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During a Path of Exile 2 preview and press rountable, game director Jonathan Rogers revealed details on the recent three week delay. This includes great elaboration on the technical reasons why, how the team might have been able to meet the original release date, and its rough cost.
“We explained that effectively we just underestimated the amount of time it would take to merge PoE 2 and PoE 1’s realms together. It was very unfortunate because it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that should really delay a huge release! I don’t know what to say really, it just ended up being that. The irony of it is that the work is basically done now, I think we might of actually been able to make the original release date anyway. But it was getting too close, it was looking very risky, so we felt like we had to delay.”
“Now, obviously you give game designers three weeks and they’re jumping over the moon, right? So they were very happy to get to do more polish. They were like, oh the game is going to be so much better due to these three weeks. Ultimately, the reason was attending to back-end reasons, it wasn’t the game itself.”
Rogers then touched on the challenges of making this call as a game director, as well as the costs of the delay. “It’s very difficult because, when you’re the game director, there’s every pressure in the world to not delay. There’s all this marketing booked and it will cost us a lot of money. There’s a lot of stuff like, a 20% deposit of this marketing commitment. But ultimately we felt it was very important to do it because the launch could have been a disaster if we didn’t get that back-end stuff done. Hopefully it won’t be a disaster now, finger’s crossed!”
When asked about specific costs, Rogers was hesistant to talk about it, but stated the following, “I don’t think I want to go into it to be honest, but yes, look it’s almost certainly more than a million dollars. It is what it is. I mean even from the perspective of the fact that we had commitments from server providers that kick in at a certain date! We have to have the servers [ready] on that date, so now we’re paying for a month of servers that we’re not actually able to use. There’s stuff like that are just random considerations, that you just look everywhere and there all sorts of thee kinds of things.”
With all this, Rogers also noted his personal feelings on the delay, and how it would impact the fans lookng forward to it. “I felt really bad because I know a lot of people take holiday, but it was so risky that we were anxious to do something about it.”
It would have been a tough call to make, but if you sit back and imagine the backlash that could have happened if players’ PoE 1 purchases didn’t trasnfer over, or if some other unforseen back-end failure hit the community on the game’s launch, the decision starts to make sense. Even if it cost an eye-watering amount of money.
What do you think about this delay? Are you happy Grinding Gear Games did it? Let us know below!