Grinding Gear Games estimates a 65% likelihood of Path of Exile 2 launching fully this year—but what potential hurdles could arise?

Path of Exile 2 developer Grinding Gear Games has told Eurogamer there’s an approximately 65 percent chance the game will be released in full this year. Remember, PoE 2 is currently only available in unfinished, early access form.

The comments come from Path of Exile 2 game director, and GGG co-founder, Jonathan Rogers, who was speaking to me after a media briefing for the imminent (and jam packed) 0.20 early access update. During the briefing he told the assembled press that he was “very keen” to get the game done this year and would be “very disappointed” should he not be able to. “We might slip,” he added. “But it’s still very much my intention to try and get the game finished this year.”

I pressed him on these comments afterwards to see how realistic a full launch this year really is. “I think it is quite possible,” Rogers told me, “but not, like, 90 percent. I’m thinking a 65 percent chance of getting it done this year. That’s my current feeling about it. I have a schedule that will get us there. It’s a question of can we actually meet that schedule, which will be challenging but not impossible.”

Should the game not make it out this year, though, we won’t have much longer to wait. “Yes, absolutely,” Rogers said. “If it wasn’t December, it would be March kind of thing.”

One of the reasons I was sceptical about the date was because it’s taken the game four months to get to patch 0.2, which launches 4th April, so there will only be eight months left of the year to get to version 1.0. It doesn’t seem like long enough, not if the other updates are of a similar size, which Rogers said they will be – “if not larger in some cases”.

But I’m missing a crucial piece of the equation, apparently.

“If we didn’t have one or two of [the classes] during early access, that wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

“It’s worth understanding that, sure, there’s a bunch of stuff going in 0.20, but also there’s a giant team of people working on Act 4 that isn’t represented here, so there’s a lot of content going on in the background,” he said. “And also, there’s huge numbers of monsters and things like that – that we’ve done a lot of work on but aren’t finished – that are sitting there waiting to come out. So there’s more work there waiting in the wings that will make that accelerate. It isn’t just the case that we’ve made three acts and now we need to start on the next three. A lot of work – much of the work – has been done for the remaining three acts.”

The intention is to release those missing story acts – Acts 4 to 6 – during the early access period, probably one at a time. “There certainly needs to be new content in the 1.0 release, so we do need to do that stuff there, but it’s probably going to be the case that we want to release those acts – at least acts four and five – one at a time,” he said. “But it isn’t set in stone – we can change our mind about that.”

Some things, however, will be held back for the game’s full release. Some classes, for instance. The early access build has six of 12 planned classes in it, and 0.20 will introduce the seventh, the Huntress, but again, this doesn’t leave a lot of time to finish and release five classes more.

“I suspect we’re probably likely to not have all of them for full release,” Rogers told me, “but we’ll see. It depends on how things go and where things end up. Obviously I’d like to get them all in, but they do take a long time to make, and the most important thing for full release is that we have the full campaign and there’s all the content that we need and all that sort of stuff.

“It’s not like we’ve got a shortage of classes, right? If we didn’t have one or two of them during early access, that wouldn’t be the end of the world. We’re doing all right. We’ll try to get them all in but if we don’t then whatever: it is what it is.”

Path of Exile 2 update 0.2 launches for PC and consoles on 4th April at 8pm BST. Besides adding the new Huntress class, who throws spears and has a unique parry mechanic and intriguing bleed abilities, the update also significantly reshapes and revamps the endgame. The laborious towers have been reworked so they’re less laborious and more exciting, and there’s more content to encounter and more variety to it.

GGG is also addressing a lack of loot by pumping around 100 new unique items into the game, as well as new crafting options, new skills, new class ascendency options – the witch can become a lich! – new support gems and more. There’s even a cool new enemy type that’s effectively an AI player, capable of dodge-rolling and all the things you can do, and when they die – if they die (they’re apparently very challenging) – they drop some of their stuff. Grinding Gear Games showcased Path of Exile 2 patch 0.2 in detail on Twitch.

Path of Exile 2 arrived in early access in December last year and rocketed to nearly a million concurrent players – a target Grinding Gear Games now has its eyes set on for the game’s full release.