Path Of Exile 2 early access release delayed to December to ensure your POE microtransactions carry over
The older code is full of "strange demons", it seems
Path Of Exile 2's early access release has been shoved back three weeks from 15th November to 6th December 2024, game director Jonathan Rogers has announced in a brief Youtube video. The action-RPG itself will seemingly be ready in time for the original launch date, but there's a load of "server-side infrastructure work" that needs doing.
"One of the key promises we made is that all your microtransactions will work across both Path of Exile 1 and 2," Rogers said in the video, as passed on by charming RPS doppelganger PCGamer. "In order to do that, we have to integrate the account systems for not only Path of Exile 1 and 2, but also for the console realms as well.
"This meant changing a lot of things: not only do we have to create a bunch of new systems, we have to make sure that all the old data is backwards compatible with them as well. And when you start migrating databases that are this old and with this much data, you find all sorts of strange demons."
Old certainly means old, when it comes to Path Of Exile. The original game launched in 2013.
Rogers detailed a few of the aforesaid "strange demons" - accounts sharing the same email address and steam IDs, and accounts that consist of "random gibberish". Purging them will go hand in hand with additional load-testing to ensure the backend code changes don't screw the game up at launch.
"I actually believe that we possibly could have made the original launch date, but I'm no longer confident that we could do it without making mistakes, and these are the kind of games we just can't let happen," Rogers continued. "So with that in mind, we've decided to delay. Now this one's totally on me. I just didn't leave enough time to make sure we could get it done."
This is as fine a time as any to say that I played a bit of Path Of Exile 2 at Summer Games Fest and - speaking as an extremely greenhorn POE player, so green that I still giggle like a schoolboy when people call it "peeowee" - found it to be quite fun. I was some kind of necromancer, I think. I basically spent my 30 minutes resurrecting enemy corpses while backpedalling furiously. There's also a crossbow-wielding class in POE2 which looks like it'll be catnip for the twin-stick shmuppers.