Path of Exile 1's Next League Delayed After Grinding Gear Games Admits It Overcommitted On Path of Exile 2's Development

The latest update about the first Path of Exile is that there is, unfortunately, no update. In a new video from Game Director Jonathan Rogers, he explains that the next league and patch 3.26 no longer has a formal target date, as Grinding Gears Game has dedicated a significant enough portion of its team to Path of Exile 2 that the patch has fallen to the wayside. 

Rogers went into greater detail about the decisions made to attempt to get both games on track in a YouTube announcement. For context, Path of Exile 2 was already delayed from early 2024 until November, then an additional three weeks to its actual release date in December, which was considered a success. 

He explains that 3.26 would have ideally gone out in October, but “it was too close to the huge circus that was the organisation around Path of Exile 2’s launch.” Then, with Christmas coming, it was getting harder to find a good window to pivot back and launch. 

More notably, in the weeks leading up to the release, despite prior claims from GGG that PoE2 development wouldn’t interfere with PoE1, several members were borrowed from the first game to help round out the second game’s endgame details. 

“Taking people off Path of Exile 2 at that point was just impossible,” Rogers says. “The endgame was not in a shippable state. But you know what? We could still do it if the Path of Exile 1 team just kept helping until Path of Exile 2 shipped in late November, we could still do it. Maybe [patch 3.26’s] scope would need to decrease a little bit but mid-February was still possible. We just needed to ship this damn game first.” 

Since then, they’ve held onto those team members a little bit longer, and there’s no known date for the upcoming patch. They’re looking at pre-production details for 3.26 at the moment, and once PoE2’s 0.2.0 patch comes out, he claims he’ll repurpose “as many resources as are needed from our company to get 3.26 done as soon as possible.” 

In his words: “Unfortunately, I just can't promise a date right now. I'm really sorry for how this went down. Honestly, I should have predicted the fact that taking the Path of Exile 1 team off Path of Exile 1 would lead to this outcome, and I probably should have resisted doing it.” 

On the first PoE’s Steam announcement page for this update, the video was accompanied by a quote from its very own Emperor Izaro Phrecius: “An empire must be built to weather any storm.” Seemingly in turn, players bombarded the YouTube video with quotes, both in-game and real-life, about overwhelming oneself. 

Until more comes out, PoE players are left with Settlers of Kalguur, which is considered to be a return to form with a solid town building mechanic, though many players are still likely sad to be left in the dust as PoE2 irons out its kinks.