Developer Stream - Feb. 10th, 2023 (Transcribed)

AndrewTilley · February 14, 2023, 10:52pm

https://i.imgur.com/JUdRUyt.png

Below is a transcription of the developer stream on February 10th, 2023 that’s hosted by Mike Weicker. This weeks stream featured Judd Cobler, EHG CEO and game director, as an impromptu special guest.

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

Also, the entirety of this stream is spread across two posts within this thread as it exceeded the 50,000 character limit, so please continue reading beyond this initial post.

Q: Are we likely to get a campaign skip at 1.0? For us people who’ve already done it million times over.

Mike: Well, the campaign skip system is going to continue to be what it is now with the dungeons, so yes and no because you’re going to get the same one now but not a new one. Not a Diablo 3 adventure mode where you click a button and no campaign. We’re not planning that.

We are planning ways to expand that system because right now it’s not doing a good enough job at being that campaign skip. Campaign skip is probably the wrong word for it – campaign customization I think might be a better term. So, like a method by which you can adjust the campaign experience to suit your needs a little bit better. So we’re not done with that. That’s still the same core system that’s going to be happening moving forward.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What art style do you enjoy most in ARPG’s; something like Torchlight or Diablo or Last Epoch or some other game?

Mike: I’m crazy ultra biased but my favourite is Last Epoch. I’ve been here for the creation of this art style and everything, so I’ve had input in it. By no means am I leading the charge or anything, but I give feedback on them as they’re coming through and things like that. I do like this more realistic-esque art style but that’s not to say that you can’t do others really well too. Even like extreme differences, like Minecraft Dungeons, that’s extremely different. It’s a very stylized version of a non-realistic, you know, it’s very out there and it works great…it works great for them. I don’t know…my favourite is an art style done well. But if I’m going to pick a style – if I was going to be like, ‘Mike snap your fingers and the art style of Last Epoch could be anything you want’ – I wouldn’t change it.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: With the campaign skip you guys are going for with dungeons are you going to stop letting people go straight to mono’s in the End of Time or take level 1’s to get carried in mono’s?

Mike: We don’t plan to. Yea, I guess there’s that multiplayer skip as well which is just have someone rush you, right. In order to make the quest system smooth and play nice when you’re in a group with someone that maybe isn’t quite perfectly sync’d in the campaign as you are, so like – everyone who’s played Diablo 2, how many times have you been in a situation where you didn’t have the full staff before going into the tomb and you couldn’t walk down but the door was opened and you were the only one who couldn’t complete the quest so you got left behind and the rush went on without you? How many times has that happened to you? Or how many times have you been rushing for someone and they went, ‘oh, I didn’t get the quest’ and you’re like, ‘argh, now I got to start all over again…ugh!’. Or someone releases in Trav right as you finish the kill on the council and it just…urgh! Ah, it’s okay…calm down Mike. [heavy breathes and then laughter]

You know what I mean, so we really wanted the quest system to be very friendly in that situation where there’s easy auto catch-up mechanics and things like that. In order to have that it kind of forces a really easy rushing system, at least with the solution we had. So there’s – we decided is it better to have a really easy rushing system to “exploit” how the leveling happens and have the questing work nicely in situations where people aren’t necessarily in the exact right sequence with each other, and we chose to make things just play a little friendlier in the sequencing for quests.

It’s not to say that it can never change if there’s some big reason not to but – I haven’t seen complaints that rushing is super-duper easy, you know. [laughter] Like it doesn’t affect the very first characters at the start of a cycle. If it’s your first time playing through the game I’d still really recommend playing through the campaign, even if it’s your first time playing through with that class or mastery class or different theme in that mastery class. Playing through the campaign is set up really carefully to try and ease you into the mechanics and you get new abilities slowly as you’re going through the campaign and everything. It kind of lets you explore that class in an evolving environment instead of just – and I’m sure for people who are like, ‘oh, this is my hundredth Marksman…I don’t need to do that’ – great, you know, like I agree. [laughter] It’s hard to kind of lay out a good early user path and still allow like hyper experienced players to enjoy the system as well.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I’ve been testing multiplayer and it feels very good, nice job! Sadly its going to end soon. Funny thing 10 days felt too short, probably because there are so many builds to try out.

Mike: Yea, and…umm – I think it’s really good that we’re ending, I know we’ve still got a couple days left, but I think we’re ending this event and people are saying, ‘hey, I want to play more.’ And I think that’s a really good sign and that’s what we hoped would happen. I know that sounds mean – ‘ah, I hope you really don’t get everything.’ [laughter] But it’s really important for us to take this information and make some changes offline and prepare for the next event. Having this online does take resources away from the team from doing other things as well, so yeah. Sorry you don’t get to do everything you wanted to for it. I know a lot of people are sitting in the boat where they’re like, ‘everything was fine for me, like just release multiplayer!’ [laughter] I’ve seen a couple posts like that, ‘there’s nothing to fix, just do it!’ [laughter] And I’m thrilled that this is happening for some people, absolutely, but unfortunately it’s not everyone yet.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: You don’t think having that easy rushing will cause all of multiplayer to just be everyone trying to get boosted and not actually play the game? I feel like it should only be doable after your first playthrough.

Mike: Yea, I mean…there’s still debates there to be had for sure. I think that because the initial wave of people who are coming in, like when a cycle starts there will be no rushing that happens there really or very minimal, at least in the initial wave, because people who are ahead early will want to keep being ahead, I think. And people who are joining like a week later or something like that…yea, it’d probably be nice to have that experience be normal and fresh for everyone. It’s tricky. I think we’re going to be looking for feedback on things like that and I think we’ll be keeping an eye on how it works and everything.

Part of it is going to be is the campaign rewarding to do, both from a gameplay perspective and from an itemized reward – there’s things in the campaign still that even if you get rushed you still have to get. You still have to get your passive quests, you still have to get your idol quests, and completing the campaign at the end I think gives plus one to all attributes, I think? My point is that there are like endgame rewards for a character throughout the campaign so if you want to have that completed character, that finished character, it has to go through the campaign – or at least part of it. That’s a big reason why we have more than 15 quests that have passive points as rewards and there’s more than 8 quests that have idol slots as a reward, and this is an attempt to say, ‘hey, there’s this content we want you to interact with but you can interact with it in a unique way for you.’ And trying not to say, ‘here’s the path you have to follow.’ We’re still slowly layering those systems together, so we’ll see how that goes.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Have you guys thought about doing a group SSF in the same mode of SSF people can invite to lobby to create the SSF group. To play SSF alone you do lobby by yourself then separating leaderboard for 1P, 2P ,3P, 4P. Then using regular SC and HC as a more free trade. So people could choose their own form of economy. This could help maybe cut down community divide and cause more developer focused support?

Mike: Yes, we have considered that. I think that we’re probably – we’re leaning a different direction right now than that. It is an interesting proposition and it does hit a lot of the really key points and things that we’d like to hit with a system like this because, you’re right, there are a lot of people who are very split on the issue and getting that into sort of one cohesive space would be really great. The part about that that I’m not personally a huge fan of, and this has come up in discussions we’ve had before, is that it does kind of restrict – like you’d have to limit who could be in this SSF league, so to speak, and having those predetermined lines is a little tricky to have feel good, I think.

I think in an ideal situation people would be able to have more of a hop in, hop out vibe on like, ‘oh, I want to play with my friends but I don’t always want to play with my friends…sometimes I want to play with other friends.’ Like there’s no one size fits all – like you can do your group with 4 people, you can do your group with 7 people…everyone’s got a different number of friends and different combinations of those friends that’ll be on at different times. So I think it’s tricky to do it that way. It does – like there are versions that you can where it’s just basically private leagues. I think there’s easier ways to do it that would end up being more straight forward, a little smoother and…ya, I think. It’s all very hypothetical until we get through all of this and yea…

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What are the thoughts of the team regarding the new item/exalted drop rates looking at the ongoing event data? Speed running not only the campaign but also gear progression atm.

Mike: We definitely did – we buffed a bunch of drop rates really recently, didn’t we?

Judd: There definitely was some buffs to exalted drop rates. I think the percentage that we increased it by – it seems like people are saying that they’re getting more than what was intended though, but I may be slightly out of the loop on that though.

Mike: That’s what I thought. That’s the same thought I had too. The difference I was seeing people talking about I was like, we hardly even nudged the dials. [laughter]

Judd: Yea, yea…it seems like it shouldn’t have been felt to the extent that it is. So we’ll have to look at that.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are the drop chances being lowered in the normal game and is there a way to better highlight chests? I have a disability and its kind of hard to see.

Mike: Oh, like seeing if a chest exists there. Umm, maybe. That’s the sort of stuff that’s really good as forum feedback. Like a screenshot with, ‘this is where it’s hard for me to see.’ That sort of stuff is really useful there. I don’t think we have any plans for it specifically right now though.

Judd: We’ve always intended to bring in like colour blind options and stuff like that but they haven’t quite gotten to the top of the list yet. I would love if we could get some of those in before 1.0 though. We’ve even made graphics for the different rarities of items and the paper doll and the inventory and stuff like that so that if people are colour blind they can differentiate more easily there but we haven’t quite got them into a build yet.

Mike: I’m being told that we did – that the early drop rates for exalted did go up quite a bit. And ya, that’s the sort of stuff that we’ll be tweaking and changing and experimenting with.

Source: YouTube Link

[Judd and Mike discuss the item linking system]

Judd: Oh, I made a pretty sick ring a minute ago. We don’t have item linking in quite yet or I’d show you, but apparently there is branch where we have local item linking happening so I’m going to see if we can get it to spread across channels before the 0.9 release. We’ll see.

Mike: That’s because of the chat issues, right? Not the chat system itself.

Judd: Yep. Umm-hmm.

Mike: And when you say local, just to clarify for people listening, you mean people who are physically in the same zone as you – local in the sense of when items drop whether they’re shared or not. Right?

Judd: Oh sorry, I was reading something. I’m not good at multitasking in these streams like you are yet. [Mike and Judd laugh] Say again Mike.

Mike: I was just saying, the item linking stuff, for the fact that it’s only on local is referring to local servers where like…

Judd: Yep, and so we were aiming – we are aiming to get some version of item linking out. That’s like an MVP [minimum viable product] version that we know that we could get out but it’s not quite the experience that you’d expect with item linking and I fear that people would be a little bit annoyed if they couldn’t link them in the way that you’d expect them to be linked at all times. So we’re going to see if we can get that patched up and out in time. It would be a big win, especially when we’re talking about the item gifting system and stuff. It’s the main reason we’re trying to get it in sooner rather than later.

Mike: Yeah.

Judd: But we will have it to where it’s completely cross channel and everything works as expected.

Mike: Oh yea, but it’s just whether or not that happens pre-certain patch or not is… [laughter]

Judd: Yea, ya.

Mike: That’s always the question; can we do it? Yes. Can we do it in time? Maybe. [Judd and Mike laugh]

Source: YouTube Link

[Judd and Mike talk about changes to gamepad support in recent builds of the game, and reminisce about how easy it used to be to keep track of game development changes]

Judd: I’m playing with a gamepad right now. It’s feeling great.

Mike: Nice. Oh, you’re not jumping around like you were before. I guess we fixed that.

Judd: No, yeah. We have it updating in really quick intervals now so that is feeling much better.

Mike: Nice, I didn’t even notice. Actually, I almost made a comment when you first joined, ‘you see Judd’s playing on keyboard and mouse now instead of gamepad because he’s not jumping around like last time.’ I still don’t know everything that’s going into the game.

Judd: It’s hard to keep up now that the team is a little bit bigger. I even have a hard time keeping up with quite a few things that are going in.

Mike: I remember when it was just like keeping an eye on the patch notes channel. It’d get updated every day or so, you know.

Judd: Yea, easy squeezy. Absolutely, we were all involved in every meeting. There were no separate meetings for like world building and stuff like that. It was just, ‘everyone hop in, we’re talking about Eterra.’

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Hey Judd, when are we getting that passives reset button?

Judd: Are we talking about the…like…

Mike: Passive respec’s and not having to do them individually.

Judd: Oh yeah. Did we ever implement the ability to just press the Enter key?

Mike: Yes, we definitely did that.

Judd: Okay, okay. The overall passives respec button, I would say that that is probably pretty low on the list at the moment…if I’m being realistic.

Mike: It did, it did – well, first off we do have that button internally already so all it is is exposing a function into a UI element. So the barrier to put this in is super-duper low. [laughter]

Judd: Ahhh…who’s feeling leaky now Mike!

Mike: [laughter] I’ve told them this. That’s not new info, that’s not new info. That’s old!

Judd: [laughter] Good old info. I know we had a…

Mike: But no, no…last time we talked about it we said no.

Source: YouTube Link

[Judd and Mike talk about an old button that used to be on the start screen]

Judd: Remember when we had that button on the start screen that would delete all characters and it was like just a 2x2 pixel and we’d just – like nobody ever found it, but we’d use it on the dev team.

Mike: Yea, for years there was just a tiny spot of the loading screen that you could click that would nuke your whole account. [Judd and Mike laugh] There was a confirmation pop-up that happened, ‘like are you sure?’

Judd: But if you found that 2x2 pixel spot it’d probably be a little surprising that you were presented with a confirmation bubble.

Mike: I think the confirmation popped up like right underneath it too. [laughter] So if you were spam clicking you’d hit it accidently.

Judd: [laughter] My goodness.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: The last time I asked about the 100% offline mode for 0.9 it was unknown at that time if it was a 0.9 or 1.0 feature. Curious if that is known yet?

Judd: Which feature?

Mike: Pure offline mode. Like don’t even have to have Steam on.

Judd: Oh, I see, I see. So we’re working towards a more pure offline build here. We will be releasing offline with services with 0.9. So we do expect you’ll be able to use the chat feature and stuff like that, but it’s actually just a little bit of work to de-couple those things and hasn’t hit the top of the priority stack yet. So 0.9 will launch with a somewhat offline feature – it’ll be very similar to what you guys are experiencing on live though.

Mike: Yea, we’ll have basically the same offline mode that’s already there and then the other one is still in the pipe.

Source: YouTube Link

[Judd and Mike discuss possibly adding a way to invite players that send you an invite and also Judd mentions they need a way to transfer party lead]

Judd: I got an invite from somebody. I’ll have to turn that around and invite them though.

Mike: Yea.

Judd: Ahh, do we know if /invite is actually hooked up to work?

Mike: I have no idea.

Judd: We’re about to find out.

Mike: There’s an invite button that you can type the name in the ahh…umm.

Judd: Oh that’s right.

Mike: And I think you can right-click on the name in chat messages to invite there?

Judd: Ahh, yes but this person just invited me straight out. So I just have the invite bubble.

Mike: Should put a little button on there, ‘actually, invite them’ – ‘invite back.’

Judd: Yea…that’d actually be really helpful. [Judd and Mike laugh] One thing that we also need is we need a way for people to give other people party lead.

Mike: Yep, neither of those things should be hard, I don’t think.

Judd: No, no, no.

Mike: I don’t know if the party lead transference requires a party reform…but no, when someone leaves you can transfer party…ya.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: MTX when? Judd give us something!

Judd: Ah, so we’re looking to include an MVP [minimum viable product] version of the MTX system with 0.9. The inventory will be very limited, but what is very exciting about that is that everybody who has purchased the game actually does have pets and coins and stuff like that – so for the very first time you guys will be able to equip your pets and see the amount of currency that you have. So we do expect to have that with 0.9 barring any last minute, I don’t know, crazy hiccups that we could experience. Right now, you know, Mike you’ve actually been working on that quite a lot.

Mike: Yea I was going to say, as the person implementing that I’m confident.

Judd: Okay.

Mike: Or one of the people implementing that.

Judd: It’s a very involved system.

Mike: Yea, there’s so many edge cases…oh my God.

Judd: Mm-hmm. You have to be hyper, hyper careful about it because people are spending real money and we have to make sure it’s water tight.

Mike: Yea, big time. I just did the error states and messages for if the panel doesn’t load properly initially.

Judd: Mm-hmm. I’m excited to show everybody all of the cool like video’s and cosmetics because I don’t think we’ve really shown the community way too much of any of the cosmetic stuff, have we?

Mike: We’ve shown quite a few concept images and a couple renders, but not much really.

Judd: Yea, ya…it’s good stuff. The team is doing a great job on all of those.

Mike: Yea.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Can you put names over the mini-map and tabbed map over the player icons so I know who is where.

Mike: Yea…umm, that’s definitely a thing – to have names there as options. The first feature we want to put there is have colours be there. So have like a background colour here [points to the player portraits] associated with each person and then have the colours of the icons on the map match that colour. So that if you want to do it by colour you can be like, ‘so and so is purple and oh, I know who purple is.’ So if you’re playing with the same people in the same group for a while it’s pretty obvious who’s who. But ya, adding names there is the same level of difficulty. There’s a major problem that caused us not to do that. I can’t remember what it was, but ideally we’ll be getting that in.

Source: YouTube Link

[Mike has a bug with loot showing on the character select screen and Judd mentions the new loot drop spawning and models that are being worked on]

Mike: [laughter] All the loot, it didn’t despawn and it’s physically located in the world at the same spot…interesting. I’ve never seen that before.

Judd: Oh wow. Ya…no, that’s new. And it’s not our updated on-ground loot models either because I see the hockey puck.

Mike: Oh ya, there’s the hockey puck. Are you sure that got in?

Judd: Ahh, I don’t think that’s merged in. I think it’s on an outstanding branch, but we had a lot of really good work done with the loot on ground models, how loot spawns and feels when it sits when actually popping out of stuff.

Mike: Yea, a little flop, twist, jump.

Judd: Yeah…yea, ya. It’ll be a lot better.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will there be a character with barrier skills? Like elemental walls, fields, protection veil?

Mike: Yes…umm, the tricky thing with physical walls that show up – and there are, like Necromancer already has wall abilities that they can make…but it’s very limited and there’s big gaps in it usually and things like that because if anyone’s ever played bone prison or with someone playing a bone prison Necro in D2 it kind of sucks sometimes. So like a lot of the wall concepts we’ve come up with and worked with to get in are like energy walls or spirit walls…like the kind of wall that a player could walk through very easily but someone who is an enemy might be affected when going through it, like a debuff or something that. That’s the sort of style of wall that we’ve been approaching more in design and concept stuff.

Source: YouTube Link

AndrewTilley · February 14, 2023, 10:52pm

Page 2 of 2

Mike showcases concept art of the Falcon for the upcoming Falconer mastery of the Rogue class that’s releasing at 1.0

https://i.imgur.com/QgT7eyz.png

[Judd gives some background info on the falcon and asks for our falcon cosmetic skin suggestions]

Judd: So this is funny. We’ve gone through and we’ve updated a ton of models, and you guys will see plenty of those with the 0.9 release. A lot of these aren’t even available in this multiplayer build right now as we’re replacing a lot of enemies, but those will be available for 0.9. So with the falcon we actually did 3D model the falcon and animate it and everything like that, but that was a while ago when we were testing out some initial skills for the falcon. Now that we have progressed a little bit we’ve gone back and we’re revamping all of the Beastmaster’s pets, and they look super cool, and the falcon is kind of in that same vein as a pet so we’re updating the falcon and this is the new concept art that we’re going to be modeling this off of in the very near future. Very happy with this one. This one’s kind of hot off the press.

And so ahh…this is also one that the team is really excited about developing cosmetic skins for. So if there’s any type of falcon cosmetic skins you guys want to see we’d love to hear it. And, you know, everybody goes to like, ‘we need a phoenix!’ and stuff like that – which will absolutely happen. Absolutely going to have a phoenix cosmetic skin for this.

Mike: That was the first one I was going to suggest. [laughs]

Judd: Murica bald eagle. I like that. [laughs]

Mike: I’m going to take this opportunity because every time it comes up, there’s way more eagles in Canada than America. [laughs]

Judd: [laughs] Steampunk tesla falcon. Yes Quiet, yes. This is one that even if I had to go take personal funds and hire external 3D modelers because we didn’t have the bandwidth inside, like I’m just going to pump skins into this falcon. [laughter]

Mike: The store’s going to be like half falcon skins and then everything else. [laughter]

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will you ever add settings for hiding teammate abilities or scaling the opacity or quality of their effects/projectiles?

Mike: Possibly…

Judd: It’s a really good question and it’s something that for a long time we’ve been pushing is that whenever there was going to be group play in the game that we need to make sure that the skills that we’re developing, the visual effects, are not overpowering. Now that we are actually seeing this in multiplayer there are some initial actions that we’re taking. For example, you’ll notice that whenever Meteor comes down on Mike’s screen that you don’t see the targeting reticle on the ground. That was one of the first things that we saw, ‘okay, stuff like that is noisy’ and so we can differentiate what visuals happen on players clients versus what’s happening on your player client. So, our first task is going to be going through and seeing what can and need to change on that front and then we’ll implement those changes. Then if we see that there are still skills that are making, you know, just too much screen clutter then we’ll go and we’ll probably implement ways to add more transparency to those or what have you. Making sure that the screen and the play space is very readable is very, very important to us.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will you guys add trade?

Mike: We’re still digesting information from the survey we sent out, if we want to or not, what that’s going to look like…

Judd: Yea…right now we’re trying to get as much feedback as possible. We have the entire design team spending a lot of time reading all of the comments across our forums, and Reddit, and all our other social media. Trade is a very divisive topic. We knew that going into it. So there are definitely still conversations going on about trade. We’re not ready to commit to saying that anything is going to change or anything like that yet, but there is a lot of conversation going on and a lot of ideation going on. It’s always fun if you guys have ideas for trade, we do love to read those, and that’s what I’ll say…we’re still discussing, still ideas.

Mike: Just a blanket reminder; remember to be respectful in those conversation, and that people are going to have differing opinions. Like if someone is not being respectful try not to beat them at that same point, try and drive the conversation into being more respectful. Whenever I see suggestions that are well worded and are not overly aggressive I take them much more seriously. Yea…we’re still working on it and who knows what will happen yet.

Judd: Ideally we find something that is inclusive to more spectrums of the playerbase, but we do have a solid design goal that we want to make sure that when you’re playing the game that playing the game is always a fantastic way to find good loot and it doesn’t feel like it’s completely overpowered by trade. It’s a slippery slope that we have to take into account when we have all these discussions.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Any idea of what is causing characters to feel unresponsive while kitting? Even while just holding right-click forwards characters behave differently than in offline, and some skills just lock your character in place (does not behave like that in SP). Other than that arena felt good.

Mike: Umm…the…

Judd: The answers yes, and we’re working on it. [laughs] Yea, there’s definitely a number of things due to like animation controllers and things like that we’re working on addressing – that we’re fairly confident that were going to have in for 0.9. I don’t think it’d be a blocker…I don’t think it’d push our release date or anything if we didn’t get them in. Plus, our hotfix cycle for 0.9 will probably be slightly longer than the patch cycles we’ve had in the past. But yes, we do know what is causing those and we’re working on addressing them.

Mike: And when we say hotfix cycle being longer you mean that there’s more time that we’re willing to put hotfixes out rather than time between hotfixes?

Judd: Yep, yep.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Speaking of stash tabs, how do you feel about players needing to setup their stash tabs every cycle?

Mike: That’s a good question. Umm, I think it’s important – because they’re purchased with an in-game resource I think it’s important that they’re being re-purchased every cycle. Setting up the configuration of those every time I can see being tedious and like, I don’t know, having some sort of way of being able to save configurations like, your first stash tab is always like this and your second stash tab is always like this and then when you buy your second stash tab it just auto configures it like your second stash tab defaults or something, that’d be cool. And that can be stored client side so it’s not a big deal. I don’t know, it definitely seems cool. I think it needs to be at least a little bit reconfigurable every single time because they’re purchased with an in-game currency.

Judd: Yep. And being realistic there right it’s probably that, you know, people will need to purchase the new ones and reconfigure them each time.

Mike: At least initially, ya.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I totally understand the complication of the loot issue but can you all share your largest concerns over trade? Like what is the nightmare scenario?

Mike: The nightmare scenario is just that playing – like going out into the world adventuring to find gear is strictly worse as far as how quickly you can obtain the gear. Like if you’re going to do any competition whatsoever or any sort of trying to be powerful in the game that the clear and obvious way to do that is by always just going to the shop and buying whatever piece of gear you want and you’re basically ignoring almost all the drops you get except for a very select few mega drops and other than that you’re just like it doesn’t matter what drops. If one of these mega drops drop, great I’ll pick it up and sell it but other than that I’m basically just going to the shop and buying everything all the time for all players. And I think it’s important to note that this is the nightmare scenario and I used a lot of terms that are really extreme in that – like “always” and “for all players” and it’s just like…it’s getting to that extreme that’s the nightmare scenario. I don’t know if you want to say something.

Judd: Yea, ya. When you have a larger, like a global economy, and there’s no restrictions it just very quickly becomes a – there’s so much access to great gear from the economy that it would be silly not to go and get your gear that way. Which means that when you play the game the likelihood that you find upgrades for your gear is extremely small and we want to mitigate that, but there definitely are design goals that we would have if we were to implement trade in some manner. Though, even when we’re brainstorming right now internally…open trade, like a completely open trade economy, is not something that we’re discussing but there may be ways that we can do things – like give items external value and have some way to exchange things that makes good sense for the way Last Epoch is designed. But, again, we’re still in discussions about it, we’re listening to everybody, there’s plenty of people that have some very interesting suggestions that do make their way internal and we do have conversations on those.

Mike: Yea, the conversation’s not over – it never was over. That’s something that’s important to note as well. It’s not like the conversation stopped and then something happened and we re-opened the conversation. No, the conversation has just never stopped.

Judd: Yea. Ya, I think that maybe the way we worded that item gifting post made it feel more final than we intended it to because, you know, item gifting initially was, like, this is something that we can get in for 0.9 so that people that are playing with each other can exchange items without, you know – the scope wasn’t all too large and we could actually get it in. But I’m nervous to even talk about it that much because, you know, it’s ahh…there’s still just a lot of discussions that we need to have internally.

Mike: Yep, and they’re happening every day.

Judd: A lot, yes. And afterhours – our evenings are…for some of us our evenings are trade discussions right now.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Going forward after the 0.9 launch, what kind of patch cadence will we see?

Mike: Ah, we don’t have a specific number – like I’m not going to say that it’ll be every X months or it’ll be every X weeks or anything like that, but it will be much more frequently than what it was from 0.8.5 to 0.9 and we are aiming to get back to a regular cadence. Much more reminiscent of what happened pre-0.8.5.

Judd: Yep. Yea, the community’s best reference for that is just to go and look at the release cycle that we had before this very extended dev cycle. With this dev cycle the reason that we stopped releasing content for as long as we did was because we hit a point of no return with multiplayer development where are on our development branches we could no longer make single player builds without it being a huge undertaking because we had a lot of multiplayer logic in place. So we had to get to the end of that before we released new content. We could have taken other routes but it would have resulted in multiplayer coming later than it is right now, and we really just needed to buckle down and get the multiplayer so that it was done.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Do you happen to have an ETA on patch notes for 0.9? And have you considered releasing it on separate days due to the volume of changes?

Mike: Oh, it’ll likely be pretty close to the release of 0.9 when the 0.9 patch notes will come out. Patch 0.9 patch notes dates – it’ll be close to the 0.9 release date, it’ll be close to March 9th. It might be a day or two before.

Judd: And largely that’s due to the fact that the patch notes that we have pulled up right now are ludicrous – there’s like 60 pages of patch notes. So when we present that to the community we need to aggregate it and make, probably, sections near the top that are more concise so that people don’t feel like they have to go through 60 pages of stuff to find the good bits. Umm, it’s a lot. We have not been sitting on our hands for the last 9 months, I promise you that.

Mike: As evident by a lot of the stuff that people are finding in this test, I think. [laughs]

EHG_Kain: [in the comments] We’ve discussed releasing it in parts, however that raised some other issues. So likely we will be posting it all at once. The exact date for patch notes TBA, but you can expect similar to past major patches.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are there plans to add more timelines to the endgame?

Mike: Ah, ya I think there would likely be – so you’re asking for more…new islands here [has the End of Time map open]. I think likely what would happen…the volume likely wouldn’t change too much, just because it becomes a little overwhelming in the system when you need to complete each one of them to finish. I think likely – and you need to complete them many times to get the blessings that you want. Either there’d be some sort of change there where that’s easier to do or it’d be more along the lines of replacing timelines – or like a timeline becomes corrupted, or like someone invades a timeline and the whole thing gets changed and it’s still the same timeline but with a twist or something. There’s definitely a lot of room for – just re-organizing how they’re laid out even and what levels they show up at…there’s lots of room for doing things like that in the monolith system and that will happen. So it definitely won’t be static. That’s the sort of thing you’ll see in cycle content, I think.

Judd: Yea, the only thing to add to that, for me, is that I really want people to understand that after 1.0 endgame becomes a huge focus for us. Extending it in terms of the item hunt, the content available, the systems, adding on just a few layers of complexity – we don’t want the game to be super complex for new people that are coming in, but there’s definitely things that we can add before we get too complex there. Endgame will continue to be a major, major focus post-1.0…and even going into 1.0, a bit.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Wouldn’t it be better to treat it like PoE and make a league with and one without trade?

Mike: Yea, so ideally – and this is a topic that’s coming from the forums a little bit here. Ideally, if we’re going to introduce a trade system in a perfect world, and we’re talking rainbows and butterflies and everything’s perfect, whatever system that gets introduced for trade it wouldn’t have a playerbase split associated with it. So people who were wanting to play in a trade environment and people who were wanting to play outside of a trade environment would still be able to physically play together. Having it be a hard separated environment like that wouldn’t be ideal. It might be what needs to happen if we were to do something like that, who knows yet. But ideally…ideally, there wouldn’t be a playerbase segregation completely, as far as who can play with who. Because maybe you really like trade and your friend doesn’t, but you still want to be able to play together.

Judd: I have a lot of thoughts on that. I probably…ah, I don’t want to dive into that too deep though.

Mike: Yea, and I’m really just talking purely hypothetical, in a perfect world, what if you could wave your magic wand and have something happen…that’d be an ideal element to it. I’m definitely not saying that it’s possible. That’s one of the issues with just saying okay, there’s two games, you know…that’s basically what it is.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Any hints on the remaining Shaman skills or skill updates?

Mike: There’s not really anything I can say that I haven’t said already. There’s at least one new skill…

Judd: Are you talking about Tempest Strike?

Mike: I’ve mentioned…so what I’ve said about Tempest Strike – I’ve said Tempest Strike is going to be a pretty big overhaul, it’s going to have a new identity, it’s not really going to be sitting in the same space as Serpent Strike, Swipe, or Tempest Strike…it’s not really going to fit in that space anymore. It’s going to scale off of attack speed…ahhh, I think that’s all I’ve said about it. Oh, it’s going to be a lot heavier, a lot bigger skill.

Judd: Umm-hmm…Ice Thorns.

Mike: Ice Thorns is going. I know I’ve said that a million times over the years and no one believes me anymore, but it is. [Judd and Mike laugh] And yea, there’s another melee skill coming in to take the place that Tempest Strike holds and there’s…ahh, there’s not much else to say. There’s a new totem skill, I think, at some point. I could be wrong about that one. It’s either a new totem skill or a new branch to an existing totem skill. I can’t remember which one it is.

Judd: I’m trying to remember our conversations on totems that we’ve had internally.

Mike: I’ve got the notes, I’ve got the notes. It starts when the computer starts up.

Judd: Nice, nice.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: When is the last character wipe?

Mike: Umm, so the characters existing in the multiplayer preview events are not permanent characters so they’re getting wiped, but they’re not ever really there…if that makes any sense. So, on February 12th when this event finishes all the characters you’ve been playing in this event will go bye-bye. There’s a new event that will start two weeks after that…a week after that…

Judd: The 23rd.

Mike: The 23rd. When that event finishes those characters will be gone. And then 0.9 starts [on March 9th] and those are all fresh characters for multiplayer. All of your offline characters, anything you’re playing in 0.8.5 right now will continue to exist and be playable offline as normal like nothing’s changed, they just won’t come to online.

I see this one some how all over the place and I reply every time I see it to say no, it’s wrong. People say that your multiplayer characters are going to be shifted to offline – that’s not happening. No, we’ve never said that and I’ve said many times the exact opposite of it so that’s not happening.

And when 0.9 goes to 1.0 the goal is to – this is still a little far away so we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but when 0.9 goes to 1.0 the goal is to take all of those characters and put them into a standard environment so that they’re still available to play, but they won’t be fresh cycle characters when 1.0 launches…as like this is the latest ladder and everything like that. So they’ll still be playable and available and if you’re not interested in competing on the new ladder, no problem, they’re good for ya.

Judd: Oh, and we did say CT’s will keep their characters right. Everybody at 0.9 will be required to start fresh.

Mike: Yeah, yea, ya.

Source: YouTube Link

Feedback Request

You likely noticed that Judd posed several questions to the community throughout this stream. So, if you want to provide feedback on any of these then please do so.

[Mike asked this one and while it was directed at those in the stream I’m sure he’d still love to hear your feedback regardless] I’m interested to know, people who are here, if you’ve been playing the multiplayer beta, how did it go? Did you enjoy yourself? Were you underwhelmed? Were there things that you didn’t expect to see that you’re excited about? Were there like, you know, give me some live feedback. I want to hear what’s going on.
If there’s any type of falcon cosmetic skins you guys want to see we’d love to hear it.
If anyone has any suggestions for what a really cool Meteor MTX would be I’ll put that near the top of the list.
How do you guys feel about the future of Epoch having different playable race classes, instead of just humans? I’d be interested to hear about that one.
If you guys have ideas for cool uniques definitely let us know.

Lastly, February 26th will be the 2 year anniversary of Mike doing these weekly streams. How the time fly’s.

Macknum · February 15, 2023, 11:35am

Mike must be haunted in his sleep by PoE when trading is his biggest nightmare in hack and slays . Thx for the script .

ponpoko · February 15, 2023, 2:20pm

Very useful!
Thank you very much!

My Request

It was very fun MP beta!
I made melee character, my friend made ranged character.
Great COOP experiense!
At first, we traveled Monolith on low level, and we saw hell.
Hard level is fun for coop.
Personally, I think that games need the End Stage. (scale limited end boss)
But I feeled that unlimited scaling is not bad for coop play on LE.

・Replaced skill visual are cool.
My expectations for MTX are higher than before.

・I wish if more skill node or unique items are exist that effect to allies on each characters.

falcon cosmetic skins → Cat skin. Cat charge!
Meteor MTX → Titan’s foot.
I’m fine with either.

Edit
proofread part of the text.

Deimos169 · February 15, 2023, 5:52pm

Feedback Request:

I played the beta with a friend, I wanted to include my brother in our party as well but unfortunately our schedules didn’t line up.
It went well, we didn’t run into any major issues and the issues we did run into other’s have already drawn attention to. My friend had a blast as he wanted to wait to play for the first time until MP was out to give it a whirl.
Was I underwhelmed? Eh. Kinda. sorta. not really. Having just under 2200 hours in game of course I’m looking for more content, but I knew the circumstances of this patch, and the last year really, to curb my expectations. I am looking forward to what happens moving forward. For instance, I like the changes to shurikens for a full on lightning conversion build. Need more of that.
I think the real winner is the optimization improvements. It felt good to be going through some maps and fights without stutters, felt like a brand new experience at times.
I’m going to say that controller support needs some real love before 0.9 releases proper, it felt like it’s taken a step back compared to 0.8.5. I’ll post my feelings about it in a controller feedback thread.
Hard for me to make a decision here until we get Falconer fleshed out. I tend to like thematic MTX on a per build basis. So if there’s a “ninja”-esque archetype within Falconer, then I’d like a falcon MTX to reflect that, like in full black garb. But obviously I’d like visual changes like we have with Cold converted Spriggan form as well at no additional cost.
An Exterminatus orbital bombardment laser. Purge the heretics.
I guess it depends on where you’d like the class and visual design to go. Right now we have the Nagasa as a reference point. How would the animations of this race look on paper? How would items? I mean this in terms of interest for the player as well as for you as a business. Like there’s more opportunity if we have races (no doubt more humanoid) that can be geared up with MTX vs a Druid form model swap situation. I could go either way on this, until we get more races in game I think the majority of people would just rally towards gender options for what we currently have.
I had ideas for a stackable lightning DoT mechanic to be comparable to Frostbite/Ignite and you guys cut me off by adding in Electrify right as I thought of it. So, I’d like something that helps Multistrike fit into the Aurelius build better as Multistrike has no conversion options at the moment so it just becomes a vector to distribute smites and really nothing more. Aside from Aurelius’ mechanic being a little messy right now when dealing with non-bosses and rares, Multistrike just stops being effective at any measure before the end of the campaign and exponentially so by the time you get to the Reign of Dragons. Where as a Fulgurite Shard rogue now has Shurikens and Lethal Mirage fully convert to lightning (I didn’t get a chance to test the build on the beta unfortunately).
Actually more lightning supportive uniques would be great overall. It’s the least represented of the core 3 elements by a good amount, I mean goodness void has more supportive uniques than lightning right now and there’s only one mastery that has any real major use of void.
Edit: Also something to convert Holy Aura’s fire support nodes to lightning would be great as well.

buzzybug · February 15, 2023, 6:12pm

i woul really like to see an “ethereal” skin for the falcon. The skin would waver and shift and change transparency.

I really wish i had artistic talent because i have a very clear idea in my head of what i would want it to look like but it would be very difficult to make the artwork for it myself.

Muddlemancer · February 16, 2023, 3:12am

I enjoyed the multiplayer beta. I only played one class (Sorc), and only partway through the campaign, since I knew the character would get wiped. But it was fun, and I definitely noticed performance improvements, which is great. The new void-fused earth model is cool. I really like the new NPC portraits for dialogue. I was hoping to see a lot of the cool gear that’s been teased in concept art, but I didn’t really notice any, though I didn’t play that far into the campaign, so maybe some of that shows up later.

I did run into a few bugs, but nothing that a quick close out, log back in didn’t fix.

I do miss the old sequence for picking your mastery where you have to run past the shadows of yourself, and I miss being able to use skills inside of town. And when we use town portal, are we going to be able to go back to the spot on the map where we opened the portal, because I really don’t like having to start from the waypoint or start of the map.

I didn’t actually play coop with anyone, as I don’t have any friends with the game and I usually play solo on arpgs anyways.

Overall, it was fun, but I was hoping to see more visual updates. Of course I may have missed a lot of new stuff since I didn’t play that far into the campaign.

More than anything I’m excited for the pace of new content drops to pick up once 9.0 is out.

I definitely want a bald eagle skin. Torchlight 3 has a bald eagle pet and I love it. I don’t think I have any really original ideas for skins beyond what you’ve already dreamed up, but what first comes to my mind is a dragon skin, maybe a pirate parrot skin complete with a tricorne hat. Or maybe a skin where your falcon has a little elfin or spriggan-like creature riding atop it.
Cool meteor mtx…hmmmm…I wonder if there’d be anyway to make it look like the Death Star beam, where you multiple beams converging at the top of the screen, and then the big blast. Or wait a minute, a falling angel meteor, Tyreal falling from the sky and kamikaze-ing your foes.
I’d love having non-human races to play in Last Epoch.

Shrukn · February 16, 2023, 4:56am

I didnt play the MP much and only stopped at around L50 so hardly anything, I wanted to keep playing but hate short events that are voided, I am 100% playing in March as long as its more ‘presistent’
None, but I do want the Warlock to have ‘Book minions’ that cast your spells on your bar sort of like Vale Spirits
An MTX that changes based on how high your Increased spell/fire damage is, ie every 200% of each it glows brighter as it descends / does a more visual impact so you want to improve your stats as much as you can
Honestly dont care at all about that stuff, I do like interesting engaging lore though. Edit: thinking about it I dont like transformation skills at all. Cant even play a Lich without Reaper Form for example
I have so many ideas for this game but most wouldnt be made as too powerful or would break the game - Heres one:
‘When you deal damage with a skill in your first slot, automatically trigger the skill in your 5th slot’ ‘xx cooldown 50% triggered damage etc’ the amount of shit you could do with that unique would be kinda cool, You could shoot a mob with Marrow Shards then auto Transplant onto them. You could also maybe do some auto Raise-Skeletons-Sacrifice stuff on a loop possibly

DiceDragon · February 16, 2023, 4:59am

Loading times during campaign are brutal and detract from an otherwise extremely amazing campaign experience in co-op.

Monoliths break when you have a bowmage and a smite hammers paladin, atleast in my experience. We are all westcoast and still had the fights crash/lag out on boss fights with those two characters.

I also feel like work still needs to be done on scaling/movement for classes, once we hit monoliths and classes started to come online the bowmage was offscreening stuff before people could hit, even in a 3man. And in some parties I was getting left behind because a reap/transplant lich is unmatchable in movement. I dont mean nerf lich, but why does fury leap have a 6 second cd vs transplants 4, when transplant is instant, and fury leap isnt? what is fury leap being punished for exactly?

when you are actually in combat and playing it feels super great, but the skill balance and movement balance can really detract from the experience still.

Shrukn · February 16, 2023, 5:05am

nothing, its just outdated and all this stuff needs a rework for MP, from the very short amounts I watched on stream a few different players; it was locustesque PoE gameplay where you all just fly through the maps killing everything almost instantly and not stopping and this was happening as early as Welryn, the ‘4 man HP’ didnt seem to be anything

Deimos169 · February 16, 2023, 6:18am

Yeah thanks for reminding me of one bit of feedback. The enemy HP bonus in groups probably could use some more sauce. Not sure if it continues to increase after the campaign but just in a duo of two competent builds without crafting any gear it was a cakewalk up to Harkon+Zerrick where we got to.

QuietForMe · February 16, 2023, 12:21pm

Thanks for your hard work as always @AndrewTilley these really do save me alot of time. i would legit dont know without these great transcriptions <3

phil2022 · February 16, 2023, 2:45pm

Thanks for this!