Path of Exile 2 won’t be leaving early access and launching in full this year, according to game director Jonathan Rogers.
In an interview with GameSpot ahead of the reveal of Path of Exile 2’s huge The Third Edict update, which adds the ARPG’s fourth campaign act, new temporary interlude acts, its first seasonal league, and more, Rogers said that despite his hopes earlier in the year, Path of Exile 2 won’t fully release in 2025. That also means the game won’t be going free-to-play anytime soon.
“I definitely don’t believe that’s possible anymore,” Rogers said. “Things have taken a bit longer than we’d hoped. Ultimately, there’s two things that need to happen before we can leave early access. One of them is that we obviously need to finish the campaign. I don’t think that will take too much longer. But the other one is we have to get to the point of balance where everyone is actually happy with how things are. The general opinion needs to be that we’ve actually got it locked in. Obviously we can’t go into full release until we’ve sorted that out. Once those two things are true, then we’ll release.”
While The Third Edict update adds Act IV of Path of Exile 2’s campaign, developer Grinding Gear Games still needs to release Acts V and VI. Rogers said that while Act V will definitely come as part of early access, it’s possible Act VI’s arrival would coincide with the game’s full launch.
There are still five classes yet to be added to Path of Exile 2 as well–the Templar, Druid, Shadow, Marauder, and Duelist. One nearly made it into The Third Edict, Rogers said, but ultimately didn’t make the cut.
“We still intended to get a class out for this one, we just didn’t quite finish it in time,” Rogers said. “There will definitely be a class in the next update, I’d say. I say definitely even though I probably shouldn’t, but the classes unfortunately have a bit of unbounded amount of time. You can go into them thinking you know what they are and then by the time you’re actually done, you’ve refactored a bunch of things a bunch of times and it’s way harder than you expect. We had a class in mind, we did a lot of work on it. We realized, ‘You know what, if we’re going to finish off all these bosses and things, we can’t quite finish the class,’ so it ended up not happening, but we’ll get there.”
GGG has previously said it expected Path of Exile 2 to be in early access for “at least” six months. Towards the beginning of this year, GGG announced it was putting a major update on hold for the original Path of Exile in order to work on updates for Path of Exile 2. At the time, Rogers said the studio “still had a lot to learn about how to run two games simultaneously.”
For those who want to dive into Path of Exile 2 but don’t want to pay for early access, the game will be holding a free weekend August 29-September 1 to coincide with the launch of The Third Edict update.
