Last winter, action RPG fans had to literally tear themselves apart: Blizzard suddenly threw paladin into Diablo 4, and Grinding Gear Games rolled out druid and a big update for Path of Exile 2 almost on the same day. Playing both games simultaneously is a thankless task: each ARPG requires hours, builds and thoughtful farming. This time, the schedule of the stars came together much better.
GGG Studio has officially released the next major addition, Path of Exile 2 — Return of the Ancients. The GGG Live announcement stream will take place on May 7, and the release itself will take place only on May 29, 2026. Kelly’s lead community manager explained the postponement on social media briefly and to the point: the update promises to be one of the biggest in the history of the game, and the team needs a little more time to “bring it to mind.”
For those who are waiting for Diablo 4: Lord of Hatred, this is the perfect alignment. The Blizzard expansion is coming out on April 27th, which means there is almost exactly one month left before the start of the new league in PoE 2. This is enough to calmly upgrade your character, explore the redesigned endgame and not feel like a parallel season in another ARPG is pulling at your sleeve.
Path of Exile 2: Return of the Ancients — what we know and why Diablo 4 fans win
The Return of the Ancients teaser runs for about 30 seconds — and, frankly, it teases more than it shows. A huge fortress rises from the ground, cutting off a part of Wraeclast, and GGG hinted at a serious restructuring of the endless endgame map even earlier. One gets the feeling that the “ancients” in the title are not for beauty, but a full—fledged faction for which the late gameplay will be rewritten.
The community, of course, did not wait for the stream and set up its own detective story. Some Reddit users saw in the photo of the spider on the Kelly keyboard an encrypted announcement of the duelist. Others immediately dug up a trailer from ExileCon 2023, where a duelist fought with a spider in gladiator armor, and compared it with the latest art in the PoE 2 fan databases. The atmosphere is like around Silksong, only the mysterious bait is not a knight beetle, but a bearded man with a rapier.
Although, to be honest, all this conspiracy theory is not much needed. Path of Exile 2, according to the director of the game, should be released from early access this year. This means that in any case, GGG will have time to add new plot acts, missing classes, and redesign a bunch of systems. Return of the Ancients fits too neatly into this roadmap to turn out to be another passing update.
With Diablo 4, the story is different, but the mood is similar. Blizzard has noticeably reshaped the Lord of Hatred endgame: pumping has become slower, and each improvement is more significant. Personally, I’ve been waiting for this for a long time, and judging by the forums, I’m not the only one. A month of head start before Path of Exile 2 is an honest opportunity to try out a new model and not feel like a hound on two races at once.
So April and May 2026 are going indecently well for ARPGs. First, Diablo 4 closes a big chapter through Lord of Hatred, then Wraeclast meets the “ancients” in Return of the Ancients. The two main headliners of the genre have finally agreed not to trample on each other’s heels. All we have to do is double—click the mouse, make some strong tea, and apologize in advance to our loved ones-they won’t see much of us for the next couple of months.
