When Path of Exile 2 launched in Early Access last year, fans of the action-RPG series were assured that work would still continue on the first game, which was due to have its 3.26 update go live last year. Months later, the studio behind both games—Grinding Gear—explains why that didn’t happen and gives a brief inside look at why simultaneously juggling development on two live-service games is such a headache.
“When we launched PoE 2 we promised we could continue to release PoE 1 expansions, and we do intend to keep that promise but it’s certainly been a lot harder to deliver on than what we expected,” game director Jonathan Rogers said in a new community update published on YouTube. It’s partly a response to the ongoing meltdown over on the subreddit for the original game as players wait for news of new content while assuming the worst, with some joking that PoE is now a dead game.
In the video, Rogers tries to outline how the timing for shipping PoE 1's next league, a fresh reboot of its world, just kept getting torpedoed by PoE 2's Early Access launch, despite the team’s best intentions and planning. The biggest roadblock was the amount of work the sequel’s end game needed going into the holiday season and beyond, and the desire to fix what was broken before going back to a game that was already working.
First, the team didn’t want to ship PoE 1's update the same time PoE 2 was coming into Early Access. Then, PoE 2 was delayed by a few weeks at the same time developers for PoE 1 had been pulled off the game to help get the sequel out. After that were all of the problems with the very successful but still buggy Early Access launch, and things only snowballed from there.
“How could I justify taking some of the most experienced developers we have off PoE 2 when it’s on fire?” he said. While the team had previously hoped to get PoE 1's update out by February, they eventually realized they needed to stop “fooling ourselves” that PoE 2 would get to the perfect place in time for the old game’s next update to go out.
“It means we can’t really work on PoE 1 [version] 3.26 until PoE 2 [version] 0.1.2 has shipped,” Rogers told fans. “And if I’m being honest, it probably means we need to support that for a couple of weeks after that as well.” He added that he’s “really sorry” about how things ended up and says it was a mistake to take developers off the update for the old game and think they could still make their dates. Basically, PoE 1 players will need to sit tight for at least a couple months more at this point.
Despite the unexpected delays, Grinding Gear Games still plans to stick to its multi-game approach to development. Rogers said it will just take time to figure out the best way to do that. Whether people still playing the first Path of Exile will show patience and grace while waiting for that to shake out is another question entirely. So far at least, the answer appears to be no.
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