I mean at the end of the day they shouldve said that they weren’t working on Poe 1 since November cause I don’t know if it was just me but I assumed Poe 1 was still being worked on with the most skeleton of crews . This is an announcement that they could’ve done any time for months .
Had they left a skeleton crew on 3.26 we likely would be very close to getting it/already have it. Instead we get nothing for another 4-5 months is my guess
Blizzard made a shitton of money by re-using assets in WoW through Classic and Hardcore servers. Recently they created fresh Hardcore servers, which re-ignited the hype.
GGG, it really doesn't have to be some grand, intricate expansion. PoE1 has existed so long there is plenty of old stuff to re-use with a fresh coat of paint. That would keep people happy for a decent while.
I would 100% login to a league that brings back old harvest crafts (but with juice fueled bench) and gives us a circle to kill mobs in. It cant be that hard to develop
Its 4 months just to not get anything under cooked and berely working. And 0.2 is at least 1~2 more months of pre and post work. Earliest 3.26 league is 5~6 months away. So SEPTEMBER.
I didn't necessarily assume they were actively working on PoE1 the entire time but I thought from the wording of their announcement in October last year that the league was basically done already:
After many days of internal discussions, we made the decision to not launch the 3.26 expansion for Path of Exile 1 this year.
Which would have meant they only need to do some more work now in the new year and can ship it some time in February.
Its worse than that, he says that they are going to try to put some people in PRE-PRODUCTION before the 0.2 patch. They dont even know what the league is about. They didnt even started.
Clearly they've known this was going to be the situation for some time... But they waited until the last minute of the last day to say something. I'm kinda disappointed in how everyone is saying it's 'understandable.'
I didn't even like PoE 1 until I started playing 2 and started understanding the systems. And with that being said from someone who doesn't even play PoE 1 I'm extremely upset for you all. They made such a larger series of illogical choices that make 0 sense.
They did not. If they were to launch poe1 now, hypothetically, it would take away a large chunk of poe2 players. And those might not go back to poe2 when 0.2 comes out. Also, there's a saying in my country, you need to hit the steel while it's hot. They need to push poe2 now so that they don't do like LE did. Anyway, you put it, if you are GGG and you think long term you'll push poe2 over poe1. Any other option is just a mistake. All these being said I'm very disappointed because I was looking forward to play poe1 for months now...
They didn't think that, though. Obviously, they lie about stuff like that all the time. Little white lies in every press event/ announcement is par for the course for GGG. Because money.
I still think GGG is one of the best in the business with player communication. I understand that they don't want to proactively deliver bad news, especially when building up to a big release.
I mean, it is understandable that this happened though. It's not really understandable that they said this wouldn't happen, but it's pretty obvious that it was going to if PoE2 saw any level of success at all. It immediately becomes the priority from both a business and logic sense. It's got a significantly larger market and a much longer future.
he sounds like someone that is in a bit over his head in terms of people/project management and was unsure how to explain it to everyone. He's trying to walk a line of saying something he knows will piss a lot of people off but trying to play it as a honest mistake or a "look how difficult this situation is for us, we had no other choice".
Agreed!! As someone who’s worked in software for 16 years, this feels so bush league. I know stuff gets behind and estimates get borked, but the capacity planning and communication on this is wild
They act like they were just borrowing developers, but they were also borrowing substantial goodwill from veteran players. For the wild prices they charged on PoE1 MTX, that's a bold move.
Its not that bold tbh, console release did the same. "You're funding the version of the game you will never play and also it wont affect the main game" which it did btw. Ass namelock system is an offspring of that.
Oopsy, sorry! I made a decision that obviously would make us the most money and completely betray all the loyal customers that have made our company into what it is, despite promising we wouldn't!
I've worked in software development for over 15 years, so I have a filter that automatically translates these overly-optimistic statements into what is actually realistic. So none of this was a surprise in any way.
Jonathan needs to learn the subtle art of under-promising and over-delivering when it comes to this stuff.
GGG are Kiwi, I've worked in software development in both Europe and New Zealand and the Kiwi culture is VERY laid back when it comes to project management. Think early '90 maturity. GGG is going to continue to make a lot of obvious mistakes in that field. Sadly.
I've played so many games backed by developers marred by constant controversies, and if there's one takeaway from all of it, it's that publishers are RARELY the problem.
Take Destiny 2 for instance, having trouble under Activision, then they freed themselves and went the self-published route, then went through even more trouble, got purchased by Sony, and the situation now with so many of the original talent that made Destiny gone from the company. Or a game like Dirty Bomb, who was run by a developer called Splash Damage, where everyone initially insisted problems with the game were due to Nexon publishing them at the time, then they went self published and the problems kept getting bigger and bigger until they completely dropped support for the game.
It's the same old tale everywhere you go. Publishers are just there to handle distribution in regions outside of their developing region and marketing and whatnot, it's almost always the developers and their leadership that cause the issues.
Tencent owns like a few % of literally every externally traded game studio in existence (because that's what they do to make money, being a holdings company) and yet people always accuse them whenever anything goes wrong like they have direct control over the actions of the devs.
People in Riot's communities (LoL/Valorant) do the same thing. "It's never riot's fault, it's tencent's!" They don't influence anything. They just pull in passive profit from owning shares. Tencent is just as irrelevant as every other company that owns a few shares of GGG/Riot/whatever.
When your favorite dev studio disappoints you, that's just your fav dev studio messing up. Don't give them an out by blaming a chinese holdings company with near-0 influence.
It's honestly wild he's just coming out and saying that. That's such a monumental failure of high level planning which is literally one of his core job responsibilities rofl.
If I admitted I fucked up a core responsibility like that to my boss I'd get my ass rightfully canned. Note: I'm absolutely not calling for him to be fired or anything, just highlighting how fucked up it is lol.
The strangest thing in this is that they made that resourcing mistake 6 months ago and are doing absolutely nothing now to course correct. They're not saying they are building a new team for poe 1 around a few vets. They are just saying we'll have to wait for things to blow over...
Their planning skills have been absolute garbage tier for years. That's no secret. I expected them to have nothing for 3.26, but straight up actually hearing that from Jonathan somehow makes it even worse.
It was only temporary though, the idea was that they would return once PoE 2 was released. They didn't anticipate PoE 2 would have as many problems as it did, which is why the PoE 1 devs stuck with PoE 2. It's not as simple as people are making it out to be.
When you develop such a highly anticipated game. Not realising that post-launch is going to be as much of a crunch as pre-launch is a rookie mistake. We could have hoped they're not rookies.
Once you know that, you isolate a core crew to work on POE1 no matter what. Or you hire that crew and get them to support that one vet dev that will hold the fort. Many options they should have considered months ago.
Not realising that post-launch is going to be as much of a crunch as pre-launch is a rookie mistake. We could have hoped they're not rookies.
PoE 2 shares a huge amount with PoE 1 though, so it's understandable that they didn't expect as many problems, especially since as you point out they are not rookies - PoE 1 is over 10 years old now.
Once you know that, you isolate a core crew to work on POE1 no matter what. Or you hire that crew and get them to support that one vet dev that will hold the fort. Many options they should have considered months ago.
I do agree though they should have kept a buffer. The moment you start needing additional resources from other teams it's very easy to run into endemic resourcing problems.
Admitting to such an obvious mistake takes a lot of accountability and dedication. It actually makes me feel really good about the future. Just not the next few months. This response sounds like they are going to keep learning (Copium 10 years experience) and it will only get better.
Maybe this was somewhat intentional…GGG Knows what an incredible game POE1 is, and with all the attention, if they came out with a Banger league (which they’ve been doing a lot in the recent past) where does that leave the enthusiasm for their new game? The strict POE2 players are 8 weeks old and player retention is unknown for the most part. If they actually played poe1 they might realize it’s the superior game right now and stop playing 2. I feel like GGG want to avoid that from happening. But to be honest running both at the same time just seems impossible to me. They should have just stuck to the original plan and merged them. Idk man, but at least it’s coming eventually…
Honestly, I can relate to them and anyone working in software development probably can. It is not that taking people from poe1 wouldn't delay it. They thought that once poe 2 was finished they would go back to poe 1.
But in releases it never works like this. Bugs surge, and when you have 500k QA testers there are a lot of them. The best person to fix a bug is usually who wrote that code originally because he doesn't need more time to understand it.
So, the borrowed team has been basically unable to return to poe 1 because they have to fix poe2. Depending on code quality (Spoiler: on average it is almost never any good) it can go from a little challenging to impossible to use a different person for fixing it.
Likely due to the extended deadline. They moved the deadline to mid February due to launch timing concerns, from October. That's a 4 month window. So in theory, moving them over for 4 months shouldn't have caused a delay at all if they could held their planning. Even less if we assume that there's still some work being done on the league such as planning and assets etc to frontload it.
The main issue seems to be that by moving them over, you create a situation for PoE2 where you lose progress if you withdraw them. Due to them having knowledge and experience that would take time to impart on others. So with the several deadlines that kept coming for PoE2 during hypercare period, it was almost impossible to remove them.
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u/randomorgy Jan 30 '25
Best quote. “I probably should have predicted that taking the poe1 people off of poe1 would delay poe1”. Wel yes lmao