TECH NEWS – Grinding Gear Games (GGG) has had to make compromises because the studio doesn’t want to neglect support for the original Path of Exile.

Ten months after the last Path of Exile league, it’s clear that the studio took on more than it could handle. However, Jonathan Rogers, the game’s director, told YouTuber Talkative Tri that he is optimistic and things are close to getting back on track. He said one of the main problems was that GGG had deviated from its long-standing development philosophy.

The latest Path of Exile 2 update was Dawn of the Hunt, which clearly focused on a new character type: the Huntress. They couldn’t make any announcements until they were sure it was ready, let alone start talking about anything planned for PoE1. Consequently, the update seemed rushed and may have received a lukewarm reception because of it. The new 3.26 league will arrive on June 13 for the first part of Path of Exile, putting us right on track for the originally promised release schedule. Having a new league or a major patch every two months sounds excessive.

“If you want to lock the features, you can’t lock the date. If you want to lock the date, you can’t lock the features. In the past, we were always locking dates. But then, with Path of Exile 2 in development, we got to the point where we were locking features instead, and honestly, that wasn’t the best. We’re doing a four-month update cycle. It’s consistent and will always be the case. We don’t want this kind of uncertainty anymore. With the new development model, the date is fixed, but the content is not. That might mean the class we’re planning to add won’t make it. I think it will make it, but if it doesn’t, and all the other classes we already have are good as a result, then we will make that trade-off. That is not the mindset we had for 0.2.0,” said Rogers.

He added that the primary goal of the 0.3 update for Path of Exile 2 was to improve the playability of the existing classes, even if that meant sacrificing the new ones. The usual update plan for Path of Exile 1 was also sliding out of place half a year ago.

Source: PCGamer