Path of Exile 2 developer struggles to deliver updates to Path of Exile "We still have a lot to learn."
Since the announcement of Path of Exile 2, developer Grinding Gear Games has promised to keep its predecessor alive. However, this has proven more difficult than expected, and planned updates have been delayed.
In a video update this week, game director Jonathan Rogers apologized to Path of Exile players. He explained that this was never how it was supposed to be, but that the studio had taken on more than they could handle.
The problems reportedly started last summer. Instead of focusing on the next update for Path of Exile, Grinding Gear Games moved the entire studio to work on the sequel. Since then, work on Path of Exile 2 has snowballed.
"How could we think about making an expansion for Path of Exile while we still had hundreds of thousands of people having a bad experience with Path of Exile 2? There are crashes, there are extensive balancing issues. How could I justify taking some of our most experienced developers away from Path of Exile 2 while it was on fire?"
Things have improved slightly, but that doesn't mean Grinding Gear Games is ready to move people back to the 2013 game. First, the developer needs to release update 0.2.0 for Path of Exile 2, and once that's out, they need to set aside at least a couple of weeks to ensure everything works properly there.
Path of Exile's 3.26 update, which was originally scheduled for October, still has no clear release date. This has led to much disappointment among fans of the first game, who fear this is the beginning of the end and believe that these problems should have been communicated much earlier.
"We still have a lot to learn about how to operate two games simultaneously. We were too confident. We still need to figure out how to set up our studio to make this possible," Rogers said and thanked players for their continued support.