Developer Grinding Gear Games had some disappointed news for fans regarding the Path of Exile 2 release date, and it’s not good news. Ahead of ExileCon in New Zealand, the developer announced that it won’t be releasing the sequel this year. At all. In any form.
We told you it was disappointing. As it stands, the game is on target for a closed beta test to begin on the 7th June 2024, which is nearly an entire year away. Then you’ll have God knows how long between that and the full release, after the beta test has helped iron out any wrinkles found.
Path of Exile 2 Release Date – Why is it taking so long?
Originally announced back in 2019, no-one could have guessed how long it would take to find out the Path of Exile 2 release date, or even the beta test, for that matter. Now, that’s not entirely the fault of the developers, as changing technologies and plans mean the game has shifted from what was essentially a Path of Exile expansion to its own standalone feature, however, there aren’t many games that have been in development for that long and not suffered in some way for it.
That may be the defeatist in us talking, after all, how good is Path of Exile, and the extra time taken from a studio like Grinding Gear Games will be spent filling the game with good quality content that is well-crafted with love and purpose. But still. We want it now.
During an interview with Eurogamer, the game director had this to say regarding the delay.
“It’s a lot of things, I more than anyone was hoping for a 2023 beta date as well. We honestly were extremely niave to think that we were going to hit the dates that we previously had. The level of quality that we tried to deliver here is just significantly higher than we’ve ever done before. I guess you always get this thing with what you might call the second system syndrome, where, when you are making a second thing, you want to learn from every single mistake you’ve ever made from the past, or make it perfect. And so I suspect that we’ve just been a victim of that.
It is refreshing to hear such honesty from a developer, and wanting the sequel to better and fix all the mistakes of the first is great to hear. He goes on to describe what held the team up, and how they’re now combating it.
“There’s so much talk in the studio of like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna have a boss in every single area and they’re all gonna be awesome – they’re all gonna be at boss-tier from POE1’ – that sort of level of scope creep. And I guess maybe we’re a little bit keen to say yes to all that stuff. And it just ended up getting insanely huge. But we’re taming it now and things are getting under control, and we know where we are. So I think we’re definitely going to hit this date in 2024.”
News that the developer was aiming too high and is now scaling it back is good, as some games certainly fall prey to scope creep, as Rogers describes it. We’d all rather have a smaller, tighter experience than a huge, vast and empty one.
So, when is Path of Exile 2 release date? We don’t know. Not this year. Maybe not fully next year either! All we do know is that it is shaping up to be one of the biggest releases when it gets here, and we’re hoping all this time translate to great quality!
What do you make of all this? When do you think the Path of Exile 2 release date will end up being? Are you going to play it? Let us know in the comments!
Source: Eurogamer
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