Work on Path of Exile’s next seasonal update is largely on hold until after a major update for Path of Exile 2 has been delivered, developer Grinding Gear Games has announced.
In a video message, Path of Exile 2 game director and Grinding Gear Games co-founder Jonathan Rogers explained the situation. Last summer, much of the PoE 1 development team was shifted to PoE 2 in order to help the developer hit its planned early access release date. Grinding Gear Games had promised to keep updating the original PoE after the release of PoE 2, and internally slated a new “league” (PoE’s version of seasons) for February. Rogers said he believed the team had time to both get PoE 2’s endgame ready for early access while preparing the new PoE league for February.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. Rogers said they “were fooling themselves” thinking that plan would work. After PoE 2’s early access release was delayed several weeks, the PoE 1 team continued to work on the sequel. Even after PoE 2 launched, it continued to run into problems, and Rogers said he couldn’t justify taking the PoE team off the project until the fires were put out.
“How could we think about making a PoE 1 expansion, when we still had hundreds of thousands of people having bad experiences in PoE 2?” Rogers said.
It was after the developer’s holiday break that it decided the goal was to get PoE 2 to a state where it didn’t have major issues before moving forward with full development of PoE’s new league. As a result, major work on PoE update 3.26 won’t happen until a few weeks after the release of PoE 2 update 0.2.0, Rogers said. PoE 2 is currently on update 0.1.1, with no given release window for when 0.2.0 might arrive.
“I’m really sorry for how this went down,” Rogers said. “Honestly, I should have predicted the fact that taking the PoE 1 team off PoE 1 would lead to this outcome, and I probably should have resisted doing it. But at every stage I just kept thinking, ‘We still have time, we still have time.’ And then we didn’t have time any more.”
The silver lining is that some pre-production work on PoE update 3.26 is currently underway, and Rogers said once update 0.2.0 is out the door, the studio will devote as many resources as possible to releasing the new PoE league as soon as possible.
“We still have a lot to learn about how to run two games simultaneously,” Rogers said. “We were overconfident. We still need to work out how to structure our studio to make this possible. But we do have a solid plan for what we want to do with [update] 3.26.”
PoE 2’s launch has largely been a major success story for Grinding Gear Games. The anticipated ARPG sequel saw more than 1 million players pay for early access despite the fact that PoE 2 will eventually be free-to-play, and it’s regularly one of the top-played games on Steam.
Its launch hasn’t come without some unforeseen consequences, however. Grinding Gear Games stated its support staff was wildly unprepared for the amount of support tickets related to PoE 2’s early access launch, and has had to double its support team to better meet demand.