Grinding Gear Games needs a few more weeks, and the game’s director has taken full responsibility for the delay!

Jonathan Rogers, director of Path of Exile II, has announced in a video message that the free-to-play action-RPG will not be available in Early Access on November 15th: “Unfortunately, I have some really bad news. We have to postpone Early Access for three weeks. The new date is December 6th. I’m really sorry about this. People plan vacations and things like that around our launches, but we just have to do it. So what happened? Well, it turns out that it’s not really the game itself that we’re behind on. It’s a bunch of server-side infrastructure work that has taken us a lot longer than we expected.

Now, one of the key promises we made was that all of your microtransactions would work across both Path of Exile I and II. In order to do that, we have to integrate the account systems not only for Path of Exile I and II, but also for the console realms. That meant changing a lot of things. Not only do we have to create a bunch of new systems, but we also have to make sure that only old data is backwards compatible with them. And when you start migrating databases that old with that much data, you find all sorts of weird demons in them. How do multiple accounts have the same name? How do multiple accounts have the same email address? Why do multiple accounts have the same Steam ID? Why is this person’s account name just random gibberish that can’t even be decoded?

We have to get everything perfect so that no one loses what they paid for and no one’s account is broken. At the same time, because we’re changing all this backend code, we have to do a lot of load testing to make sure that the whole thing doesn’t fall over if they get the huge number of players that we’re expecting at launch. I actually think we might have been able to make the original launch date, but I’m no longer confident that we could do it without making mistakes. And these are the kind of mistakes we can’t afford to make. So with that in mind, we’ve decided to delay.

Now this is totally on me. I just didn’t leave enough time to make sure that we could get it done. And I’m really sorry. This really hurts. Now, we’re going to have a livestream in about four weeks where we’re going to talk about all the content that you can expect to see in Path of Exile II’s Early Access. You can think of it as the biggest league announcement we’ve ever done. I’m really looking forward to telling you about the endgame content that the team has been hard at work on. Until then, thank you for your support,” Rogers said.

Path of Exile II will be available in Early Access on November 6th for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC (Steam, Epic Games Store).

Source: Gematsu