As player numbers leap alongside Path of Exile 2’s final early access update, and the game’s prospective 1.0 release later this year, a question arises about the future of Path of Exile 1. Will it be elbowed out? In short: no. Grinding Gear Games intends to support the older action role-playing game “as long as there are players” playing it and believes it’s capable of running both games smoothly side by side.

“We have no motivation to stop supporting POE 1,” Grinding Gear Games co-founder Jonathan Rogers told me recently. “The launches for POE 1 are also in the hundreds of thousands of concurrent users every time. 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.

“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.”

Grinding Gear Games’ intention has always been to run Path of Exile 1 and 2 alongside each other, and not do what Blizzard did with Overwatch and have Overwatch 2 controversially replace Overwatch 1, for instance. To this end, Path of Exile 1 and 2 both use the same micro-transactions shop, and cosmetics carry over into both games, which is a laudable implementation.

“In the early days of POE 2, Path of Exile 1 was affected negatively” -Jonathan Rogers

But there are good intentions and there’s reality – the reality of running two live service games at the same time. This reality has already bitten Grinding Gear Games in the bottom while developing Path of Exile 2. As Rogers said: “In the early days of POE 2, Path of Exile 1 was affected negatively. We had a long period there where we weren’t doing POE 1 launches and it took a while to get our company into a state where we had the ability to do both games at the same time.

“But now we do have separate teams. There’s separate people managing them and they’ve got their own resources and things are fine there. Now it’s actually not a problem to maintain POE 1 and 2 at the same time. POE 1’s launches are now on time, they’re happening regularly – it’s not a problem.”

The issues he’s referring to stemmed from developing Path of Exile 2 early access updates while also building the final game for the 1.0 release – specifically campaign Acts 5 and 6. This meant doubling up on the work to some degree, and the only way of achieving this at the time was to deprioritise Path of Exile 1.

Once Path of Exile 2 launches, though, that should no longer be a problem, because the big parts will be done and it will then be a case of running it like a live service Path of Exile game – and Grinding Gear Games has a lot of experience in doing that. “Then it’s just a matter of doing the same formula that we’ve always done for POE 1,” Rogers said. “We know how to create a league [a kind of season] in four months. That is a thing that our company knows very well how to do. We’ve done it 40, 50 times.

It’s just a matter of getting back to that rhythm again,” he added. “POE 1’s already back in that rhythm and it’s not a problem any more. We were rightly criticised back when it wasn’t – it was bad. 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.”

Path of Exile 2 update Return of the Ancients arrived last Friday, alongside a free weekend and game discount, and prompted player numbers to leap considerably – with concurrents peaking at over 400,000 on Steam alone (it’s also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X).

The update brought with it a complete rework of the endgame, not only greatly expanding it but also bringing more shape, purpose, and direction to it. The Atlas map should no longer be such a bewildering place to find yourself in after the conclusion of the campaign, courtesy of major new questlines to lead you through it.

Return of the Ancients also effectively brought Steam Deck Verification to Path of Exile 2: all of the mechanical requirements have been taken care of but the actual certificate might have to wait until Valve verifies it.