Path of Exile II Early Access Launch Delayed

Grinding Gear Games has announced that the early access launch for the upcoming free-to-play action RPG Path of Exile II has been delayed from November 15 to December 6. This is due to “a bunch of server side infrastructure work” that took a lot longer than expected. The game will be available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.  Path of Exile II is a new seven-act storyline that is available alongside the original Path of Exile 1 campaign. Both the old and new storyline lead to the same shared Atlas endgame. Path of Exile II retains all expansion content that has been created over the last six years and introduces a new skill system, ascendancy classes, engine improvements, and more.

The full message from Path of Exile II game director Jonathan Rogers regarding the delay:

Hi, I’m Jonathan Rogers, Game Director on Path of Exile II.

Unfortunately, I have some really bad news. We have to delay early access for three weeks. The new date is 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 Path of Exile I and II. In order to do that, we have to integrate the account systems for not only Path of Exile I and II, 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 Path of Exile II‘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 has been working hard on.

Until then, thank you very much for your support.

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