Game director Jonathan Rogers announced in a short YouTube video that the early access version of Path Of Exile 2 has been delayed by three weeks, from November 15 to December 6, 2024. The action RPG itself looks like it will be ready in time for its original release date, but there's a lot of “server-side infrastructure work” that needs to be done.
“One of the biggest promises we've made is that all of your microtransactions will work in both Path of Exile 1 and 2,” said Rogers in the video reported by charming RPS doppelganger PCGamer. “To do this, we need to integrate account systems not only for Path of Exile 1 and 2, but also for the console areas.
“That meant changing a lot of things: Not only did we have to create a bunch of new systems, but we also had to make sure that all the old data was backwards compatible with them. And when you start moving databases that old, and with that much data, you find all kinds of weird demons .”
Old means definitely staleAs for Path of Exile. The original game was released in 2013.
Rogers detailed several of the “strange demons” mentioned above—accounts that share the same email address and Steam IDs, and accounts that consist of “random gibberish”. Cleaning these up will be done along with overhead testing to ensure that backend code changes do not break the game at launch.
Rogers continued: “I actually believe we can probably set the original release date, but I'm not sure we can do that anymore without making mistakes, and these are the kinds of games we can't let happen.” continued Rogers. “With that in mind, we decided to postpone. Now it's entirely up to me. I just didn't leave enough time to make sure we could get it done.”
This is a good time to mention that I played a bit of Path Of Exile 2 at Summer Games Fest, and speaking as an extremely novice POE player, it's so green that I still giggle like a schoolboy when people call it “peeowee”. – I found it quite entertaining. I guess I was a wizard of sorts. I basically spent 30 minutes resurrecting enemy corpses while backing away in anger. POE2 also has a crossbow wielding class that looks like it would be catnip for twin-stick shmuppers.