Hello again.
To conclude my fascinating series of posts about the campaign, two funny facts I have noticed throughout the last year and a half or so (funny-weird, not funny-ahah).
Fact 1: The players side.
Quite often on these forums, when someone mentions the campaign, some relatively new user posts to explain the campaign will come complete in 1.0. Or a new member, as part of their first impressions, mentions he/she is looking forward to the full campaign at release.
EHG never said anything like that (quite the opposite), but to the general gaming community, this is simply implied: an RPG is in beta, the story is incomplete; once it comes out of beta, it means the story is finished.
Isn’t this going to create a lot of disappointment if Last Epoch gets released without a full campaign?
Fact 2: The developpers side.
For over one year, there’s been absolute silence from EHG regarding the campaign. It doesn’t appear in any road maps anymore; in the development update posts, in the interview with Zizaran (which goes in depth through many other questions), in any other dev posts, the campaign shines by its absence. Not a word. Of course, multiplayer has been sucking up most of the communication, but they still find time to update us a little bit about the missing masteries, the future of monoliths, the chat… A lot of subjects really, but never the campaign.
Coming from a studio famous for its amazing communication (a well deserved reputation), it is a bit worrying.
Therefore I will conclude my rant with an appeal:
who will be the first to break the wall of silence and give us an update on the campaign’s status?
I would happily reward you with a shiny (if completely imaginary) Dev of the Year Award, guaranteed to make all your colleagues envious at corporate parties, and impress the opposite sex.
They’ve said before that some of chapters 10-12 (pretty sure about 11 &12, not entirely sure about 10) will be coming post-1.0. Do you want an update or just for them to reiterate what they’ve said before?
I cannot find any trace of these declarations on these forums. Must have been on stream or discord.
And many (probably most, no way to be sure) players believe the campaign will be complete for 1.0.
So yes, if they want to tell us clearly whether it will be the case or not, and if the campaign is still being worked on at all, that would be great.
Maybe, maybe not. There’s a lot more games nowadays that are treated as a service with continuing updates (like LE is intended to be & PoE is) including the campaign/story but I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the younger gamers weren’t too fussed about that as they’re expecting it “to be continued!” in subsequent updates.
For some sure, but I think the general consensus on this genre is that the campaign is secondary. Most players don’t care about PoE’s story and almost everyone skips D3s campaign completely, so not finishing the story to prioritize other things seems reasonable as long as the endgame is coherent with the story as is (which is largely the case right now).
I’m no developer, but I’ll do my best to provide you with as much developer information about the campaign as I can find.
History of Chapters 10-12
But before that, lets remind ourselves about the history of Chapters 10-12. First, they were not part of the original early access roadmap for the game. These chapters weren’t added to the roadmap until July 20, 2021, though Mike does talk about them on Discord prior to this reveal.
In the dev blog that introduced this new roadmap format, Judd had this to say about it:
The key words from this being that some items on this roadmap may come after 1.0, with these additional chapters falling under this category.
Developer Statements
June 28, 2021
August 24, 2021
June 30, 2022
July 16, 2022
September 14, 2022
September 15, 2022
October 14, 2022
November 11, 2022
The video should start at the correct time, but if not the question begins at 1:43:20 and answer ends at 1:43:55.
November 17, 2022
December 2, 2022
The video should start at the correct time, but if not the question begins at 5:18 and answer ends at 6:06.
January 20, 2023
Mike briefly talks about future changes coming to the campaign.
TL;DR
There’s a lot of changes coming to the campaign to bring all the chapters up to the level of Chapter 9. This includes the environments, voice acting, NPCs, etc. with additional items like cutscenes, quests, dialogue, and more be added or changed.
Chapter 10 was originally planned to release by 1.0, but that may or may not happen depending on how things go leading up to launch. Chapters 11 and 12 are definitely coming after 1.0.
Everyone who plays D3 NOW.
At launch, I am pretty sure many, many people bought Diablo 3 JUST to play the campaign. Millions, probably, as Blizzard catters to a much wider audience than PoE or LE, and a more casual one (casual often meaning, more interested in the campaign than in endgame min-maxing).
But anyway I agree with the general idea of your post.
I just don’t feel like investing time in any kind of endgame before completing the game itself, but I am aware I am weird.
I personally am against total campaign skips because it removes a huge chunk of content from the gameplay loop, so I definitely get your frustration with the current state of D3 campaign. It’s interesting to me that the more hardcore game (Poe) chose to keep their campaign mandatory while the casual one effectively removed it.
Fortunately the current plan for LE is to use dungeons to take ‘shortcuts’ in the campaign so we shouldn’t have the same issue as D3.
I have a friend who is getting d4 just to play the campaign once. Thats it.
its crazy, he does not actually play arpgs either, he does not play PoE, actively makes fun of it even. He does not play diablo games other then for the campaigns.
its kinda crazy how different the community can be in this genre for topics like this. Hardcore players dread the campaign and want to just get to the blasting monsters part of the game. And casuals are like “but what about the emperor? what happened to him, we got blessings for the spear, what happens next?”
