Path Of Exile 2 closed beta delayed until later this year

Seeing as Path Of Exile 2 has already undergone a curious journey from 'sequel released as expansion' to 'actual sequel' in the four years since its announcement, not to mention years of delays, what's one more diversion? The action-RPG's developers announced last night that the closed beta planned to start on the 7th of June will now not. They think they could have something ready by then but it wouldn't be up to their standards, so what's the hurry?

"We previously said that we would get the beta out on June 7th and while we think we would be able to get the game's content ready in time, we understimated how long it will take to get gameplay polished to a standard we're happy with," developers Grinding Gear Games said in a statement posted on Twitter overnight.

They add that they do still plan to do alpha testing in June, but the beta will come later this year, probably "towards the end of the year".

Our Edwin has previously talked with Grinding Gear about how to make loot satisfying, as well as about the beta.

"We're planning on just having the entire game in the beta, all the way from the beginning to the endgame, with all character classes and everything," game director Jonathan Rogers told Edwin last year. "It's sort of firmly our belief that for a beta like that, you need to be able to test the whole game. Otherwise, you're not really testing anything - we need to understand the economy, because it's our last chance to get all that stuff actually good before we deploy. And once you've released something, you can never fix the economy again, because people will keep all the items they have. So yeah, we do have to make sure that we're testing the full economy."

The full game will come to Steam... eventually? In the meantime, you might want to register your e-mail on PoE 2's site for updates on the closed beta.