Dev Q&A - The Monolith of Fate

AndrewTilley · August 28, 2022, 2:39pm

https://i.imgur.com/5Wl8bpF.png

Below is a collection of questions from Mike’s weekly dev streams whose answers focus almost entirely on the Monolith of Fate. The updates Mike describes aren’t likely to arrive with patch 0.9, but it’s interesting to hear what could possibly be coming to the Monolith in the future.

I’ve transcribed everything to the best of my abilities, but you can click the source link to watch them for yourself.

Speaking of filling those gaps in Monolith, got any ideas that you guys are discussing?

Oh yeah.

You’ve made this extremely modular system after its first rework but it seems to have been left in that state with minor improvements. I’m wondering what could possibly be next?

Yeah. I don’t want to speak with too many specifics on this because a lot of the stuff – so I think that overall the Monolith is a really solid system. I think it’s got a lot of really great features in the meta progressions that it has overall with getting your blessings and then your greater blessings. The agency in the content you’re playing with within the echo web itself. I think there’s a lot of really good stuff there and I think that we could, and I know there’s a lot of feedback we’re getting about things that the Monolith is missing and we definitely agree.

I think for the most part there’s other things that are more important and we’re working on those things first, is sort of the short answer. So I don’t want to say like, ‘oh yes this feature we’re going to do’ because it might be quite a while before that feature comes in. I don’t know when there’s any changes to the Monolith happening but there’s definitely gaps, especially in reasons to – like okay here, down here I have no reason to go down there right now. Sure, I can get extra stability by killing more things, I’ll get more gear, and more loot at the end chest if I go down there. So there’s some minor things down there, but for most people it’s just a no-brainer that you wouldn’t go down there. There’s no reason to go this way because the objective is this way, and I think that’s the biggest gap…a reason to explore.

So the two key things that Path of Exile does to make that happen; one of them is the resource required to enter the zone is limited and there’s a maximum value you can get out of that resource. I’m talking about maps here. So you have a map, you worked really hard to get this map, it’s this valuable key to get into this dungeon and as soon as you leave the dungeon you can’t go back in – and it has six portals, yada, yada, yada – but once you’re finished with the dungeon it’s done. So completing the whole thing is the incentive, getting full value out of what you’ve invested already. It kind of plays a little into a sunken cost fallacy, but not completely. However, in the Monolith because you can just go into the next echo and there’s no real penalty for wasting mobs in an echo, that sort of natural incentive is gone. So providing an alternate reason to explore… [Mike trails off as he finds some nice boots].

The second thing that PoE does to incentivize exploring the map that you’re in, and this is something that we can do a lot easier, is league content – secondary league content that has a random chance to appear. So you can be in a map and suddenly another map just opens up in the middle of it and you can then go into that one. Having these like sub-dungeons that can just randomly appear if you explore, or just other things like that, are really useful in the grand scheme of like let’s make exploration fun in a Monolith echo. So I think content like that would be where we’d be looking to expand to earlier rather than later, but I can’t give you details of what that is.

Source: YouTube Link

Any plans to add randomized events or encounters in the echoes?

Yeah there’s lots of cool things we’ve got plans for, especially in the Monolith echoes, because right now the key thing they’re missing is a reason to explore. You kind of just go to the quest and finish it. We’ve tried to add little things like the more things you kill the more rewards you get at the end, and the more stability you get in total so there’s bonus stability you gain for killing more things. There’s things we try to do to make you stop and fight stuff, but there’s not anything we have to make you want to explore and we need to add things like that.

Path of Exile has a really good natural way of making you want to explore in that you have a limited – like the key costs you, the map sorry, the map to get into the map holds value in itself and so you want to get the most out of the map that you can because the map has value. You have a limited number of times you can go back in so you want to just go and explore everything and get as much as you can. We don’t have that so we have to come up with other things.

On top of that Path of Exile also has things like where you can just find a random map inside the map, there’s random events that show up and things like that, and by exploring you see more of those things. So we’ve got a few other little tricks to make exploring better because just adding those on their own doesn’t actually make you want to explore, but maybe there’s things you can do to make certain echoes have a higher chance, or maybe you can load up drop rate on a specific one and so if you get one of these special things in that specific one it’s even more valuable. So there’ll be certain maps where you’re like I got to explore this one entirely or this one I can just rush through.

I think having subtleties like that will really help a lot. I don’t have any details of what I’m sort of vaguely referencing, but yeah we want to add things to make you want to explore which I know some people have been asking for for a long time. So many things where people are like we want this, I’m like yeah we’re working on it…it’s going to be a while.

Source: YouTube Link

How do you feel about how dungeon layout are generated? Particularly with the amount of dead-ends that are generated in Soulfire Bastion when its design encourages it being cleared fully. Other dungeons also generate with sometimes high levels of backtracking which can be quite frustrating.

Yeah, this is not uncommon feedback. I don’t have a solution for you yet. We’re always working on stuff like this though, is all I can say right now. It’s not perfect.

I think that’s the worst part about dungeons right now, is that the randomization systems we have in there are…I don’t know the term to use for it but it’s a similar effect you get in the uncanny valley. For anyone who doesn’t know, the uncanny valley is a reference for realism and how good something is basically.

[Mike opens Paint and starts drawing an example]

This is the uncanny valley here and this is how good it feels to look at something that’s artificially generated. Basically, there’s this thing that happens when something gets really close to being really good but it’s not quite there yet and the quality just plummets even though it’s getting better and better as we go. The same sort of thing kind of happens with, I think, dungeon generation layout – whereby no randomization sucks because you learn it quite quickly and it becomes trivialized. That’s really good for specific things but not in an ARPG where the plan is to do it quite repeatedly, like it is for dungeons.

So we’re kind of in this weird spot where we got some randomization but it’s not quite good enough and it’s starting to cause problems. We might be dipping into that valley a little bit, and I know it’s a little bit different and everything but that’s what it kind of feels like. As with everything else we’re still working on it, it’ll get better, we’ll improve it.

[Mike is currently playing the Lightless Arbor dungeon]

I think that was one of the first times I’ve had to backtrack in here this run. Maybe I’m just getting lucky but also because it’s not incentivizing clearing the whole thing. I do want to urge as well that we are interested in incentivizing, not necessarily clearing the whole thing, but having situations where you want to deviate from the path of your primary goal to look for secondary objectives – to look for extra things that might be there that are worthwhile to look for. I know that’s very vague, but those are the things we’re interested in incorporating into not only dungeons but also into Monoliths as well – which is the main thing I think that’s missing from them.

Source: YouTube Link

What system do you think will hopefully carry the 1.0 launch? Maybe the Monolith or arena or multiplayer or something else? Totally okay to skip this question if it’s weird.

No, I understand what you’re talking about and – I do kind of want to skip it, but I’d love to answer it though. We kind of just want everything to be a little bit better, everything to be a little bit more polished, everything to be a little bit more complete. I think that’s going to be the big push at 1.0. It will be a push to bring a lot of new people into the game.

Maybe there’s new dungeons, new Monoliths, things like that, new features in the Monolith, new features in dungeons, things like that. Just getting those experiences to be better. I think having, and this could change as we’re still a ways out, but I think having fewer major endgame systems at launch – like I don’t think it’d be smart for us to do an entire Monolith level endgame system for launch. It’d be like if PoE tried to make a second mapping level system at their 1.0 launch, or something like that – I know it’s different then and now. I don’t think that including another system that’s this expansive and this big would be wise at launch.

Maybe something that tied into the Monolith, or maybe tied other systems together. Improving the experience of the systems we have now, that would be good to have. Keeping those gameplay systems that are available really strong, really tight, and really interesting because there are a few things missing and there are things that people have talked about a lot in like critiques of Last Epoch and things like that – which they’re not wrong. We need to get these right before we move on to more things, not move on, but like before we start adding like major endgame systems we need to make sure the ones we have are really awesome. I think they’re really good right now, I don’t think they’re really awesome yet so I really want to get to the point where I can say confidently that the Monolith is really awesome – it’s fun to play, it’s engaging, it’s got depth and complexity it’s, you know, all those sorts of things.

Source: YouTube Link

Any plans to add more stuff to endgame?

Kind of goes with the question I was just answering which is great, great timing. Yeah, we did design the Monolith system and the dungeon system to be expanded upon – both in a like we can slap down another timeline here and we can shuffle these timelines around, and we can add more dungeons to the world. We’ve got three dungeons right now. It’s intentionally set up so that we can add more dungeons and we want to add more dungeons. Also, just having more things to do inside of the Monolith and more ways to engage with the Monolith and reasons to explore – and these are all things that I think most people most people watching are like, ‘yes Mike we know obviously’. Sorry for being a little bit of a broken record, but yeah.

Source: YouTube Link

Any plans on adding random events or quests inside Monoliths or stuff like loot goblins?

Oh yeah, oh yeah. Can I give you details of what those look like and when they’re going to be there and how they’re going to work? No. Do I think it’s the biggest thing missing in Monoliths right now? Oh yeah! Do I think it’s more important than randomized level generation? Oh yeah. Do we have specific detailed plans on how it’s going to work? Nah.

But yes, some sort of system where – and technically we kind of already have this but I can understand why it might not seem like it, shrines are technically that. [Mike gets distracted] What was I talking about? Random events, super important. Oh yeah…let’s get some random events, shrines being kind of like the base version of that. Yeah they’re kind of like the base version that. That’s like the super most basic version of that possible. It doesn’t really count, but it’s kind of close enough that it’s similar-ish. Yeah, reasons to explore inside Monoliths is really important and it’s something we’re missing big time. That’s the most lukewarm take of all time.

Source: YouTube Link

In regards to my previous question about random events in Monoliths, I was thinking how cool it would be to have rifts like those in the campaign within the Monolith.

Yeah this is not the first time I’ve seen this. This is not the 80th time I’ve seen this suggestion, so yeah.

Like those in the campaign within Monolith to add an additional modifier and can increase stability even further or have like a random thing in the Monolith that we click on that spawns a boss like an illusion of Orobyss that tries to kill us and if we survive drops something cool. Could something like this end up in the game?

Something like that could end up in the game. I think I saw perrythepig suggest something like that on – maybe it was perrythepig, if someone else suggested that I’m sorry – I thought it was him on a forum post recently…I think. I saw a Discord post by someone else, who I didn’t recognize the name, about a month ago suggest something like this. There was someone on stream a couple weeks ago that said something like this. Yeah, this gets suggested a fair bit. I think it’s on point, I think it’s on theme, it ties into other systems in the game…so we’ve tutorialized it already which makes sense, it hits theming stuff with time travel, it’s great.

Source: YouTube Link

Will areas in the Monolith and campaign eventually get randomized like in PoE or Diablo?

Oh, like the level layout. It’s possible we might start adding randomized level layout systems to the game. There aren’t any in development right now, specifically. We’ve started some with like randomizing your starting placement within echoes, which has helped a little bit, but for a lot of very experienced players it’s essentially the same thing as it was before. There’s definitely room for improvement in that category. I think there’s also room for, and this is probably easier to implement, having small offshoot zones that are randomly placed and possibly randomized once you get into them. I’d say that’s more likely to happen first, but none of it’s really in development right now so I can’t really say this is coming or anything like that.

Source: YouTube Link

While I love the theming for each Monolith timeline, after you get your blessings it starts to become problematic. The game has 100 plus maps, hundreds of enemy types, but each timeline only has 15-ish maps and a 30-ish enemy pool. Any plans for a corruption farming island that mixes all maps and enemies for making the endgame grind for blessings less repetitive?

That’s interesting. I don’t think we’ve really gone over that idea. I think the hope was that we’d be able to set it up so that even on the endgame grind you’d still want to switch, but I guess the fundamental nature of corruption farming one timeline does cause it to really favour not doing that. I think it’s a really good point. It’s the sort of thing that would go really well on a suggestion post on the forums.

Source: YouTube Link

I agree maps need more stuff but I feel it’s a dangerous topic. Exploring maps in Last Epoch is pretty tedious – maps are big, characters are slow, dashes are often on cooldown. You’ve talked about more exploration but I hope if a map has something for me to find I know when I enter the map and I don’t have to fully explore a map to find nothing.

So this is actually an interesting topic that we have talked about. Maybe it is guaranteed or maybe it’s not guaranteed, or maybe it’s not guaranteed but implied that there’s more of it or something like that and maybe that’s the reward…maybe that’s the special echo reward in that one. Where it’s like there’s a higher probability of this random event to happen in this zone and so you know like okay this is a good one to explore and so you explore that one in particular instead of just like always exploring all of them in hopes that you get it or just randomly stumble across it sometimes. You definitely got a very good point and I agree, and we’re aware of it.

This island has treasure on it to find.

Yeah.

You might find treasure on 1 out of a 100 islands.

I think that would be a low – like maybe the default number is 1 out of 100 but the ones that say it it’s like 1 out of 5 or something, or 1 out of 3. Or the ones that say that can have anywhere from like 0 to 4 of them or something. I don’t know. Maybe every once in a while you won’t find it with any but sometimes you’ll find it with multiples on those ones that are like spiked to have them. Just so that you know this is like a good one to search but you can always search if you want and there’s always a chance or something. I don’t know. This is sort of – we’re into hypothetical big time, but yes I definitely agree there needs to be some sort of communication to the player so you’re not like full clearing every single one in the hopes of finding these.

Source: YouTube Link

What are your/the teams/the community’s feelings on the endgame and the end-endgame, meaning mono’s followed by empowered mono’s? I’ve made 25 plus characters, 700 hours so far and I’ve only taken one into empowered because by the time I get there I didn’t feel like there was a point. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious path for power creep besides hoping for better versions of stuff I’d collected along the way. Am I missing something? Do mono’s take too long?

Uh, maybe. I have a feeling – so we sort of have these two game modes we kind of have to keep in mind and right now we’re primarily, I think, designing for multiplayer as like the main game mode we’re kind of keeping in the forefront. Trying to do that without causing problems in single-player is difficult for sure and especially difficult when you don’t have a large player base and all the features functioning in multiplayer to design for in a live environment. A lot of things we’ve designed for are hypothetical situations so it’s a little tricky to get the details right, first of all. You’re hitting on some very fine points and I think they’re going to evolve a lot in the next little while between now and 1.0. I think those are the types of things that are going to end up changing quite a bit and a lot of it’s going to be based on player feedback.

So a lot of it’s based on hypothetical situations right now, both in single-player and multiplayer really. It might be a little bit too long, I don’t know. I think one of the big advantages a single-player situation has is that because things aren’t resetting you do have a longer time to spend in the environments so you’re getting a little bit more time to go through this and come back to it after a while type thing. There might need to be things that change there to make that more interesting. In multiplayer there’s more of an opportunity to skip ahead with friends type thing, and that environment does rotate faster generally. There’s things that will help that, I think, as time goes on in both situations.

When it comes to the possibility that maybe it feels too long I think that might stem more from a problem in the Monolith itself, that we’ve talked about quite a few times, which is just more things to do. For example, in this situation right here let’s pretend I can’t see what’s down here and maybe there’s something down there. Right now it’s probably just a couple of enemies and that’s it. What if there was a possibility that down there there was a portal to a boss that had a sweet extra drop and there was a reason to explore more because of that. I think that type of thing where there’s just like random events that can happen in the Monolith that just make it more fun to play the Monolith in general and make it more about the journey than the destination would help this across the board – single-player or multiplayer doesn’t matter. I think that sort of thing is missing from the Monolith before it really feels like a complete endgame system. We do get this feedback a fair bit where it feels like there might be something kind of missing from the system. I think that’s mostly what it is.

We’ve tried to add little things that are less intensive to add into the design to make it more interesting than just sprinting to the finish, which I know some people still do but I think it’s less prominent to just sprint to the finish than it was before – which is good I hope. I think it’s more about improving the Monolith’s moment-to-moment gameplay feel than changing too much of the overall structure of the Monolith, but like I said as we get more feedback we’ll see if there’s more we need to change in the overall structure.

Recently we did do a few changes to the structure of the Monolith system as a whole, which speeds up getting to empowered and speeds up once you’re in empowered doing multiple runs. There’s a lot of things like that that we’ve done recently to sort of do what you’re talking about. I don’t know if doing too much more of it, outside of that, is great yet. I hope that answers the question.

I missed some of the questions I think – that there didn’t seem to be any obvious path for power creep outside of getting better stuff. I did read that whole thing, sorry. I think it also might not be explained well enough though that the empowered versions of blessings are significantly more powerful. For example, the empowered version of this blessing is between 45-75% Cold Resistance so the regular version of this blessing probably has a range of like 15-40% or something. So there’s quite a bit more power to be had there from each of these in the empowered ones, so there is that at least. Also, you do get more blessing options the higher you stack corruption and just by being in empowered – so you’ll get the right blessing faster too.

Source: YouTube Link

vapourfire · August 28, 2022, 4:51pm

Dude, you are a wonder… I am not fond of sitting through youtube videos (or have the time on Fridays) in the hopes something important comes up but would gladly skim through your transcripts anytime to see what gems Mike has let out of the bag.

Thanks for posting this.

AndrewTilley · August 28, 2022, 5:16pm

Thanks man. I’m glad others find it useful, and there’s certainly more gems out there.

McFluffin · August 28, 2022, 6:07pm

The way Mike talks about adding stuff to mapping makes me so stoked to see what’s coming. In my eyes it’s the biggest improvement they can make to the game right now.

XLVI_carpo · August 28, 2022, 6:56pm

I always loved how Warframe had random encounters. Like the Stalker that randomly appears in maps but has to be triggered by killing bosses.

I could imagine it would be cool to have randomised events / special encounters that are tied to certain map types. And the more of the map types in the pool dedicated to that event will increase the chance for that encounter to appear. Not guaranteed, just increasing the chance, but in a way that is noticable.

People should not know this right away when entering a map. They would have to complete the bonus for stability to get to know if the encounter would spawn or not.

eagles4evr · August 29, 2022, 11:50am

yeah echo’ing what was already said, having these dev streams written out is super helpful and thank you so much for doing it. cant always catch it, feel like im missin out.

AndrewTilley · August 29, 2022, 3:05pm

I wholeheartedly agree. I can’t wait to see what this “awesome” version of the Monolith, and other current endgame systems, looks like. There’s a lot of great ideas being pitched here and I hope the execution is equally as great.

@XLVI_carpo Those are some great examples. However, I think there’s design space for randomized events/special encounters to offer both types of experiences – some that you know will appear or have a high chance to appear, and others that can appear at complete random. These completely random events would likely be the most thrilling and frustrating of the two, for basically for the same reason – the possibility of failure. Though, I feel that’s what would drive increased player engagement (likely more so for the dedicated player) to have these types of moments of risk/reward.

ponpoko · August 30, 2022, 11:54pm

Thank you!
This is very useful!

Is it time to update the developer blog?
Looking forward to it!

system · August 30, 2023, 11:55pm

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