Because Path Of Exile 2 Was "On Fire," Original Path Of Exile Players Won't See A New League Anytime Soon

This news probably falls into the bucket of "kinda saw that coming." However, many Path of Exile players probably didn't WANT to see it coming. I mean, the team at Grinding Gear Games has said multiple times in the last few years that the PoE and PoE2 teams were separate and different teams so one wouldn't impact the other. They promised that the original PoE wasn't going anywhere.

To be clear, today's announcement is not indicating that PoE is going anywhere, but it still isn't great news either way.

When Path of Exile 2 delayed its early access, though, the writing was kind of on the wall if you thought about the games a bit. Who would be used to help get PoE 2 ready to go out the door? Well, your experienced PoE staff, that's who. After early access launched and PoE 2 was "on fire", Game Director Jonathan Rogers's words, not mine, that team needed to stay and help out still.

This meant an informal delay to PoE's 3.26 league. Although there wasn't an official "announcement" per se, the team did discuss it on a live stream. The original "new date" for PoE's 3.26 was then discussed as being mid-February.

In a new video from Rogers below, that date isn't holding and no new date or even launch window is being revealed.

In what I am sure will be sad news for PoE's players, the current league, which would have already been running for 7 months come February, is going to run longer. Grinding Gear Games is prioritizing getting PoE2's 0.2 patch out the door and expects to still need the team to support that patch for a few weeks afterwards.

This means that while there is work going on for PoE 3.26, it is slow.

Rogers points out in the video below that the studio still has a lot to figure out regarding how they need to structure their studio to support two games. That's not exactly the phrase I'd like to hear right now...seeing as two games are now out there. We aren't talking about hypothetically trying to decide if you want to make a second game anymore.

Rogers ends with an apology and saying players "deserve better than this."

I love the transparency. GGG has always been pretty good about that. Rogers even discusses how it was his bad decision to take PoE staff and move them to PoE 2, but he "thought they had time."

Here's my concern though: are they going to hire staff? If not, won't the people moved to PoE 2 still be needed for 0.3, 0.4, etc? And even if you hire staff, that doesn't mean they will hit the ground running and being high contributors right away.

It's a tough spot, but one that should have been a bit more predictable than when Rogers had to apologize for his database migration oversight delay.