A
new video from Grinding
Gear Games announces the grind towards the release of
Path of Exile 2
will take three weeks longer than previously expected. Jonathan Rogers, game
director on the action/RPG sequel, apologetically reveals the "really bad news"
that the launch is now coming on December 6th, explaining the extra time is not
actually required for game development, but rather to ensure that none of the
existing PoE playerbase gets cheated out of items they have paid
for:
Unfortunately, I have some really bad news. We have to delay early
access for three weeks. The new date is the December 6. I’m really sorry about
this one. People plan time off and things like that around our launches, but we
just have to do it. So what happened? Well, it turns out it isn't really the
game itself that we're behind on. It's a bunch of server side infrastructure
work that has taken us a lot longer than we expected.
Now, one of the key promises we made is that all your microtransactions will
work across both PoE 1 and 2. In order to do that, we have to integrate the
account systems for not only PoE 2 and 2, but also for the console realms as
well. This meant changing a lot of things. Not only do we have to create a bunch
of new systems, we have to make sure that only old data is backwards compatible
with them as well. And when you start migrating databases that are this old and
with this much data, you find all sorts of strange demons in there. How do
multiple accounts get the same name? How do multiple accounts get the same email
address? How do multiple accounts have the same steam IDs? Why is this person’s
account name just random gibberish that doesn't even decode?
We have to get everything perfect so that nobody loses anything they paid for,
and nobody has their account broken. At the same time, because we're changing
all this back-end code, we have to do a lot of load testing to make sure the
whole thing doesn't fall over when they could get the huge number of players
that we’re expecting at launch.
I actually believe that we could possibly have made the original launch date,
but I'm no longer confident we could do it without making mistakes. And these
are the kind of mistakes we just can't let happen. So with that in mind, we've
decided to delay.
Now this one's totally on me. I just didn't leave enough time to make sure we
could get it done. And I'm really sorry. This one really hurts.
Now we're going to be having a livestream talking about all the content you can
expect in PoE 2's early access in about four weeks. You can think of it like the
biggest league announcement we've ever done. I'm really looking forward to
telling you guys about the endgame content that the team have been working hard
on.