Grinding Gear Games plans to release Path of Exile 2 in full – in version 1.0 – this year. Game director and studio co-founder Jonathan Rogers revealed this intention during a press briefing detailing the game’s final early access patch, 0.5.0, Return of the Ancients, due end of May, that I was a part of.
Rogers told press that the studio’s intention was to release Path of Exile in 1.0 sometime after ExileCon, the Path of Exile convention, which takes place in New Zealand in early November. (Grinding Gear Games is based in New Zealand.) For reference, Path of Exile 2 entered early access in early December 2024.
“This is actually intended to be the final update in early access before 1.0,” Rogers said in the briefing. “The endgame is the last major thing we feel is really important to get right before we’re able to ship, so assuming that the players actually really like the new endgame stuff for this update, there really should be no reason why we can’t launch into 1.0 for the next update.
“We are intending to do 1.0 this year, sometime after Exile Con,” Rogers said. “That is the plan and I believe we can achieve that assuming people are happy with the endgame stuff.”
In a separate interview after the press briefing, I pushed Rogers on his 1.0 release ambitions for Path of Exile 2; the game’s slippery full release date has become something of a running theme in our various interviews.
I pushed because there’s still a lot for Grinding Gear Games to add to Path of Exile 2 before it’s ready or ‘feature complete’, not least two entire campaign Acts, which would take the game’s full complement to six. There are also missing character classes, and I worried that these things together had been pushed back by this upcoming patch’s almost exclusive focus on reshaping Path of Exile 2’s endgame. But Rogers sounded confident.
“It’s not like we just started on [Acts 5 and 6]. We’ve been working on them for a while,” Rogers told me, “so there’s been a lot of work on them already, and it’s just a question of getting everything ready for release. Most of the environment work for Act 5 is done. There’s a little bit left for Act 6. We’re a long way along the road of having that stuff done. It’s just getting the bosses done, the play testing to do, and all that sort of stuff, so it’s certainly not impossible to get that stuff done.”
In order to make the date achievable, though, some things will have to give – in this case character classes. Simply put, some of the missing character classes will have to wait until after the game’s release.
“As long as it feels like a complete game and that there are enough classes, which there will be, definitely … it’s not going to be the end of the world” -Jonathan Rogers
“Originally we were going to do 12 character classes but I actually don’t believe any more that it’s crucial that all of them are necessarily in 1.0,” Rogers told me. “We want to make sure that all the character classes we do have are finished and they’ve got all the ascendancy classes they need, and they’ve got all the skills they need, and everything like that. There are more character classes that will come. But I don’t actually necessarily think that for 1.0 you need that.”
Currently there are eight classes in the game: warrior, ranger, huntress, sorceress, mercenary, monk, druid and witch. It’s believed that the remaining classes will be the Marauder, Duelist, Shadow, and Templar, as seen in Path of Exile 1.
Rogers continued: “The key thing that we need to know is that the game feels complete, and I think it will feel complete with what we’ve got there. If the campaign’s in and good, and the endgame is full of content… No one can accuse us of having a shortage of content, so we should be good there. As long as it feels like a complete game and that there are enough classes, which there will be, definitely – I think we’re missing one or two of them – it’s not going to be the end of the world. We’ll just do them after the fact. That’s still stuff that we can do a little bit later.”
Incidentally, Rogers wouldn’t commit to how many classes will be available at the game’s 1.0 launch, so there’s a chance one or more may be added for it.
The one thing that could upset Grinding Gear Games’ plans for a 1.0 launch this year is feedback to the upcoming endgame changes. Broadly, these bring major questlines to the endgame to give it more shape, and also introduce entire new areas of the Atlas endgame world and ambitious and overlapping mechanics for it.
Whereas the studio is confident it can make Acts 5 and 6 in the dark, so to speak, it really needs player approval for the endgame changes before it can thumbs-up the final release. “We know how to add an Act,” Rogers said, “and I’m pretty sure at this point, people trust that when we do add an Act, it’s going to be good. Like, there’s nothing to kind of test about that, and that means that we’re safe to deploy Act 5 and 6 in 1.0 and that’s not a big problem.
“Whereas the endgame: we may think we know that the endgame is going to be good, but we do have to actually test that before we can release it in 1.0, because otherwise we might be launching into something where we’ve got this whole huge system that isn’t necessarily up to scratch. So it is crucial that we’re able to know that yes, the endgame that we’ve envisioned here is actually good, before we can go into 1.0.
“So even though our plan is to do 1.0 by the end of the year, if the endgame wasn’t accepted, we would continue iterating on it until the point where it was, before we could say 1.0 was good.”
I was smitten by Path of Exile 2 – an action role-playing game of a similar vein to Diablo, but deeper and more challenging – when I reviewed it at its early access launch. Since then it has swelled significantly in size, adding one of the missing three acts, many new classes, and piles upon piles of new items, skills, many gameplay mechanics, and of course the endless business of class tuning. Even the existing Acts will have had another pass by the time 1.0 rolls around. It is, in short, a launch to look forward to.
Return of the Ancients, patch 0.5.0, will be released on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series S/X on 29th May. Currently you need to pay to enter the early access but when the game launches in full, it will be free to play.
