Path of Exile 3.26 brings a big endgame upgrade and mercenaries to the free ARPG

After nearly a year of waiting, Path of Exile 3.26 marks the grand return of the still-undisputed ARPG champion. While PoE 2, Diablo 4, and Last Epoch are all making great strides, Grinding Gear Games' original free Steam game is still tough to top, with more than a decade of honing under its belt. It's been on the back burner of late, but with Path of Exile 2 early access now in a stable spot, GGG is ready to deliver Secrets of the Atlas, a major endgame overhaul featuring additional crafting options, map chains, and fresh pinnacle bosses, accompanied by new challenge league Mercenaries of Trarthus.

"It's certainly been too long since we had one of these," director Jonathan Rogers remarks. "We had some struggles as a studio for a little while there, but we got our shit together, and we are back in action now." New Path of Exile update Secrets of the Atlas marks a shift at Grinding Gear Games; not only is it an answer to the cries of veteran players aching for one of the best RPGs ever to get fresh attention, but it's also the first in GGG's new schedule. From now on, both PoE 1 and 2 will release major updates on staggered four-month cycles, meaning a total of six leagues each year across the pair (one every two months).

The big focus here is on the endgame, and PoE 1 game director Mark 'Neon' Roberts tells me during our preview event that the team is very much putting the long-term, hardcore audience first with this update, although he emphasizes that it's also a great time for series newcomers to try the free Steam game. Indeed, the introduction of mercenaries – companion characters that you can hire to join you on your adventures and fight alongside you – is something that will undoubtedly prove a boon to those dipping a tentative toe into the original game's waters.

These mercs are veterans of the lawless cities of Trarthus, an area Roberts is keen to expand on the in-world lore for. Each one you come across will have a full set of equipment and skills that you can study, and you'll need to challenge them to a duel if you want to earn the right to hire their services. Alternatively, if you don't want their companionship, you could fight them to win an item from their inventory; or if you'd rather see them gone altogether, opt for an 'exile' battle that will prevent them from appearing again in the mercenary pool for some time.

Having a mercenary by your side will mean tougher foes, but greater rewards; Roberts tells me that the game considers them equivalent to half of a real player in terms of scaling. You'll need gold to hire them, too, which is now a core part of Path of Exile with the integration of the Settlers of Kalguur league into the main game. With the city built, you'll no longer need to handle the construction elements from last season – it will simply be made available to you once you reach the endgame.

In Kingsmarch, you'll find several of the big features from the Settlers league, although some of the more 'broken' ones are gone. Key among them are the ability to respec with gold, the currency exchange tool for trading your crafting materials, and the black market that allows you to gamble for items. These three will also be made available in other towns for your convenience, although some of them won't unlock until certain progression points through the campaign.

Once you arrive at the city proper, you'll be able to utilize the shipping mechanic again, allowing you to trade with other regions for large bounties of gear, currency, and other loot. Notably, you can now trade with Karui ports for the passive-altering Tattoos introduced with Trial of the Ancestors, or with Kalguur to claim a new tool called Runegrafts. These work similarly to Tattoos, but are instead used to replace the mastery nodes on the passive tree, and range from simple changes like altering the item type of a bonus to the Runegraft of Time, which boasts a chance for skills with a cooldown to instantly refresh.

All of these mechanics, of course, are in service of the upgraded endgame. Tears in the Atlas have appeared, created from distorted threads of memory. Master cartographer Zana has been trapped inside, and you'll work with newcomer Eagon to step inside and attempt to find her. These play out as a sequence of maps (Roberts says they typically range from four to eight in a row), all of which can be fully affected by the standard combination of your Atlas tree, Scarabs, Fragments, and so on.

The monsters in these threads are imbued with memory petals (an effect fittingly reminiscent of Clair Obscur Expedition 33's gommage visuals), and defeating them will allow you to absorb the petals. These can be spent on new abilities, dependent on the current map, which appear on a mini-bar next to your regular skill set. They boast some particularly potent effects, and can stack up with multiple at once as you progress further through a thread, as well as special Altars that apply stacking modifiers to all future maps in the chain.

For example, Memory of Impatience pulls in souls from surrounding enemies to make you temporarily much more powerful. Use it, then follow it up with Memory of Panic and Memory of Disbelief. The former causes monsters to revive once after death, effectively allowing you to farm them twice, while the latter prevents them from dropping equipment (instead ensuring that their loot pool is filled with more valuable rewards such as currency and maps).

Combine multiple powers and Altar effects and you'll encounter "some of the most juiced maps ever run in Path of Exile," Roberts teases. At the end of a thread, you'll face a warped, upgraded version of a powerful boss (including some of the ultra-strong pinnacles). Defeat these to earn special map fragments that open up the ability to take on three all-new pinnacle bosses. Roberts says these are considered stronger than the current lineup, although not as tough as ubers (we'll have to wait for a future update for the newcomers to receive their respective ultimate incarnations).

Of course, new pinnacle fights mean never-before-seen rewards. We get a glimpse of a few, including the Starcaller axe that casts new skill Starfall upon a melee crit, allowing you to blanket the entire screen in falling stars. Another example is the Wine of the Prophet flask, which gives you the effects of a random divination card upon use for 20 seconds. The trio can also drop new crafting currencies, used to manipulate a new stat called memory strands.

Items found in the thread maps can appear with a certain amount of memory strands. In general, the more it has, the more likely it will be to appear with better tiers for its modifiers. As you craft the object to replace affixes or add more, memory strands will be consumed to make the resulting mods more potent. The new crafting currencies let you add memory strands to normal equipment, or consume them to randomly upgrade an item's existing effects.

As you'd expect, the Atlas passive tree has also been overhauled to offer ways to modify the new threads of memories, from how they play out to the range of drops you can find. There are also some options that let you boost your rewards from Kalguur. Last, but certainly not least, PoE 3.26 features a hefty rework to the Betrayal mechanic. Crucially, you'll no longer need to reset your Immortal Syndicate progress to take on the Mastermind, meaning you won't lose your hard-earned work manipulating the group's members.

The fight against the Mastermind has also been overhauled with "significantly fewer immunity phases," and there are more rewards up for grabs, including Veiled Orbs and the new Allflame Embers. An improved twist on a mechanic from the Necropolis league, these allow you to replace monster packs in endgame maps with a variety of special monsters that add another level of customization to endgame. The 'crafting sprees' found in safehouses now also offer pre-generated items, giving you a relatively low-risk way to try your luck at building something special without 'bricking' it in the process.

Rounding out the update are some welcome quality-of-life buffs. These include the ability to pause at (almost) any time, an extra inventory on the map device, automatically collected Breach splinters, vendor windows remembering your search, and highlights to show what items a given currency item can apply to. You'll find even more in the full patch notes, including the ability to separate monster and non-monster targeting when playing on gamepad to make it easier to interact with objects while enemies are still around.

Path of Exile 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas, and the Mercenaries of Trarthus challenge league, launches Friday June 13. You can play for free on Steam or via the standalone launcher. If you're a long-time PoE veteran who's been waiting for this, I probably don't need to tell you to come back. If you're new, and perhaps started with the sequel, this update is the ideal time to give the first a try and discover why it's still widely considered the best in the business.

Alternatively, take a look through more of the best games like Diablo for some other suggestions, or try another of the best free PC games that we recommend.

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