Update 2, 5:10 pm ET: It looks like progress is being made, as players are finally starting to get into the game. "For those still in queue, what we are doing right now is letting in players in batches so that [[link]] we can make sure to monitor the backend and not overload it," Grinding Gear Games said in a message posted to X. "Thanks once again for your patience and hopefully it won't be too much longer." The concurrent player count on Steam now stands at just under 460,000.
Update: At around 4:25 pm ET, two and a half hours after Path of Exile 2 was set to go live, Grinding Gear is still struggling to make it work. In its most recent update, the studio said it's encountered a new problem with its database and is working on another fix. More updates will follow as they become available.
Original story:
Grinding Gear Games warned us that Path of Exile 2's early access launch might be rocky. The developer hadn't expected more than a million players, but pre-sales of the action RPG surpassed that.
"There are probably going to be some queues during [[link]] the launch weekend," said game director Jonathan Rogers. "Before the launch, when we were ordering [server] capacity, we really didn’t expect to have more than a million people online at the same time."
Sure enough, within 30 minutes of Path of Exile 2 going live, the concurrent player count on Steam exploded to more than 286,000. But everyone's stuck staring at the login screen while Grinding Gear Games works on updates to the backend.
Grinding Gear Games said on X just ahead of the launch that it was "doing some last minute database upgrades to try help handle the overwhelming amount of Exiles getting ready to LOGIN to Path of Exile 2." It also warned that there may be a "short delay" in servers going live. And so it seems to be.
The original Path of Exile is a popular game, but those of us who've been able to play its sequel early have been so impressed that we're expecting more than just existing PoE players to flock [[link]] to it, the crowd of new and old ARPG players who've been invested in Diablo 4 for the past couple years being the game's prime target. It's also drawing comparisons to FromSoftware games, which might extend its reach even further: "I hate the cliche, but Path of Exile 2 really is the Dark Souls of isometric dungeon crawlers," Fraser wrote.
Lest there be any doubt about the level of interest, there are also currently more than one million people watching Path of Exile 2 streams on Twitch.
Grinding Gear Games said in its most recent update on X that it has now deployed the new database configuration, and estimates that access will be available within the next half-hour. We'll keep an eye on things and let you know when things start to get better.
