After 13 years, Path of Exile's devs are finally ready to ditch one of its most iconic and frustrating mechanics

If you've ever seen Path of Exile you probably noticed that all its gear has red, green, and blue circular sockets on them. Those sockets are the basis of its character build customization: You don't learn skills in PoE, you pick up skill gems and insert them into your gear. Skill gems–and multi-colored sockets—have been core to PoE ever since it was released.

They're also the first roadblock for new players who aren't coming into every new league, or season, with a plan. I remember playing PoE years ago and getting annoyed that I couldn't fit a skill gem into any of my items because the colors didn't match. There are ways to get around this, of course, but it's a struggle for everyone at the start of the campaign and a constant bit of friction as you upgrade your gear.

In PoE's next expansion, Curse of the Allflame, socket colors, a system that has been synonymous with the action RPG for the last 13 years, will be removed. Most items will have gray sockets that will work with any skill gem you find, saving you the busywork of having to swap the colors around until they're just right.

The decision to ditch socket colors (with some exceptions) wasn't easy, but developer Grinding Gear Games felt it was necessary to keep PoE relevant for new players.

"I'll admit I've been biased on this because even before I joined the company, when I was playing the game for a number of years, I never really found socket colors to be all that engaging of a system personally," game designer Octavian said in a group interview with PC Gamer. "I've had a bit of an axe to grind for a number of years now."

Game director Mark Roberts added that removing socket colors came out of discussions on how to bring in new players and to "allow people who tried the game and found it too complex to come back and try it again." Despite Path of Exile 2's imminent release, Roberts said the team still wants to remove barriers-to-entry in the original game where they can.

Similar discussions already happened when designing PoE 2's simplified skill gem system, but the developers decided the colors were too inseparable from PoE 1's DNA at the time. But when it came up again, they all agreed that it needed to go.

"We've run it by dozens of people in the office and usually the response is, 'What, you can change that? That's a good change, but you can change that?'" Octavian said.

Another helpful change coming in Curse of the Allflame is access to a crafting bench in every town. You can think of the crafting bench like Minecraft's Crafting Table, except the recipes are for adding crucial stats onto your gear, like elemental resistances. New players often neglect to use it because it's normally sitting in your personal hideout, but soon they'll show up everywhere alongside your stash.

"We're 100% questioning now things that are sacred, but also we are trying to—and this is an important thing that there's a bit of a misconception about in the community—bring in a new audience, we are still trying to grow our community and grow our audience for PoE 1 as well," Roberts said.

Curse of the Allflame won't just be the end of socket colors though. The new league will also bring substantial reworks to both Abyss and Legion, two activities that haven't been touched in years. Abyss, for example, will work a lot like it does in PoE 2 where you follow green cracks in the ground and slay whatever foul creatures come crawling out of them. These won't be the last reworks either. Roberts said to expect more in future leagues while not-so-subtly hinting that the monster-hunting Bestiary mechanic will probably be next.

Curse of the Allflame will drop on July 24.

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