Path of Exile – What to Expect This Year

With Path of Exile’s Harvest expansion up and running, we get this official announcement that shares Grinding Gear Games’ plans for the remainder of this year. In short, we’ll be getting two big challenge league expansions, one in September, the other one in December. At the same time, we get an official confirmation that the planned beta for Path of Exile 2 had to be pushed back to next year due to the COVID pandemic.

Here’s more on that:

Now that we’ve launched the Harvest expansion, we have completed two of our four expansions scheduled for this year. As many of you know, Harvest’s expansion deployed a week later than our usual schedule and we want to outline what this delay means for the rest of the year.

Normally we operate on a 13-week development cycle, launching one expansion per season. These expansions always occur in March, June, September and December. Since Harvest required 14 weeks of development, this means that if we do not adjust our schedule, the September and December expansions would hit quite late in these months. For the September expansion, this would likely be fine but for the December expansion, it would be dangerously close to Christmas when many of our staff would be taking time off to spend with their families. Fewer developers would be on standby to help out if any issues arise.

Our plan to mitigate the potential impact of a late December launch is to launch our 3.12 September expansion just 12 weeks after the launch of Harvest. It’s a much larger league than Harvest, so we had to begin work on this expansion about a month early. We believe we can successfully launch within this time frame. This would also mean that if everything goes well, our December expansion can also occur earlier and leave more room prior to the holiday period.

This is all still subject to change so don’t book your time off until we can confirm the launch date more firmly, but we’re hopefully looking at the middle of each launch month.

At some point this year, we’re also hoping to make a Mac OS port available! The release of Vulkan on the PC version has been necessary for us to get the testing required, as Vulkan will be the renderer we use on Mac OS.

When we announced Path of Exile 2 last year, we mentioned that the earliest an early Beta could occur might be late 2020. This is definitely not happening this year, due to significant schedule delays due to the pandemic. We have been focusing on keeping our leagues coming out as close to on time as possible, and this does mean some delays for the sequel. We are looking forward to our next announcement about its upcoming content, and we’ll keep piling on any technology improvements we can make into the existing Path of Exile client.

We are very excited about the year ahead. The difficulty of developing Harvest from home was immense but culminated in a league that we are very proud of. This makes us extremely optimistic for managing the year ahead and continuing to deliver on the high standard of Path of Exile expansions that you’ve come to expect.

Thank you so much for all of your support and patience while we’ve worked through the challenges of this year. We really appreciate it!