Path of Exile 2 Early Access gets pushed back three weeks

During the opening night live event at August’s Gamescom, Grinding Gear Games revealed plans to bring Path of Exile 2 to Early Access on November 15. Things have changed, though, and folks who have been eagerly awaiting this one will need to hold out a little longer.

According to Grinding Gear’s latest update on the project, Path of Exile 2‘s Early Access release has been delayed to December 6, 2024. Game director Jonathan Rogers shared the news in a video on the game’s official website and social channels, starting off with a quick intro and an apologetic announcement. 

“Unfortunately, I have some really bad news. We have to delay Early Access for three weeks,” he began. He addressed the fact that people even tend to plan time off for their launches, but said they “just have to do it.” 

As Rogers noted in the video, the game itself isn’t the issue at hand. The delay came about as the result of “a bunch of server-side infrastructure work that has taken us a lot longer than we expected.” 

Some of this has to do with fulfilling the promise that all microtransactions will work across Path of Exile 1 and 2. To pull that off, they have to integrate the account systems for both games, as well as the platforms. A bunch of new systems had to be created in the process, all of which needed to be backward compatible with the old data. 

He said that while he was actually confident they could have made the original launch date, he wasn’t certain they could do it without making mistakes. “When you’re migrating databases that are this old and with this much data, you find all sorts of strange demons in there,” Rogers added. 

The only strange demons we’re looking to battle are the ones in the game, and it sounds like this will hopefully be the last snag before we can do so. Beyond that, the team will also have a livestream to talk about all the content players can expect in Early Access in “about four weeks.”