Good Morning Folks. It is a bit of a rough day for the Path of Exile community. More specifically it is a rough time for the folks who were Path of Exile 1 players looking forward to the 3.26 League. While there were not hard dates surrounding it, comments made by the development team around the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access indicated that we could expect the next league to land late January or Early February. We are now in that window and there has been a growing unrest among the player base hungry for information about the next league. The new trials for Path of Exile II are almost universally loathed by the community, causing an surge of Izaro memes. One of the biggest is a thread that has been doubling the number of images of Izaro every single day until we get news regarding the launch date of 3.26.
We can’t really work on POE1 3.26 until 0.2.0 has shipped. And being honest, we probably need to support that for a couple of weeks as well.Jonathan Rogers
We got that news… and it was not good. It turns out that Path of Exile 3.26 is not coming anytime soon. Effectively the entire Path of Exile team has been pulled to help resolve the massive issues with Path of Exile II. I think a lot of my poor sentiment over this is being influenced right now by the fact that I am reading Play Nice, the book about the downfall of Blizzard by Jason Schreier. I just finished the passage last night where they talked about how World of Warcraft effectively consumed every available resource from every other team in the company. It certainly feels like we are seeing something similar playing out with Path of Exile II as it is consuming all available attention as the game that put Grinding Gear Games on the map suffers.
During the 2019 Exile Con presentation about Path of Exile II, Chris Wilson talked about how they were concerned about splitting the player base, and why they were planning on making Path of Exile II as a content expansion to the original game. Over the years of pandemic era silence this scope was changed, but effectively Chris Wilson’s prophecy has played out. There are a lot of players that did not really enjoy Path of Exile II, a largely group that I am part of that did not like it as much, and then a whole slew of players who were brand new to the franchise and have no clue what they are missing. The choice to focus on a game that is in Early Access, is a purely financial choice. Path of Exile II sold better than they expected and still has peak concurrency higher than some Path of Exile leagues. However for many it also feels like a Betrayal of the promises that Path of Exile was not going to get lost in the hype.
It is inexcusable for a player to be able to leave your game without knowing the date they are returning to it.
Chris Wilson
As a result… players on the subreddit are taking to using the company’s own words against them. It does in many ways feel like in the push to get Path of Exile II out the door, they have backpedaled on a number of the core tenants that they talked about in this widely viewed 2019 GDC talk. For the outsiders who were never part of this community prior to the launch of the early access, this probably seems odd. The thing that you need to understand is that we were effectively promised that the development of Path of Exile II would not cause the development of Path of Exile 1 to slip.
The release cadence that made Path of Exile the game that it is today is essentially built around the concept of four releases per year. Two would be larger releases, two would be smaller releases, but effectively every three to four months the player base had another league to engage with. The entire flow of Path of Exile centers around the league launch, and then also the fall off of the game after a month or two depending on how successful that league was. At the time of writing this the current league, Settlers of Kalguur launched on July 26th, 2024 and is 188 days old. Prior to this the longest league was Crucible, another league that was pushed out due to work on Path of Exile II at 130 days. They have not been able to hit the target cadence since 2021 with the Sentinel league, which I can only assume also has been impacted by the development of Path of Exile II.
Back in October, I gave Jonathan Rogers a good deal of credit for the communications and transparency when they had to push back the launch of Path of Exile II Early Access. The thing is… this video format of him sitting in the interview suite delivering a fireside chat, only really works so often. This is the fourth of these that I can personally remember, talking about unfortunate events and delivering a public address over whatever issue happens to be going on. What we need is better communication before the train derails. Even in this video he as much indicates that he knew that they were not going to hit the target for 3.26 before they left on holiday break. That is the point where you should have opened up to the community. Many of us were excited to have a new Path of Exile League on the near horizon, and as such it didn’t quite matter so much that the current state of Path of Exile II was pretty shitty. It was “early access” after all, and we had a better game to get excited for soon.
The other thing that really hurts is the loss of Bex, the long time community manager for Grinding Gear Games. She’s been gone since August of 2023, but has never really been replaced in the types of interactions that she had with the community, nor the regularity of communications. We’ve also had the inexplicable loss of Chris Wilson, the previous figurehead of Grinding Gear Games and to the best of my knowledge the last time we heard from him was at the release of the Necropolis league. I get that Mark Roberts and Jonathan Rogers have stepped up into their roles as leads of Path of Exile I and Path of Exile II respectively… but it still feels weird to not hear the iconic and much memed line anymore: “Hi, I’m Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games”.
So what do we know? We know that the teams are actively working on Path of Exile II 0.2.0 and we do not have a release date for that, but it will be a massive balance patch that comes with a league reset. Since no timing has been announced yet, I figure that is probably at least a month if not two out. We also know that they will not begin work in earnest on Path of Exile 3.26 until that has launched and that it has been given a few weeks of burn in. So I figure at this point the earliest we will see a new Path of Exile league is April potentially May. In April, the Settlers league will be over 260 days old at that point… so they need to at least throw us some sort of bone. Now is the time for them to dust off some major event like Endless Delve to give players something to focus on while they wait. The NecroSettlers Event was not terribly well received, and that league is effectively dead. I looked to see if I could find a pseudo-six-link helm yesterday and there was exactly one for sale… and it was 260 Divines.
In a perfect world, Eleventh Hour Games would use this opportunity and timeline slippage to slide in and launch Season 2 of Last Epoch. I do not think that is likely, but unfortunately that also means that 3.26 and Season 2 are likely going to be landing around the same time. If I have to choose between the two games I am going to be playing Last Epoch. I don’t want to have to make that choice, but I feel like I am way more excited about the endgame changes coming to the monolith, even though we don’t exactly know what they are. No matter what GGG rolls out with 3.26, it will not be anywhere near enough to make up for the year long Settlers league. This whole sequence has been a real hit to my faith in Grinding Gear Games as a whole. Again… like I said at the top I am reading Play Nice the book about the downfall of Blizzard, and I am honestly seeing some themes playing out here as well. I hope they can pull out of this, but they are essentially spending the goodwill of the player base right now.
Anyways… are you impacted by this announcement? Do you even care about Path of Exile 1? Drop me a line below.
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