The developers of Path of Exile are blunt – we barely started 2021, and they already claimed that we shouldn’t be entirely hopeful when it comes to launching the sequel this year.

Grinding Gear Games continues to heavily support Path of Exile (whose latest expansion, Echoes of the Atlas, was recently announced), but the players are eager to give the sequel a shot. (This also applies to Dying Light 2, as well as Dead Island 2.) Path of Exile 2‘s beta was supposed to arrive in late 202, but it did not happen, and the updates regarding the game were scarce until now.

„I hate to blame COVID for stuff, but that is a big part of it at the moment. We have had difficulty hiring internationally because the borders to New Zealand are closed, so that has curtailed the exponential growth of our asset creation team a little bit. The progress of development hasn’t been as fast as we wanted, and so our goal is to bash as hard as we can during 2021 on Path of Exile 2 stuff and see how much headway we make. Trying to get as much done as possible, and that’ll give us a better idea of a good release date we can estimate, which should be towards the end of the year,” Chris Wilson, the head of Grinding Gear Games, told PCGamer.

New Zealand seems to be a game developer haven at this point. The country’s borders are close, and we suspect that Gabe Newell, the number one person at Valve, is possibly still stuck there. Still, what Wilson says is to-the-point: they immediately downplay our expectations, which could be a good strategy, making us expect the game to launch in 2022.

Path of Exile is free-to-play and is available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The sequel is also planned for these three platforms.

Source: WCCFTech