out with new ideas after 27 years, you know, they’ve done hundreds of sets," he explained. "We figured there's gotta be stuff available for us to do, and so when looking for inspiration we loaded up Netflix and started looking at movies."

And so, heists. If they continue to drink from this fountain of inspiration, I predict the next expansion will be coming-of-age story with magic, then true crime about grim murders, followed by a gritty take on superheroes, an adaptation of a different video game, and finally the wild-eyed discovery that actually the Vaal were aliens.

Servers will go down for patching to begin at 6pm tonight (see this post for your local time), then should come back online with the update live at 9pm. Unfortunately, the Mac version planned so you can bring your click-click-clicking to coffee shops has been held up.

"Our intention was to release an experimental copy of the macOS Path of Exile client around a week ago, so that community members could test it before its official release tomorrow alongside Heist," Grinding Gear explain. "A series of last-minute unexpected technical problems meant that we only had this client distributable today. Our new plan is to release this experimental client immediately for feedback from adventurous macOS users, and to officially release on Mac in around a week."

If you're feeling bold, you can download the experimental Mac version now, which will also be updated with Heist today. Just be aware of Grinding Gear's warning that it "may be buggy and still has a few things we want to fix".

Path Of Exile is available on Steam and through its own client. We've called it one of the best RPGs on PC.