Grinding Gear Games has put a shape on the end of Path of Exile 2’s Early Access: Return of the Ancients, which went live May 29, 2026, is the final major content update before the game leaves Early Access, and the 1.0 launch is targeted for after this year’s ExileCon. Here is what that means in practice — what the game already has, what is still missing, and where the realistic window sits.

Where Early Access stands

Path of Exile 2 entered Early Access on December 6, 2024. Since then, GGG has shipped a steady cadence of major content updates that roughly doubled the size of the original launch package:

  • Dawn of the Hunt added the Huntress class along with a full league to the young endgame.
  • The Third Edict (August 2025) delivered Act 4 and a substantial round of endgame foundations.
  • The Last of the Druids (December 12, 2025) brought the Druid — the game’s first Strength/Intelligence hybrid — plus the Fate of the Vaal league and CPU optimizations that GGG said should raise frame rates by at least 25% in many scenarios.
  • Return of the Ancients (0.5.0, May 29, 2026) is described by the studio as the biggest single update in the franchise’s history: five new endgame storylines, 15 new bosses including four Pinnacle fights, two new Ascendancy classes (Spirit Walker for the Huntress, Martial Artist for the Monk), a rebuilt Atlas of over 300 fully unlockable nodes, the introduction of Challenges, the Runes of Aldur league, and the Masters of the Atlas endgame progression system.

As of writing, the game is playable on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store, and the standalone client), PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with full cross-play and cross-progression.

The announced 1.0 window

The target GGG has stated publicly: 1.0 launches in 2026, after ExileCon. ExileCon runs the weekend of November 7–8, 2026, with panels and reveals streamed online, and game director Jonathan Rogers has said he expects the full release to follow it — “I want to get this game finished, I really, really do,” he told press around the Return of the Ancients reveal. That places the practical window anywhere between roughly November 9 and December 31, 2026, assuming no slip.

There is one obvious scheduling hazard: Grand Theft Auto 6 lands November 19. Rogers has been unusually candid that while he does not ordinarily schedule around other games — “the community would slay us if they thought that we were delaying things just because some other game had a thing coming out” — GTA 6 is “a Goliath I don’t want to take on,” partly because Rockstar will “buy out literally all the media.” Read between the lines and GGG would prefer 1.0’s actual launch date to keep some distance from that weekend, which argues for either an earlier date right after ExileCon or a date in December. No exact date has been announced, and GGG has acknowledged in the past that it hopes the window does not slide into 2027; treat any specific date circulating online as speculation until the ExileCon keynote.

Between now and then, do not expect new campaign content. GGG has confirmed Return of the Ancients is the last major Early Access patch, but the studio will keep shipping balance and polish updates and run event leagues during the run-up to launch.

What is still gated behind 1.0

The final two campaign acts. The Early Access campaign currently runs four full acts plus a set of interim Act-interludes that carry characters through their last act equivalents on the road to the endgame. 1.0 will complete the campaign with Acts 5 and 6 proper. Rogers has said that once the campaign is complete, the interim content will no longer exist as such, but “you can expect all of their core elements to remain in the endgame in much the same way that they do now.”

Four of the planned classes. Path of Exile 2 is planned around twelve classes, and Early Access currently offers eight: Warrior, Mercenary, Monk, Sorceress, Witch, Ranger, Huntress, and Druid. Still absent are the Duelist, Marauder, Shadow, and Templar — and they may not all make launch. Rogers told Eurogamer the priority is that “all the character classes we do have are finished,” with full ascendancy and skill coverage, and that the game needs to feel complete in campaign and endgame terms. Separately, he told PCGamesN the missing classes and weapon types are “just another piece of content” that will arrive eventually, “just not quite yet.” So expect the possibility that one or more of those four classes lands after 1.0 rather than at it.

Missing weapon archetypes. GGG has said new weapon types are gated to the classes that use them — the Animal Talisman arrived only alongside the Druid, and Rogers has used swords as the standing example of a weapon family that will ship when its class does. If the sword-wielding classes slip, so do swords.

Third Ascendancy classes. Each class in Early Access has shipped with two Ascendancy classes rather than the planned three, and GGG has been filling the gaps through updates — 0.5 added Spirit Walker and Martial Artist, while 0.4 quietly added a third Sorceress option, the Disciple of Varashta. Expect the remaining third ascendancies to be a stated completion target for 1.0, though the same “finished beats complete-everything” logic applies.

Balance, uniques, and polish. Rogers has been blunt that the 1.0 push is mostly about balancing, new uniques, and campaign completion: “There’s no fundamental thing that’s like, ‘the game is badly designed,’ that needs to be addressed.” With 0.5 having rebuilt the Atlas endgame, the studio’s position is that the last structural blocker is gone; what remains is content volume and tuning.

What is NOT gated: the endgame rework is already live

One thing worth correcting: access to Path of Exile 2’s endgame bosses is no longer waiting on 1.0. Return of the Ancients gave every endgame boss — the returning Arbiter of Ash included — a dedicated questline, removing reliance on random key drops for first-time access, and added a new Pinnacle boss, the Arbiter of Divinity. Each Pinnacle boss now exists in a quest version plus a repeatable higher-difficulty farming version. The rebuilt Atlas tree can be fully allocated by completing maps in the Fortress, and the Masters of the Atlas system (Jado, Hilda, and Doryani, each with 12 nodes and four simultaneous picks, swappable between maps) gives you Ascendancy-style endgame specialization that doesn’t exist on the passive-tree side.

In other words, if your hesitancy around Early Access was “I’ll wait until the endgame is finished,” the answer arrived with 0.5. What 1.0 adds is the finished story, the full class roster (eventually), and the point at which GGG stops calling the project a work in progress.

What to do between now and launch

The Runes of Aldur league is the current Early Access economy and ships the first Challenges in Path of Exile 2 — eight tasks that award pieces of the Knight of Aldur armor set. The new in-game Build Guide system also landed in 0.5: community creators publish .build files that display passive tree, gem picks, item suggestions, and level notes directly in the client, which takes a lot of the friction out of starting a new archetype blind. Any Early Access supporter pack purchase grants access to all of this content now and rolls into 1.0, and GGG has held free weekends around each launch that let you trial the full game before buying.

Takeaways for planners

  • Realistic 1.0 window: after ExileCon (Nov 7–8), within calendar 2026. GGG wants to avoid direct collision with GTA 6’s November 19 launch.
  • Guaranteed for 1.0, per the studio: the complete six-act campaign with the final two acts replacing the interim structure, and a balance/polish pass across the board.
  • Not guaranteed for 1.0: duelist, Marauder, Shadow, Templar, sword weapon family; at least some of these are expected to follow after launch.
  • Already delivered, so stop waiting on it: endgame boss questlines, the full Atlas tree, two new ascendancies, Challenges, and the biggest single patch the franchise has shipped.