I have been casually watching this game for about a year and a half. I was thinking about pulling the trigger lately mostly because there is nothing else to play. I have noticed however it seems to take the devs forever to implement the planned features. The last patch update was in March I guess? I am really looking forward to certain features such as multiplayer but am not willing to wait 2 years for them.
Should I buy now or wait another few months and check back?
The game is pretty fun and fairly polished as a developing beta. I personally come and go myself, playing for a few weeks then taking a few weeks off or waiting for a larger patch and changes to be made. Ultimately its your money and time and you have to decide if you want to play in an every changing beta landscape or wait for a finished product.
All that said I was a part of betas for PoE and Wolcen and this games beta is much better than both of those games. Wolcen of course changed drastically from its original iteration to what was released, bugs aside. PoE only had 2 acts in its beta and was drastically more simplistic than the game it is now of course. If beta development is any indication of what the game could become its exciting to see where LE will go. It is also kind of fun to join in early and potentially help polish it further. The devs in this game are fairly responsive and seem to care that the game not only works well but is fun.
While everyone wants stuff now, Iād rather they develop slow and do it right - way too many games now a days are rushed and suck. There are also no do-overs - just look at Wolcen. Its far more improved from its original launch but struggles to get people to play it. I go back on occasion now and enjoy it but the game feels dead for some reason with a few dozen dedicated players and nothing else going on.
5 Likes
The game gets important patches every two to three months, thatās a reasonable amount of time Iād say. Multiplayer is planned for this year, so you wonāt have to wait for long.
You can go on and purchase now. Of course the game is not finished, but it does not feel like a standard beta, it is more complete than this and sometimes you could forget that itās still in early access.
1 Like
If youāre relatively happy with the state of the game now, Iād say go for it.
The biggest caveat without knowing your playstyle preferences would be that there seem to be enough players that dislike the character progression around level 80+, the endgame, and the loot grind once youāve hit a certain power level.
If the endgame is a big concern, you could wait till 8.2 at least to see how things turn out.
This game already has a sizeable amount of content for itās current state (easily 30-40 hours on one char and multiple hundreds of horus if you want to paly multiple toons)
On top of that this game is one of the fastest EA/Beta games in terms of major update cycles,ā¦ usually every 8 weeks, since the last dozen of majopr patches.
Only the most recent and upcoming does take slightly longer than the 8 weeks.
Anyway itās definitely worth the money currently and content is coming fast.
Dont play this game too muchā¦ my advice is wait all together, and dont think about LAst Epoch until its ready late 2022 or whenever. There are gamebreaking bugs that renders your effort to dust such as loosing 140 echo progression like i just did for no reason other than logging off.
This, pretty much. I started playing in December last year and put in 2k hours from then until March. Iāve been on a hiatus since then while waiting for the new patch (and also to recharge as I was feeling a bit burned out after that marathon binge). Thereās already so much content that I think thereās no reason to delay a purchase at this point.
Thereās still plenty of things for the devs to focus on - the big one for me is finishing up the missing trees and then bringing all of them onto par but the pace has been really good up until now and I expect weāll see a lot of those missing elements implemented over the next few months. This latest patch feels like itās taking a little longer than has been the standard for the last few but I suspect thatās because itās going to be a big one.
My job is as a Scrum Master of multiple development teams. Even the most aggressive possible schedule would mean releasing new things (in tiny, tiny amounts) every month, and that would be more akin to just bug fixes and small tweaks to existing features. New features take a lot longer (2-3 months for relatively small features, up to 6+ months for big ones).
Having an expectation of weekly or even monthly new content is unrealistic here.
1 Like
I hate it when devs rush to release something every two weeks or so. I really prefer devs who take the time to do things correctly.
You and I donāt know exactly how many they are, what their quality assurance process is, how their change management is made, how they are organized, their current workload, etc. We canāt have a real opinion if we donāt know all that - and other elements.
I want devs who feel good and deliver robust content patches every two months or so. Not devs who are exhausted but deliver tiny things weekly.
Personal opinion, of course.
So, using modern development practices, quite a lot (if not all, tbh) dev teams use Agile development.
The premise here is to take a new feature, break it down into āStoriesā (pieces), and then create 2-week āSprintsā (aka iterations) to work on stories for that feature, and keep doing so until the feature is complete. Larger features require more Sprints. Also, as you said, there are multiple teams working on different things - art models, code logic, engine tuning, etc. each of which are needed for a new feature. It doesnāt necessarily mean that āmore people = more features.ā
QA happens as each story is completed, but there is a whole other round of QA once the Feature is wholly complete. And then, sometimes, multiple features are combined into a new version, and that whole version goes thru both automated and manual regression, and end-to-end testing of all included features.
Then thereās the deployment to an internal āstagingā environment to test the deploy to ensure it will go properly when it goes āliveā.
Any defects found along the way in all that are either critical and fixed (delaying the release), or deemed minor and added to the backlog for future versions.
Each set of Features is also prioritized based on a few factors, including complexity, market factors like competitiveness, and team experience with the new work needed.
Now, this all assumes they are using standard Agile practices, and have a sophisticated team.
4 Likes
Yep, itās a matter of choice: which method is in use?
And just one personal comment: I always do love when one person takes the time to explain things.
Often on forums we see posts like āThat, when?ā or āWe need/want thatā, etc. Thatās boring. So I really love when someone explains things carefully. GG!
Yes, it is a matter of choice.
@Zaodon ā thank you for writing this, I had meant to do the same, but thought I started to sound like quite the asshole while explaining.
1 Like
Iād rather they take the time to get it right. This game has soo much promise.
I donāt want another wolcen incident.
1 Like
funny question. The thing you should think about is if you want to play the game or not, rather than when. because if you want to play the game, it doesnt matter when you buy it. because in the end, youĀ“ll buy it anyway. which automatically leads to buying it right now because it doesnt matter if you invest today or tomorrow, in the end youĀ“ll invest anyway
You definitely have to be the kind of gamer who enjoys the alpha and beta phases of games. Iām sure it appeals more to gamers who are interested in game design themselves. For me, itās also being able to see the game in a state that it wonāt be in the future.
If a unique or item gets changed, a lot of the time we get to keep the legacy version of it if we had one before the change. I think little things like that make being part of a beta special. Plus Iām a screenshot junkie and enjoy collecting a library of the process of development.
If you donāt like betas Iād hold off, once multiplayer is released youāll need to start a new character in order to play online.
Personally Iām having fun playing the game and testing different characters and builds figuring out what Iād like to focus on for multiplayer once itās released.
Did you followed Wolcen? I think thats slow ;).
I dont think the progress is slow but that is my opinion. Sometimes i do have this feeling aswell though. Especially on the multiplayer department. At the same time i rather have EHG taking there time end doing their updates good instead of getting half baked ones.
Good things take time. Some game compagnies can learn from that imo.
I hope EHG wont rush anything. When something bad is released its out there, sometimes the damage done is hard to come back from (image wise).
This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.