Grinding Gear Games has announced Path of Exile 2. Somewhat confusingly, it will not be a sequel to Path of Exile, but a revamp and expansion. To try and make this clear, Grinding Gear is promoting Path of Exile 2 under the tagline "One Game, Two Campaigns".

Path of Exile 2 is a new seven-act storyline that is available alongside the original Path of Exile 1 campaign. Both the old and new storyline lead to the same shared Atlas endgame. Path of Exile 2 retains all expansion content that has been created over the last six years and introduces a new skill system, ascendancy classes, engine improvements and more.

Grinding Gear's made the announcement at its inaugural Path of Exile convention, ExileCon. ExileCon 2019 was held in Auckland, New Zealand on 15 November. It comes two weeks after Activision Blizzard unveiled Diablo IV at Blizzcon 2019 in Anaheim, near Los Angeles in the US.

The Path of Exile 2 campaign takes place 20 years after the original storyline. Though characters will fall into the same class archetypes as those in the original game, Path of Exile 2 introduces 19 new Ascendancy Classes to choose from. The old Ascendancy Classes will still be available in the original Path of Exile 1 campaign.

Revamped skills and items

Path of Exile 2 will revamp the game's skill system.

Support Gems are now socketed directly into Skill Gems, removing many of the frustrations present in the old system while maintaining all the previous depth. It's now possible to six-link every skill your character uses.

Armour and weapon progression will also be redone, as will the character models and animations.

Backwards-compatible

Grinding Gear Games stated that all of your old microtransactions from Path of Exile will be compatible with Path of Exile 2.

There is no release date for Path of Exile 2 yet, and Grinding Gear said that they are unlikely to start a beta for it until "at least" very late 2020.

In the meantime, they said they will continue to release Path of Exile expansions on their regular three-month cycle. This content will be available in the Path of Exile and Path of Exile 2 campaigns.

Over the next year, we'll announce a lot more information about the improvements in Path of Exile 2, such as changes to the Passive Skill Tree and other core game systems. Over the years there have been many changes that we would have loved to make to Path of Exile but couldn't, because they would break existing characters. Path of Exile 2 is an opportunity to make all of these changes in one large update.