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Path of Exile 2 is now finally, definitively on the road to 1.0. The ARPG’s full launch, and corresponding transition to a free Steam game, has been set for December 11, marking almost exactly two years since early access first began. It’s a longer gap than developer Grinding Gear Games had initially anticipated, and while we can expect the completion of its campaign, along with one of the most impressively vast and robust endgame offerings around, there will still be classes absent from the 1.0 roster. At Gamescom, we asked Game Director Jonathan Rogers what caused this gulf between the team’s initial plans and its eventual reality.
“What I would say is that in the early days of early access – well, kind of before we released into early access – we had a lot of arrogance about how long we thought it would take.” Having already worked on the first game for so long, the team was extremely confident going into Path of Exile 2. “It really felt like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re just going to walk in here, we know how to do live service, we’ve done all this balance stuff before, it’s fine.’ You know what I mean? We really believed that.”
It didn’t take too long into Path of Exile 2’s journey for realization to hit. “I think the wake-up call really was that actually this is a new game, there are different mechanics. All of the downstream implications of the decisions that we made have meant that we have to do everything so differently than what we’ve done before.” He points to the endgame as a big example of this, with PoE 2’s offering only really reaching a truly great state with the release of Return of the Ancients in May.
“We thought we knew how to make an endgame,” Rogers remarks – and you’d forgive GGG some of that confidence, because the first Path of Exile has long been considered the very best in the business in that regard. “Yet it took us until a year and a half in to actually get Path of Exile 2’s endgame to the point where I would consider it satisfactory.” It took time, but there’s no denying that what’s there now is something truly spectacular; vast and deep almost to the point of feeling overwhelming, but in a way that’s exciting rather than offputting.
Rogers had always been adamant that fundamental elements such as the campaign and the endgame had to be correct before the early access tag could be ripped off. “We had to fix the endgame before we could release – we did that. Now it’s great; I think most players would agree that the endgame is now in a much better state than it’s ever been in before. We had to get a lot of basic balance things sorted out, work out where the right balance is. Get the support gems in a good place. Get uniques in a good place.”
Unique items – the rarest, most distinctive, and often most build-defining pieces of gear – are foundational to action RPGs as a genre. “Even the question of, ‘What is a unique in Path of Exile 2?’ We got that wrong initially.” Many of the early offerings were simply not up to scratch, but Rogers believes “the uniques we’re making for 1.0 are all meeting the standard of what a unique is now in Path of Exile 2.” Despite this, there’s plenty of cleanup to be done: “There are still a lot of those crap uniques in the game, and we’re now having to take them out and redo them and make them better.”
“The purpose of early access was answering the question, ‘What is this game that we’re making?'” Rogers notes that, as things stand, some of the ‘essential elements’ on his checklist still aren’t in the ideal spot on the current live build, but he says GGG is now confident “that we have what we need” to deliver them all as desired for launch.
“With every one of these topics, I would say that players are saying the stuff that we’re making now is just on a much better level than what we were doing before, and so that’s what gives me the confidence to say, ‘Yeah, go into 1.0.'” We’ll find out if that belief has paid off when PoE 2’s full release arrives on Friday December 11.
Additional reporting by Lauren Bergin for PCGamesN at Gamescom.