Like it shot Old Yeller.
Hoo boy. Grinding Gear Games (GGG) has released a new update video, delivered by Path of Exile 2 director Jonathan Rogers, which delivers some bad news to fans of the original Path of Exile. And in its wake there are tears aplenty, tearing of garments, and an awful lot of copium being huffed.
GGG released PoE in 2013, and since then it has released significant updates on a regular basis. The studio had promised that, after the release of PoE2, it would maintain both games simultaneously, and continue to support PoE with expansions.
“And we do intend to keep that promise,” says Rogers. “But it’s certainly been a lot harder to deliver on it than what we expected.”
Rogers says the trouble started after the release of PoE expansion Settlers of Kalguur in July 2024, at which point the plan was to release update 3.26 in late October just before the launch of PoE2 in early access.
“But we just didn’t think we could do it,” says Rogers. “It was too close to the huge circus that was the organisation around PoE 2’s launch. But we also didn’t want to launch it immediately after PoE2 either. So that kind of ruled out December.” Eventually the studio settled on February because “we didn’t think it was possible to do it any earlier than that.”
It was, unfortunately, only storing up problems. “PoE2’s end game needed a lot of work,” says Rogers. “Having the guys on the PoE1 team help out for three months on PoE2 [before launch], given that 3.26 was seven months away, seemed like a no-brainer and man did PoE2 need it. The problem is we got to the middle of October and PoE2’s launch was imminent, and I’ll tell you what, taking people off PoE2 at that point was impossible. The endgame was not in a shippable state but, you know what, if the PoE team just kept helping until PoE2 shipped in late November, we could still do it… we just needed to ship this damn game first, get it out of the way, we literally couldn’t think about anything else until it was done.”
Rogers admits “we were fooling ourselves” because, after PoE2 launched, it immediately ran into a whole host of its own problems that needed fixing. “How could we think about making a PoE expansion when we still have hundreds of thousands of people having a bad experience in PoE 2? There are crashes, there are severe endgame balance problems, how could I justify taking some of the most experienced developers we have off PoE2 when it’s on fire?”
After Christmas GGG’s management assessed the situation and came to a fairly reasonable conclusion. “The most urgent priority was getting PoE2 to a point where it didn’t have major issues,” says Rogers. “And it’s hard to even think about what PoE needs when PoE2 has obvious problems that need fixing.”
And here comes the bad news. “We can’t really work on PoE 3.26 until PoE2 0.2.0 has shipped. And then, being honest, we probably need to support that for a couple of weeks after that as well. [But] once 0.2.0 is done I promise we will divert as many resources as are needed from our company to get 3.26 done as soon as possible.”
The bit that really has people up in arms: “Unfortunately I just can’t promise a date right now,” admits Rogers. “I’m really sorry for how this went down. Honestly I should have predicted the fact that taking the PoE team off PoE1 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 anymore.”
Rogers ends by thanking players for their support, and saying “you guys do deserve better than this, and we will get 3.26 out as fast as we can.”
As corporate mea culpas go, I don’t think that’s a bad one. The reasoning is fairly straightforward and Rogers comes across as honest and talking to the game’s audience like the grown-ups they are. But of course, however it’s delivered, this is bad news for PoE fans.
Visit the subreddit if you want to see players in the territory of pure cope, because this news of a delay is being treated like PoE has just been read the last rites. There are claims that PoE is somehow now a “scam“, or that GGG is preparing to “pull the plug” on the original game, and plenty of hand-on-hips talk about “obligations to the customers.”
Some fans are digging through previous interviews for signs that GGG knew this was coming, therefore proving… something? The hair-rending is such that one player even suggested renaming the subreddit to Grave of Exile.
You want memes? Dead man walking, “PoE1 is kil“, long live the king, Reviewbrah, heck let’s get some Berzerk up in this.
Weirdly enough, the Berzerk post is one of the more philosophical about the situation, though again the whiff of copium is undeniable. “Whatever has happened is in the past, and whatever is ahead—good or bad—will pass as well,” says the one-and-only N00bWarrior. “I don’t want this to weigh on me anymore. I need to make peace with myself and let go of this burden.
“To me, PoE and PoE 2 are like the legendary Dragonslayer sword wielded by Guts. Even Guts, with all his strength and determination, cannot carry two Dragonslayers at the same time. Perhaps GGG needs to accept this truth as well. Even guys like GGG cannot support two massive games at the same time.”
There is a whole load of this existential-leaning stuff. “Worst case scenario just happened,” says OanSur. “It’s not a delay, it’s admitting that they pulled people away from PoE1 to focus on PoE2 and the release of anything PoE1 related is highly unlikely.”
I do feel like it’s worth pointing out at this stage nobody has died. And Path of Exile is not being abandoned by GGG: It is clear from the apology video that the studio’s intention is to work on the game again.
That does of course remain to be seen, and I wouldn’t want to come across as wholly credulous. But there is a wider question of naivety and expectations here: PoE was first released in October 2013 and has received countless updates and expansions for more than a decade. It is hardly surprising that the studio’s focus has shifted to the 2024 sequel that currently has hundreds of thousands of daily players, but for some that’s a personal grievance. You see this with other games, like Vermintide, where devotees of the original act permanently wounded that the studio dared to move on to a sequel.
GGG probably shouldn’t have committed to supporting PoE simultaneously with PoE2, or at least should have been clearer about what that would mean in terms of update cadence and the studio’s focus generally. But I don’t think it’s executed some kind of rug-pull here or means to deceive any of the PoE playerbase: It feels like it’s belatedly gotten to grips with the problem, realised it can’t do everything it wants to do, and is at least communicating that openly. PoE players have every right to be upset by an indefinite delay to their next tranche of content: I’m just not sure it’s the end of the world, or of the game itself.
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