Although Grinding Gear Games released Path of Exile 2 in Early Access in 2024, they promised not to neglect the first part. It didn’t go as expected. In an interview, the studio head admits mistakes and explains how they intend to proceed in the future.
What is the problem? Despite promised that Path of Exile would not suffer from the Early Access release of its sequel, fans of the predecessor were waiting for new updates, and Grinding Gear Games apologized.
10 months after the last season, players could finally breathe again, as the studio finally announced a new season for the first part. In a new interview, the head of Grinding Gear Games, Jonathan Rogers, spoke about the development philosophy and what they want to improve.
You can watch a trailer for the new season of Path of Exile here:
They want fixed update cycles for both games
What does Jonathan Rogers say about the development of updates? In a new interview on YouTube, Jonathan Rogers spoke with Talkative Tri about the updates for the two Path of Exiles and how they approached it and how they want to proceed in the future.
Right at the beginning, Rogers explains how they approached updates in the past. They had a fixed deadline but no fixed features. They did this because, according to him, you cannot set a deadline and features at the same time. So they decided to always set the deadlines.
However, that changed for Path of Exile 2. They focused on fixed features and no fixed dates anymore, but according to Rogers, that wasn’t so good. They could no longer communicate to players when something would be released.
Now they want to change that again. They want to maintain an update cycle of 4 months for both PoE and PoE2. They align it so that when an update for PoE is released, one for PoE2 should be released 2 months later. If features are not ready by the next update, they will just move them to the next one.
Whether they will be able to maintain a fixed cycle for both games remains to be seen in the future. In game development, problems can arise quickly, which is why updates sometimes need to be postponed. Soon, Path of Exile will get a new feature: Path of Exile will finally get a simple feature after 11 years that is standard in other games
