When Grinding Gear Games first announced Path of Exile 2, it made a promise: PoE1 wasn't going anywhere, and development on both titles would continue in parallel. Ten months after the last Path of Exile league, it's clear that the studio bit off a bit more than it can chew, but game director Jonathan Rogers was optimistic in a new interview with YouTuber Talkative Tri this week that things are close to being back on track.

One of the main problems, as he sees it, was that GGG veered from a development philosophy it'd had for a long time.

"If you want to lock the features, you can't lock the date," he said. "And if you want to lock the date, you can't lock the features. In the past, we were always locking dates, but then as we had PoE2 in development, we got to the point where we were locking features instead and I think honestly that wasn't the best."

Path of Exile 2's most recent update was called Dawn of the Hunt, and it's clear that the focus was squarely on a new class, the Huntress. This painted GGG into a bit of a corner—you can't really have a hunt dawning without, you know, someone to do the hunting. They couldn't make announcements about it until they were sure that she was ready, let alone start talking about anything they had cooking with PoE1. As a result, the update felt rushed, and personally I think that was a big contributor to its cool reception.

Moving forward, Rogers said, this uncertainty will be a thing of the past. "We're doing four months, it's going to be consistent, it's always going to be the case. We don't wanna have this kind of uncertainty around this any more," he declared, to the resounding cheers of grinders everywhere. With the new 3.26 league coming June 13 for PoE1, this puts us squarely on the release cadence initially promised.

A new league or major patch every two months sounds like a dream come true for a PoE sicko like myself, but after over 300 days of radio silence on PoE1's 3.26 update I think you'd forgive me for being just a touch skeptical. I'm thinking we might see that number stretch a little bit, particularly at first.

Rogers was adamant, though: "With the new development model, like the date is fixed and the content is not, that might mean that the class we're planning to add might not make it. Now I think it will, but if it had to not make it in order to make it so all the other classes we already have are good, then we will do that tradeoff and that is not the mindset we were in for 0.2.0."

He added that their primary focus for PoE2's 0.3 update was making sure that existing classes felt good to play, and if that came at the expense of the new one, so be it. The willingness to make cuts in the name of deadlines tells me that GGG is serious about sticking to the schedule, which is something the community's been clamoring for since the usual release window for PoE1 came and went half a year ago.

We'll have to see how things shake out with the schedule, but for now at least the content is heading in the right direction. There have been a number of patches to Path of Exile 2 even in this interstitial time between major updates, improving some of the loot issues and other problems that Dawn of the Hunt had. Patch 0.2.1 should be dropping any second now, which has further loot improvements, a whole-ass Expedition revamp, and new chase uniques. It also fixes some major issues—I knew Hidden Grotto was a pain, but did you know that it was 37.5% of all maps on the atlas? And apparently the chaos flowers in Ritual were responsible for fifty percent of player deaths in the endgame? Yeesh.

GGG is hosting a livestream with details for the new PoE1 league on June 5, where we'll learn more about the patch.