Good Morning Folks! Remember when I said it was best not to take today off to play Path of Exile II? Well, that seems to be working out like I expected. Starting yesterday and continuing through this morning Path of Exile II is currently the top-selling global game on Steam. This has had all sorts of trickle-down effects and does not take into account whatever is going on with the console versions and how well they are selling. I was worried about player concurrency and capacity when this entered the top 5, but now that it is outselling the rather expensive Steam Deck I have more serious concerns. Essentially I fully expect to encounter all manner of issues this weekend while playing Path of Exile II. If I do not I will be extremely surprised and impressed.
It honestly started last night, because at 8 pm CST the preloads for the standalone client were supposed to begin. However, players unintentionally DDoS’d the Path of Exile website starting about an hour before that. I admit I checked early and was treated with either a 502 of 504 Gateway error in trying to reach the site. The official Path of Exile account posted on Twitter that they were working through issues with the pre-download and ironically it became available on Steam and Epic Gamestore before the Standalone copy showed up. By around 8:05 I was happily downloading the client from Steam, having made sure I had plenty of free disk space on my fastest drive. Others were not so lucky and had to play the uninstall game to free up room for the roughly 90 GB download.
This was not the end of the woes for last night, because by 10:30 it appeared that they had run out of pre-generated Steam Keys for folks to redeem. Kodra was a bit late getting everything set up and posted the above screenshot to the AggroChat slack. I believe this has already been remedied, but still it was yet another hiccup in the process of trying to onboard so many players wanting access to effectively the beta client. In most of the interviews, Jonathan Rogers said he was surprised by the demand at least a bit, because he assumed the game being in Early Access and having a price attached to gaining access, would be a limiting factor. However I think we are just in a time period where ARPG popularity is on the rise, and Diablo IV left so many players unsatisfied and looking for something better.
One thing that has been amazing through all of this however is the communications from Grinding Gear Games. When they delayed the game they released a clean video with zero marketing spin, just explaining what is going on and why they had to move the launch back three weeks. Similarly last night they released a video saying that they had passed one million key redemptions and were having concerns about the infrastructure. It is a clear message that comes across as extremely straightforward and genuine and prepares the player base for the fact that there will be issues. They are scrambling to try and limit the impact, but no matter what there will be queues and delays. I would love to see other companies follow this example of providing very clear guidance.
I have it installed and ready to go, as well as my Nvidia drivers updated as they released a game-ready driver that includes specific things for Path of Exile II. I will not however be able to play as soon as the servers go online as for me that is 1 PM and in the middle of my work day. However, once I get off work I will be giving it a shot, and hoping that maybe they have managed to stem the bleeding enough to get into the game. Since the game files have been released, there has been much of the information already data-mined by sites and specifically POE2DB has the full passive tree set up in a builder for folks to play with. I still have no clue exactly how I will path to get my target nodes, mostly because I have no clue how strong any of these things will be yet. It is going to be an interesting ride.
The first thing I will be doing is configuring my keybinds, and then upon getting into the game rebuilding our guild since it will not carry over from POE1. After that… trying to figure out what I am going to do pathwise as I play the game. If we are “mutuals” and you need a place to hang your hat while you play, hit me up and I can throw you a guild invite.
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