Path of Exile is in a unique situation. While the game’s sequel, Path of Exile 2, is gearing up for its official 1.0 launch later this year, the original ARPG still receives heaps of new content. And that’s not stopping anytime soon.
While many games fizzle out or even close down following the release of their sequels, game director Jonathan Rogers doesn’t want the first game to end. For as long as players support the ARPG, so will developer Grinding Gears Game, or at least that’s the plan right now.
“We have no motivation to stop supporting POE 1,” Rogers said in a recent interview with Eurogamer. The developer explained that player counts for the game are still ridiculously high as well, so there’s no reason to stop working on the game.
“The launches for POE 1 are also in the hundreds of thousands of concurrent users every time,” he continued. “There’s absolutely no reason why we would stop developing a game that has launches that most game companies would be incredibly satisfied with, if their game were doing numbers like that.”
Rogers explained that the early days of Path of Exile 2 did have a negative impact on the first game’s continued support. However, there’s now “separate teams” with “their own resources” that allow the studio to continue supporting both games with their own unique content. With that in mind, as long as there’s still players, there will still be new POE 1 content on the horizon.
“So yeah, we’ll just continue to support it forever, unless the players go away. As long as there are players, there’s no reason to not do that,” Rogers told the outlet.
Nevertheless, Rogers is still upset at the handling of both games’ simultaneous developments. Path of Exile 2’s launch wasn’t supposed to affect the structure of the first game, but it unfortunately did. “We were rightly criticised back when it wasn’t – it was bad,” he said. “It was always our intention to not have any cross contamination there in terms of one delaying the other, but it was being affected for a while. But as I said, that’s basically sorted out now for POE 1.”
This long-term support plan will mean that Path of Exile fans shouldn’t experience the same woes that, say, Diablo fans have. ARPG sequels usually have sweeping changes between releases with many fans preferring one game in the series over another. Diablo 2 fans, for example, aren’t necessarily the audience for the more arcade-y Diablo 3.
Path of Exile 1 is approaching its thirteenth birthday, and hundreds of thousands of players jump into the gothic ARPG every single day. On the other hand, the shiny new Path of Exile 2 is also seeing a mass of success, and both games are surviving hand-in-hand. If you’re a POE fan, it’s simply the best of both worlds.
