Grinding Gear Games has announced a slight delay to the early access date of Path of Exile 2. The sequel to the highly popular free-to-play hack ‘n’ slash action RPG will now debut on December 6 instead of November 15 as previously revealed at Gamescom 2024.
Game Director Jonathan Rogers shared the news in a brief video message and explained that it was caused by server-side shortcomings:
I’m really sorry about this one. People plan time off around our launches, but we just have to do it. So what happened? Well, it turns out it isn’t really the game itself that we’re behind on. It’s a bunch of server side infrastructure work that has taken us a lot longer than we expected.
One of the key promises we made is that all your microtransactions will work across both Path of Exile 1 and 2. In order to do that, we have to integrate the account systems for not only Path of Exile 1 and 2 but also for the console realms as well. This meant changing a lot of things. Not only do we have to create a bunch of new systems, we have to make sure that only old data is backwards compatible with them as well.
When you start migrating databases that are this old and with this much data, you find all sorts of strange demons in there. How do multiple accounts get the same name? How do multiple accounts get the same email address? How do multiple accounts have the same steam IDs? Why is this person’s account name just random gibberish that doesn’t even decode? We have to get everything perfect so that nobody loses anything they paid for and nobody has their account broken.
At the same time, because we’re changing all this back-end code, we have to do a lot of load testing to make sure the whole thing doesn’t fall over when they could get the huge number of players that we’re expecting at the Path of Exile 2 early access launch. I actually believe that we could possibly have made the original date, but I’m no longer confident we could do it without making mistakes, and these are the kind of mistakes we just can’t let happen. With that in mind, we’ve decided to delay.
Rogers ended the message with news of an upcoming live stream that will delve deeply into everything that’s going to be in the early access launch. The Game Director said it’s going to be like the biggest League announcement they have ever done, and he added he’s looking forward to sharing information on the endgame content players will find in Path of Exile 2.
For our impressions of the game, check out this Gamescom hands-on preview.
