Action RPG fans: Path of Exile 2 is getting a major update later this month. It’s a fairly substantial one in terms of content.

Dubbed Path of Exile 2: The Third Edict, developer Grinding Gear Games will be adding the fourth Chapter in the game’s campaign. This chapter has your escaped convict of a hero finding the Instrument of the Third Edict to battle the corruption within the Karui Archipelago, where the Karui tribe are. The whole area is pretty big and non-linear, so you can start grinding and questing wherever. There will be loads of bosses and loot waiting for you, ranging from sea monsters and sirens to even spellcasting monkeys.

The Cruel difficulty is removed in favour of Interludes, which are additional sidequests after you’re done with all four campaigns. These new missions take place in existing and tweaked-out areas of past chapters you’ve visited.

As a bonus for all action RPG fans out there, Grinding Gear Games will be hosting the game for free on all available platforms (PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5) during the following weekend from 30th August 3am GMT+8 until 2nd September 3am GMT+8. 

Here are the rest of the media’s inquiries regarding the update & the early media briefing we went through a few days ago, with answers from Path of Exile 2 director Jonathan Rogers:

Act 5 and Act 6 in Early Access Form

“We do definitely plan to add Act 5 and possibly 6.

Path of Exile 2’s The Third Edict update will go live on 29 August. The game is currently in Early Access form for PC (Steam). I’m not exactly certain whether 6 will be in for during EA or whether that’ll come in for the actual release itself but definitely Act 5 at the very least. So you know we definitely want to make sure we can test for that and you know that’ll definitely be done effectively.”

Path of Exile 2 on Nintendo Switch 2?

“I certainly don’t have a plan to do it. That would be probably a bit of a tough one to port  to compared to a lot of the platforms. But you know you never say never but certainly not on the cards anytime soon.”

Dawn of the Hunt Update Controversy

“The  issue was that we nerfed a lot of player skills and a lot of things people had come to rely on or expect to work didn’t work anymore so the game felt a lot harder. Now in the 0.2.x patch series we actually lowered monster life and did a few other things as well but the other thing as well  is there still were a lot of cases where skills were just kind of a bit bad and so the huge focus of 0.3.0 and like something we’ve spent a huge amount of time on is effectively making sure that we’re buffing all the stuff that’s weak right now on all the other classes on all the weak skills effectively so we have gone through every single skill anything that was underutilized. Anything that wasn’t really cutting the mustard, we’ve buffed it we’ve added more mechanics to a ot of places like it’s effectively just been a huge focus of the patch.

So I tried to sort ofcover that a lot in the section where we’re talking about different balance changes but the overall effect of that should be that there’s a lot less holes that a new player can fall into where theydon’t understand what they need to be doing and overall I think it should be a lot better.”

Path of Exile 2 Server Safeguards for 0.3.0 Update

“Effectively we had some very big DDoS issues all through the 0.2.0 release which really sucked this is actually a huge area we’ve been focusing on we’ve got new sysadmins but more importantly we’ve dropped a bunch of server hosts that were having problems with DDoSes anyone who couldn’t protect us from a DDoS we’ve got rid of them.

We’ve got new DDoS protection in front of all the different servers like every single server host we’re using has been protected we’ve been running tests this time so we’ve actually been doing tests where we DDoS ourselves and make sure that it can withstand it. So there’s been like a whole thing around this in order to solve this problem because I know it’s been horrible. I’m really hoping this time it’ll be okay obviously we’re going in with a free weekend this time. So we have to really make sure that all of our networking stuff is sorted. We’re certainly going to have enough servers that shouldn’t be the problem it’s just a question whether we can withstand all those various attacks which as I said we’ve put a lot of effort  into this time.”

Path of Exile 2’s The Third Edict update will go live via PC starting 29th August 1pm PST/30th August 3am GMT+8.