Bad news, Path of Exile 1 players. It seems as though the next major update for the beloved ARPG has been delayed, with no release date given. This, according to game director Jonathan Rogers, being in large part due to the developer focusing on the launch and post-launch support of Path of Exile 2.
In a video posted to the official Path of Exile Twitter, Rogers explains why this has happened. The original intent was to juggle both games at once, but with the all-hands-on-deck approach taken with Path of Exile 2 staff who would usually be working on the next Path of Exile 1 expansion have been busy on the game’s sequel.
“The ideal time to release 326 would have been late October, before the originally scheduled release of PoE2’s early access. But we just didn’t think we could do it – it was just to close to the huge circus that was the organization around PoE2’s launch. We also didn’t want to launch it right after PoE2 either, so that kind of ruled out December.”
“Then we’re thinking, we can’t really launch in January due to Christmas, so we’re really going to have to do it in February. This wasn’t great. It would mean seven months with no leagues, but we really didn’t think it was possible to do it any earlier than that.” Rogers would state that, while no official confirmation of this goal was stated, it was conveyed over time informally so that a vague understanding of this goal was circulating the community.
However, it seems even this February goal is now out of reach, as the POE1 staff brought over to help with POE2 weren’t taken off the team ahead of launch. Rogers explains. “The problem is we got to the middle of October and the release of POE2 was imminent, and I’ll tell you what, taking people off POE2 at that point was impossible. The end game was not in a shippable state.” Rogers would go on to state that even so, the team believed they could still hit that February goal after POE2 released.
“The problem is, we were fooling ourselves. POE2 was delayed 3 weeks making the problem even worse, and immediately after the game’s release we had to deal with all the problems. How could we think about making a POE1 expansion when we still had hundreds of thousands of people having bad experiences in POE2?”
The video concludes with an apolagy, and the revelation that the next POE1 expansion is something the team is still intending to do (and is doing pre-production on) but has no release date. This, as you can imagine, has made many POE1 fans rather upset. Before POE2’s launch, Rogers had stated the team intended to support both games as long as players kept playing POE1. Though given the inevitable focus on POE2 and potential league delays as a result, could you blame POE1 players for jumping ship? Especially when they feel a promise has been broken? Over half a year without a new league and new content is a long time in the world of live service.
Add on top of this the likelihood that new players will choose POE2 over POE1, it being the newer, shinier game with more support. Sure, POE1 may keep getting support as long as there are enough players to warrant it, but whether or not players want to hang around a game that feels as if it’s on the back burner is a problem GGG will have to tackle.
What do you think of all this? Would you stick around POE1 in this position? Let us know below.
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