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Update (11 am PT): PoE2 is officially out in early access now. Grinding Gear Games says it's doing "some last minute database upgrades" in an attempt to make the launch smoother, but the work "may cause a short delay in the servers going live."
Developer Grinding Gear Games has admitted that Path of Exile 2, which launches in early access today, may have the lovely problem of just being a bit too popular. Well, it's lovely if you're not sat in a queue trying to play the thing.
Path of Exile is widely regarded as one of the best strategy RPGs out there, so it's not surprising folk are eager to get in on the sequel, and PCG's own Diablo sickos are currently going gaga over it (but I can't tell you how gaga, because that would violate embargo and see me dragged into hell).
And the sales are reflecting this enthusiasm. "We’ve just passed one million redemptions for Path of Exile 2 keys, and sales are still increasing," says game director Jonathan Rogers. "Obviously this is great news, but it also comes with some downsides too."
Right now PoE2 can only be accessed by players who've bought a $30 "supporter pack", with the game due to transition to F2P for the full launch, but it turns out a lot of dungeon-fanciers have ponied up the dough. Grinding Gear Games had expected a sizeable take-up of the game, but it's been caught off-guard by how many want in.
"There are probably going to be some queues during the launch weekend," says 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."
The developer has ordered increased server capacity, but "we quite frankly don’t know what our backend services are going to be able to handle as we go above a million users," says Rogers. "Now we've added more database shards, scaling everything we have up as far as it will go: But we really don't know what limits we might hit.
"We never expected things to go this big during EA, so I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you guys so much for believing in this project. If we do run into server issues at launch, just know that we’re going to be working as hard as we can to solve them."
So if you're hyped for PoE2, you're not alone, and don't be surprised if this weekend turns out to be something of a test of patience. The developer is at least being up-front about what's likely to happen and why, but we'll know for sure when the game goes live in around four hours.
