Path of Exile’s Synthesis Expansion will launch in March

Grinding Gear Games has announced that Path of Exile’s big Synthesis expansion will launch for PC on Friday 8th March before arriving on Xbox One on Monday 11th March.

The main focus of Synthesis is the new storyline that sees the player helping a new NPC named Cavas remember his past. To do this, the player will have to fight monsters through Cavas’ memory fragments to try and activate “stabilisers”. By nature, the memory will decay as you play through it, which takes the form of a big blue wall enveloping the map, so it’s a bit of a race against time to activate the stabilizer. Once you complete a memory fragment you can place it on the Memory Nexus, a big board where you can piece together all of Cavas’ memories to help him remember. These fragments form sequences of mini-dungeons on the map, and players that manage to complete a full sequence will receive special loot and rewards from Cavas. These dungeons decay over time the more you play them, and once they’re fully decayed they will be wiped from the board.

Some of the rewards that the player earns can come in the form of Fractured Items that are found within memory fragments. These items have been damaged by the decaying memories and will therefore have some stuck properties, which can potentially be either a good thing or a bad thing. Stuck properties can’t be re-rolled, so players can make use of the Synthesizer, which is found within the Memory Nexus, to combine three Fractured Items of the same class to produce a Synthesized Items.

Aside from that, there’s also a lot of spell rebalancing going on, with all 40 spells being overhauled or rebalanced. There’s also a number of new spells and skills being added to the game, and 16 new unique items, such as armour, weapons, and accessories are also coming. The content from the Betrayal expansion, which launched in December, will be integrated into the core game.

You can read more about the update here. As a side note, don’t forget that Path of Exile’s long-awaited PS4 release will also arrive at some point in March.