Grinding Gear Games, the developers of the Path of Exile series, had to make an unfortunate announcement today, saying that the Path of Exile 2 beta won’t be coming before 2021. While the studio had previously said the beta might come before the end of this year, that doesn’t seem possible anymore.
Path of Exile is known as a “hack and slay” game, a dungeon-crawling RPG sort of like Diablo where players go through dungeons and kill monsters while completing quests. The sequel, while under development, will likely see a similar release date as its beta, though there’s no exact date yet.
The reason behind the beta delay is the most obvious one: the pandemic. Grinding Gear Games, due to not working at its fullest capacity, won’t be able to release the beta during 2020 because the pandemic has caused significant delays in the schedule, though they’d be working to finish up the game’s leagues as punctually as possible.
Alongside the Path of Exile 2 beta being delayed, this also puts two planned expansions for the original Path of Exile at risk of being delayed. Expansions are normally released 13 weeks apart, and the next one after the Harvest expansion was supposed to start in September, with the third in December.
We may see both of those, particularly the December expansion because of Christmas, be delayed too. To compensate, however, Grinding Gear Games is going to be cutting the expansion development time by a week, so hopefully that will help with the schedule for the expansions at least.
This is all subject to change, too, so until the studio can really get back to its proper schedule, there’s no telling when we’ll be playing the Path of Exile 2 beta or even anything new from the game. At the very least, nothing is going to come out when it originally was.
