UPDATE:
After half a day, Grinding Gear Games was able to fix the following connectivity issues. You can now log in and play POE2.
Original Article
Yesterday, Grinding Gear Games released Path of Exile 2 in Early Access. However, five whole hours after its EA launch, the game remains a broken mess. What’s laughable is that it has “Mostly Positive” reviews on Steam, even though 90% of gamers can’t even play it.
Let’s start from the beginning. When Path of Exile 2 launched, it had major network/online issues. Players could not connect to any server for over three hours. While attempting to log in, players were receiving an “unexpected error” message.
Prior to the game’s launch, GGG claimed that there would be long queues this weekend for POE2. However, they didn’t say anything about not being able to launch the game at all.
The big question is now why GGG did not launch an Open Beta so that it could fix any possible connectivity issues. Why did it launch the game immediately in Early Access? And yes, that was a rhetorical question. We all know the answer to this. Money, money, moneymoneymoney.
After those three hours, the devs were able to solve the “unexpected error”, and that opened another can of worms. Right now, you can’t create a new Path of Exile account and you cannot link your Steam account. When you try to create a new account, the game tells you that you haven’t purchased an Early Access key… even if you already have one.
Some suggest that you need to link your Steam account with the newly created POE account. This is something that the game does not tell you at any stage. Not only that but the official website for Path of Exile is down for maintenance.
Again, I totally understand that this is an Early Access release. However, these are fundamental and major issues. And, even when the devs manage to somehow fix this Steam account issue, players will also have to wait long queue times.
What’s also hilarious is the fact that Path of Exile 2 has “Mostly Positive” reviews on Steam, even though it’s completely broken. This shows how biased a lot of PC gamers really are. It also gives a completely false impression about the game in its current state. This is why you shouldn’t take Steam’s reviews seriously. Because, if this was any other game, it would have “Mostly Negative” reviews. In fact, if this was a game from EA or Ubisoft, it would have “Overwhelmingly Negative” reviews.
I’m certain that by the end of the weekend, Grinding Gear Games will have addressed some of these issues. However, this is a disastrous launch. It’s worse than Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, Cyberpunk 2077, STALKER 2. It’s even worse than Diablo 4. And that says a lot!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Tencent microtransaction garbage turns out to be a mess. Everyone act shocked.
The game aint broken you moron, its just a server issue…. because A FREAKING MILLION + PEOPLE WANTED TO PLAY AT THE SAME TIME.
They didnt expect that many people… give it time and its gonna be great.
He won't give it any time, he will eventually give it 10mn if it has Ray Tracing, take some screenshots in the prologue level and report what RTSS has shown, this is a gaming site ran by a 3D graphics w*nker with amateur knowledge
As soon as I read "EA or Ubisoft" I realized this is just a hit piece.
What a stupid article. A incredibly popular game with 300k on steam alone having trouble at launch it's kinda expected at this point. Why should it's reviews be “Mostly Negative” ? Just because little John didn't managed to play on launch day ? I played for 5 hours with no crashes or bugs hell no issues wutsoever really, same for 6 of my friends.Game is more stable than most full released these days. So the one with a false impression of the game here is you who aperantly didn't even play.
BTW Not even Battlefield 2042 or StarWars Outlaws that launched in a broken mess is not Overwhelmingly Negative so I don't know why you even brough up EA or UBI.
Peak Click-bait article with a lot of none-sense as usual, keep up the trash work John
what does a server issue due to high demand at 1st hour have to do with anything about "mostly negative review", its not a review about a title its just being petty
At least it's not Diablo 3?
I think it was probably because they preempted the complaints about servers. They put out a video a day or so before launch saying that they'd try to get the servers working as best they could on launch day but that the demand they were seeing was somewhat unprecedented so they expected to have some issues. It also helps that although technically you needed to buy the founders packs for early-access, the game is F2P.
Having fully read the article, yes, absolutely there's a bias, and in any other game this would have been a slaughterfest…
BUT…
Since these developers GGG have earned MASSIVE RESPECT for the quality and depth of PoE by basically anyone in the genre, yes, no one gives a f*ck and can wait for the launch congestion to cleared up.
At this point it's common knowledge that if you buy a AAA at launch there will be problems. In this case it seems the problem is the game is f*cking broken. That's a big problem when you just paid full price for a game because you wanted to play it right away no matter what. But gamers know what they are getting into buying near release. If they choose to roll the dice instead of waiting until the game is fit to be played then that's their choice/money.
As far as Steam and Metacritic reviews, I never pay attention to them because they might not even be about the game in question anyway. A good example would be Metro Exodus. It got review bombed because it was a timed release on EGS. Not just the 0 scores but reviews that distorted the quality of the game. A lot of gamers even went on to review bomb Metro 2033 and Last Light just because they were p*ssed off at Deep Silver.
Yeah, GGG had a scuffle with the servers and databases on launch, but once they switched on the servers 3 hours later I had only 2 disconnects and no lag.
Overall the game is good and fun, but also not POE1.
Certain problems are not as easy to solve as in POE1 and also a lot of flat damage has been removed from skill gems, which is now all percentage based.
This should make everything scale nice for endgame, but for the early game you are 100% dependent on your gear for damage and defenses.
Given that getting gear and currency is really hard right now, I get that a lot of people are struggling.
My tip would be to stockpile gold and check the vendors for when a new base of items starts to drop.