Path of Exile 2 director says he would be 'beyond shocked' if it didn't come out in 2026: 'We never intended to be in early access this long'

The Path of Exile 2 Steam page hasn't aged well since its early access release late last year. At the time, developer Grinding Gear Games wrote that it expected it to be finished in six months. It's almost been an entire year since then and the promised list of features isn't all here yet.

Even its game director, Jonathan Rogers, knew it wouldn't make that deadline a few months before it hit, although speaking to PC Gamer in March he said the team was "still broadly on track," and that he wanted to have it done this year. And then in August, after some nasty DDoS attacks on the PoE 2 servers, he told Eurogamer that it probably wasn't going to make it after all.

We're in October now and I also don't think GGG is going to suddenly pull two more campaign acts, five more classes, and tons of new skills out of a hat before the end of the year. I'm not even sure it's going to be able to do that before the end of next year.

But co-director Mark Roberts said in a recent interview with PC Gamer that he will be "very, very surprised if it isn't fully released in 2026," emphasizing that he would be "beyond, beyond shocked," if that doesn't happen.

"I can't ever really say with any certainty because there are just so many variables that keep changing," he said. "It certainly is the case that we never intended to be in early access this long. So already we're kind of like, OK we need to get there, we need to push, we need to get to this released."

Roberts admits that GGG isn't a "long-term planning company," and attributes the delay to a number of unexpected circumstances, like the DDoS attacks and the cleanup following the disastrous Dawn of the Hunt update.

"As soon as we started pivoting to being like let's fix the things that players actually care about and address the things that players care about, all of sudden now you've got less focus, less work going into the campaign and stuff like that," he said. "At the end of the day, your long term plans go a little bit out the window the moment you have a live service game—even one in early access—to have to manage and maintain."

One of the big pivots the team had to make was for the current state of PoE 2's endgame. When you finish the four-act campaign, you're handed an endless map of dungeons to run. A lot of it works like PoE 1's endgame, but the new ideas for PoE 2 haven't always panned out. Efficiency-minded players hated how long you had to spend hunting for special towers on your map to set yourself up for the best rewards. GGG recently dropped a quick fix for this problem and has promised that the next major patch in December will overhaul the rest of the endgame.

"I didn't account for that," Roberts says. "Having to not only implement an endgame, but to then rework an endgame wasn't part of our initial scope. Variables change, but it will result in the game being the best it can possibly be because we've had so many iterations addressing player feedback and we obviously still get to make the initial campaign and all the classes and everything that we wanted to achieve."

Meanwhile, GGG is also still updating PoE 1, which is about to get a massive expansion that includes its first reworked endgame mechanic in 12 years. Roberts is busy directing both games and says that, while he's managing it fine right now, PoE 2's release might require a change to the four-month tradeoff between them.