Path of Exile 2 will stop being a paid early-access game on 11 December 2026. Grinding Gear Games announced at its ExileCon event that version 1.0 makes the game free to play, for everyone on PC.
The release finishes the campaign with Acts Five and Six, which add 24 areas and 18 major bosses. Act Five sends players back to Oriath to deal with the Twilight Order and The Beast. Two classes arrive on the same day, the sword-using Duelist and the dagger-using Shadow. The Duelist’s Knight ascendancy comes with a squire companion that can be fully equipped, war banners, and a Mounted Charge skill that rides a golden chariot into enemies.
The launch league is Conquerors of Wraeclast, which the studio’s announcement post on X describes as a siege-and-conquest league. Players recruit troops, line them up for raids, and later build a stronghold that has to be defended. The league is also competitive: each player sides with one of three factions. Hired commanders can run mapping routes for you and keep the gold, while you keep the items they find.
Beyond the league, 1.0 changes how the game plays. Game director Jonathan Rogers said the studio wants unique items to feel more definitive: “Uniques need to really do something.” Around 40 new ones arrive, along with a wide rework of existing ones. The passive tree gets new nodes for old and new classes, jewel sockets move deeper into skill clusters, and the Atlas tree is cut back to 70 nodes. A new death summary screen will show what killed a character.
The Shadow was the class the studio had teased earlier; the stealth Shadow uses enemy vision cones, and its traps go off in the order they were thrown, so players can chain freeze, shatter and fire effects. The studio says it cut 30GB from the game’s footprint, then added 40GB of new content, so expect a bigger disk bill rather than a smaller one.
Early access began almost two years ago. Version 1.0 closes the main story, and seasonal leagues are planned to continue after it. Both new classes are returning favourites from the original Path of Exile.
The game can be played through Steam or the studio’s own launcher. The original Path of Exile gets its 3.30 league one week earlier, on 13 November.
