Path of Exile 2 developer Grinding Gear Games has warned potential login queues when the free-to-play game enters early access this weekend due to the overwhelming number of players expected to flood its servers.

“We have just exceeded one million redemptions for Path of Exile 2 keys, and sales continue to increase,” director Jonathan Rogers said in a recent video, embedded below. “This is obviously great news, but it also has some downsides. There will likely be queues during the launch weekend.

The studio never thought about the demand for Path of Exile 2 would become so big, he added. Even as more cloud capacity is added to existing servers, Grinding Gear remains concerned about the difficult road ahead.

“Frankly, we don’t know what our backend services will be able to handle as we pass 1 million users,” Rogers said. “We’ve added more database shards, increasing everything we have, but we’re really not sure what kind of limits we could reach. We didn’t expect things to get this big during Early Access.

Path of Exile 2 is the long-awaited sequel to a 2013 hack-and-slash action role-playing game considered the spiritual successor to the Diablo series. After previewing Path of Exile 2 At ExileCon 2023, Polygon Guides producer Ryan Gilliam described it as a “much prettier” game than its predecessor that rewards “precision and expertise” with a new dodging mechanic. Jordan Oloman, report for Polygon from Gamescom 2024, congratulated Path of Exile 2The WASD-style movement’s use of point-and-click controls common to the genre.

“Thank you guys for believing so much in this project,” Rogers said, concluding his video message. “If we encounter any server issues at launch, just know that we will work as hard as possible to resolve them.”