Grinding Gear Games Knows Exactly How High The Expectations For Path Of Exile 2 Are, And Aims To Excced Them

As the delayed early access for Path of Exile 2 quickly approaches, the team at Grinding Gear Games knows exactly how high the expectations are for their APRG's sequel. In a new interview with Epic Games, one of the platforms the title will release on, the team talks about everything from local co-op to early access broken builds and how fast they'll be fixed.

As I've personally expressed, the team starts their discussion by talking about how daunting the original Path of Exile can get into for new players these days. 30 or so expansions will do that to a game. While having "leagues" to jump in and out off helps sometimes, years of systems makes things challenging.

The team actually testing exactly for this apparently. In closed testing, GGG has been actually testing two groups of players: people that haven't played the original and long-time players of the first installment. Ironically, many of Path of Exile 2's improvements like upgrades for larger displays, local two-player co-op, more classes, more loot, actually made new players VERY happy, but experienced players weren't as keen on the sequel.

"We've been doing a lot of closed beta testing, and when we do that, we kind of segment the users into two groups: people who've played Path of Exile before and people who haven't. And when we first tested Path of Exile 2 in that way, we actually found that people who hadn't played the first were liking the game more than the people who had played it, which was a concern," said Game Director Jonathan Rogers.

It's a weird situation to be in. Path of Exile 2, according to the interview, actually started as a huge desire to improve combat. However, they don't intend to peel back some of the levels complexity, like class builds. Freedom is deliberate. "I think that's just a really important part of just the way that action-RPGs feel," says Rogers.

That freedom comes with some big challenges, though. Obviously you cannot test the sheer number of builds in closed testing. Yes, early access will likely come across some seriously broken builds. Rogers thinks the team is up for the challenge, “We generally have been a studio that's reacted very quickly to problems, so we have to make sure that we're still maintaining that pace,” Rogers said. “There will probably be more problems here than we've ever seen before, with so many untested interactions between skills and stats and unique items and everything like that.”

Of course, if you aren't down for the new classes, bosses, loot, and a new campaign, you will still even be able to play the original Path of Exile, it isn't going anywhere.

The full interview dives into a slew of other Path of Exile 2 topics for those following the game closely.