Path of Exile 2 director says it may not leave early access in 2025: 'I want to get it done this year, but we'll see how things go'

Path of Exile 2 players hoping the game will go into full release this year may need to be a little more patient than expected. In an interview with PC Gamer, game director Jonathan Rogers said Grinding Gear Games still hopes to wrap up early access in 2025, but it "may take a little bit of extra time."

The Path of Exile 2 Steam page says early access will last "as long as needed," with a timeline of "at least six months" to get it all done. Given the December 2024 release, a quick finger-count puts the full release—at the soonest—around June. That's three months from now, which at this point doesn't seem very likely—and Rogers confirmed it's not just unlikely, it's straight up out of the question.

"In terms of the overall time, I think we're still broadly on track," Rogers said. "Initially, before we kind of got to the crunch period, we were sort of saying six months in early access, which in retrospect was not going to happen. My current feeling is kind of a year of early access. Like, I want to get it done this year, but we'll see how things go. I mean, maybe it'll take a little bit of extra time, but I'm hoping.

"I still really want to get the game out and fully released in 2025 so yeah, that's the target. We'll see how it goes though."

The cadence of new classes may also be slowed: Path of Exile 2 went into early access with six classes and six more were planned to be added leading up to the 1.0 release, but that too is proving challenging. Rogers said he'd "love to add a class in every update" but the Dawn of the Hunt update coming on April 4, the biggest PoE2 update yet, was "incredibly stressful" because of "absolutely having to have the Huntress in there," which meant the team couldn't lock down a release date until, well, yesterday.

"This is sort of very inside baseball, production-y problems, but effectively it was just kind of a pain in the ass," Rogers said. "While I'd very much like to get a class in every new league that we do, I just don't want to promise it anymore because it just led to that situation where there was a lot of production uncertainty and we couldn't promise dates to anyone."

It all sounds not unlike what Grinding Gear experienced in the months leading up to Path of Exile 2's release, when developers on the original PoE were drafted to help get the new game in shape, which ultimately resulted in a delay of a planned Path of Exile expansion: Rogers said in January that "we were fooling ourselves" with the originally planned timeline because PoE2 ran into a whole slew of troubles immediately after launch that required an all-hands effort to get sorted.

"How could we think about making a PoE expansion when we still have hundreds of thousands of people having a bad experience in PoE 2?" Rogers said in January. "There are crashes, there are severe endgame balance problems, how could I justify taking some of the most experienced developers we have off PoE2 when it's on fire?"

Such is the way of early access, and games in general, which are often delayed because scheduling things is hard—and that's not flippant or dismissive, it is hard, and the more complex the systems in question, the more difficult it becomes to tie them altogether into something that actually works. But in the end, that's the real priority—getting it right is a lot more important than adhering to a schedule somebody scribbled out on a napkin in 2023. As Gabe Newell famously said, "Late is just for a little while. Suck is forever."