“ARPG Titans Unite: Path of Exile 2 Developers Celebrate Release as Diablo 4 Team Prepares to Dive In”

Despite facing tough competition from a handful of other major titles, the early access launch of Path of Exile 2 has astonished fans and accumulated hundreds of thousands of players on Steam, alongside developers from their ARPG counterparts at Blizzard.

Just ahead of its immensely successful release, Diablo 4’s general manager Rod Fergusson took to Twitter to applaud PoE 2 creator Grinding Gear Games for the launch, sharing his excitement to dive in himself. “Before the chaos of launch day tomorrow, I just wanted to say ‘Congratulations!’ to GGG for their Early Access release of Path of Exile 2! My pre-download is complete and I’m eager to play over the holidays,” he tweeted.

Chaos was truly the fitting word for PoE 2’s launch, as over 1,000,000 players tried to access the servers, leading to some players enduring long waits to log in—a level of popularity that the developers themselves had certainly not anticipated. Indeed, several days after its launch, PoE 2 is currently positioned comfortably as the third most popular game on Steam according to SteamDB, just behind the ever-popular Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2.

This is a remarkable accomplishment for GGG, with the sequel already achieving nearly doubling the peak player count of the original game, which is especially impressive considering that players currently have to pay to access it in its latest form—just imagine how high those numbers would be if it had launched as free-to-play from the start.

Fergusson concluded his message to the developers by adding a sentiment that will surely resonate throughout the ARPG community in the forthcoming weeks: “Now to figure out what class to play…”. You and us both, Rod.

If you’re not ready to jump into Path of Exile 2 yet, why not check out some of the best RPG games available right now?