Path Of Exile 2 will hit closed beta on June 7th 2024
"We are in the last year of development and we still have quite a bit to go," say devs
"It's been a really long time coming," Grinding Gear Games' co-founder and Path Of Exile 2 creative director Jonathan Rogers tells RPS, but their new action RPG will be getting its first closed beta on June 7th 2024. The news was announced at tonight's ExileCon, where the developers also showed off a big new chunk of the game that focused on its two new classes, the monk and the sorceress - and it looks to be shaping up very well indeed. As for a final launch, however, Rogers isn't quite ready to put a date on that yet.
"It's a tough one, because we are in the last year of development and we still have quite a bit to go," Rogers says. "We're going to start the closed beta on the 7th June 2024. It's been a really long time coming, but we're still not quite there yet, so we're unfortunately a little bit further out than we were hoping, but June 7th 2024 is when we're going to be entering the beta."
The development team also revealed this evening that Path Of Exile 2 will be its own separate game to POE1 when it launches, too, as the game's scope has grown so large in the years since it was announced in 2019, that "effectively it would be destroying POE1 if we did our old plan, and we don't want to do that," Rogers says.
Previously, Path Of Exile 2 was going to be a kind of extra large expansion to the original game, rather than a standalone sequel, but that's no longer the case. The good news, though, is that Grinding Gear Games will continue to support both games simultaneously. "People like that game, there's no reason to destroy it if we don't have to, and we can run them both concurrently so we might as well do so."
Until then the closed beta date, there are still going to be Path Of Exile 1 expansions coming out every three months "just like normal," and many of those expansions will also be present in Path Of Exile 2, he confirms.
"We're going to go through all of [the expansions] and basically revamp it using POE2 effects and so on, so a lot of that stuff will carry on to POE2," Rogers continues. "But anything we believe doesn't belong there for various balance reasons, we will take out if we need to. By default things will stay in, but if we have a compelling reason to change it, then we will change it if we need to."
I'm personally quite excited for the beta, especially after watching the big new gameplay chunk they showed off this evening, which you can watch in the video above. I'm particularly keen to get my hands on the new Monk class, as the combination of its fluid staff twirls and neat magical spells look like great fun.
Bring on the closed beta, I say, which will be arriving on June 7th 2024.