Friday, December 6th 2024
Path of Exile 2 Becomes Victim of Its Own Success As 450,000+ Players Overwhelm Servers
Path of Exile 2 today released in Early Access on Steam and consoles, and, despite the game's $29.99 Early Access pricing, it has already managed to amass a peak player count of over 458,920 players on Steam alone. While this is undoubtedly good news for the developer and publisher, the increased server load has apparently already caused problems, resulting in excessive queue times to get into game sessions. At the time of writing, the game has only been available to play for a little over four hours, and the player count is only beginning to plateau now.
According to the Path of Exile X account, the development team has been hard at work trying to stem the bleeding, as it were. So far, the Path of Exile website has been down several times due to the high traffic, preventing players from claiming their Steam keys. Additionally, and somewhat hilariously, this outage has also affected the "Early Access Live Updates" site that was meant to be a resource for gamers to keep track of work the live service team was doing to try and deal with the high launch-day volumes.
While Path of Exile 2 launched to Early Access as a paid game, the developer plans to release the full version of the ARPG as a free-to-play game, like its predecessor. The original Path of Exile launched in 2012, and it has been moderately successful in it 11-year run. That said, Path of Exile 2 has managed to garner nearly twice as many concurrent players on PC in its first 24 hours than the first game in the series could in over a decade.
It's unclear when the developer, Grinding Gear Games, will be able to get Path of Exile 2's player volumes under control, but you can follow along on the game's X account.
Sources:
Path of Exile on X, SteamDB
According to the Path of Exile X account, the development team has been hard at work trying to stem the bleeding, as it were. So far, the Path of Exile website has been down several times due to the high traffic, preventing players from claiming their Steam keys. Additionally, and somewhat hilariously, this outage has also affected the "Early Access Live Updates" site that was meant to be a resource for gamers to keep track of work the live service team was doing to try and deal with the high launch-day volumes.
While Path of Exile 2 launched to Early Access as a paid game, the developer plans to release the full version of the ARPG as a free-to-play game, like its predecessor. The original Path of Exile launched in 2012, and it has been moderately successful in it 11-year run. That said, Path of Exile 2 has managed to garner nearly twice as many concurrent players on PC in its first 24 hours than the first game in the series could in over a decade.
It's unclear when the developer, Grinding Gear Games, will be able to get Path of Exile 2's player volumes under control, but you can follow along on the game's X account.
32 Comments on Path of Exile 2 Becomes Victim of Its Own Success As 450,000+ Players Overwhelm Servers
I didn't understanding absolutely anything of the POE 1 universe when I played the first one. It was just the OKish gameplay, but with no actually story I got bored after the first run, and never redo it with another character.
Much more fun with some one for sure, i wouldn't of put 3600+ hours in it if i played on my own that's for sure.
Honestly I've never even thought of playing an ARPG for the story...Its just a background to destroy all the things much like in most shooters to me.
POE 1 had zero story, but the gameplay was interesting. However that was 11 years ago. I don't have that patience anymore...
Of course, there are significant opposites like EVE which is entirely player driven. Arguable still has a narrative, just said narrative is entirely through players actions. Which can be compelling in its own right.
And yeah, Korean and Chinese MMOs are almost entirely brainless grimd-fests, though that’s a given, they have always been like that.
PoE is basically made for the people and by the people who consider Diablo II patch cycle to be something that transformed the game for the better. Then just take those lessons and turn the knob up to eleven. Whether or not one vibes with such an approach is very much based on pure preference. I personally tend to think that Blizzard have, essentially, misunderstood their own game in the process of “improving” it and following up on the vanilla release D2 more Diablo 1-esque style could have made for a better game. But they committed fully to the zoom-zoom, loot gobbling, Baal-running style. PoE is that, but on krokodil. It’s not BAD in any way, it’s just when you compare D1 sensibilities to PoE you kinda get a whiplash. Unironically, something like Dark Souls is closer to D1 than its own modern successors.
Really looking forward to getting into it later as it gets out of EA.
I heard they’ve improved D4 somewhat, but reports vary. Some actually think it got worse. When I checked it out in Beta… well, I dunno about PoE2, but fucking ebola was better than that abomination of a game, IMHO.
Buttloads of gamr bois/gurls with their gamr tois, trying desperately to do something, anything, to bring some sort of purpose to their measly existences **AGAIN**, hahahaha :)
They could have just said so, instead of boring us with all that techo-babble, load charts, vids etc...
I haven't played enough of POE2 yet but so far I've enjoyed them about the same for different reasons.
D3 was pretty trashy tbh never mind 4.
I also have a group of friends that play with me since the D2 days so they are all more enjoyable than they would be solo.
Most my friends did not like poe 1 but they are enjoying 2.
PoE though is just super vague and feels random. The lore feels weird to me. It tries some grimdark fantasy but feels mostly like an excuse to provide us with a huge assortment of bosses, gods to worship and abominations to hate. And still, it never really bothered me, the focus of the game is elsewhere entirely.
WoW evolved. Or devolved, depending on perspective. It started out with a very barebones story. I think OG designers even admitted that they didn’t really know where to go and whether the game will succeed massively, so vanilla had a barely there story that had vague threads like something weird going in Stormwind (it was Onyxia) and the final raid boss was fucking Ragnaros, a literal “who dis”. Then yeah, they started adding more connections to WC3 which culminated in Naxxramas and Kel’Thuzad. Problem was they kinda blew their load early-ish with BC and Wrath and with Illidan dead (didn’t stick) and Arthas dead they ran out of notable antagonists from WC3. And, well, then they started… improvising.
I feel like PoE is in the same boat. What you say about its story beats feeling scattershot is probably on point because it WAS. There was never any actual plan and they just made shit up as they went along. Which usually leads to things just feeling hollow.
I did play that since beta, but that was because there was a standalone client available. Today, I'm not really playing anymore. I thought I would make room for POE2, but I'm not touching Steam/Epic, so GGG kinda sorted it out for me.