Path Of Exile's new expansion Echoes Of The Atlas is out now

After a short delay to scuttle out of Cyberpunk 2077's way in December, Path of Exile has booted its newest expansion Echoes Of Atlas out the door today. Path Of Exile's update 1.13 is live now, adding a good chunk of new features including new maps, new endgame boss, and new passive skill trees.

"In Path of Exile: Echoes of the Atlas, you'll gain even more control over your end-game Path of Exile experience by specialising each region of your Atlas with its own passive tree, crafting Watchstones to refine your rewards, selecting up to ten map bosses to face simultaneously and challenging the Atlas' new pinnacle boss: The Maven," Grinding Gear Games say.

Maven sounds like a particularly tricky new task as she'll require you to defeat several other bosses before hiking off to her realm to fight them again—simultaneously this time. After that, she'll finally deign to fight you herself.

There's also the new Ritual challenge league, which plops ritual altars around the world. You'll have to kill the baddies protecting them and then activate the altars for an additional challenge: killing even more monsters that show up to attack it in order to earn rewards from the altar.

Grinding Gear are particularly ready for players to jump into that bit of the update. "We have come up with so many league ideas that tried to be Ritual in the past, but it was only when we found this one that we knew it was worth that prestigious name," co-founder Chris Wilson said in a post yesterday. "For how simple the league is conceptually, it's a total blast to play."

Grinding Gear Games have published the full patch notes for update 1.13 as well with details on balance changes, ascendancy updates, and all the other nitty gritty.

Path Of Exile is one of the best RPGs on PC, made even more so by being free-to-play. Good thing there's always more to do, as Path Of Exile 2 is now most likely coming in 2022.