Developer Stream - September 29, 2023 (Transcribed)

AndrewTilley · October 10, 2023, 9:06pm

Below is a transcription of the developer stream on September 29th, 2023 that’s hosted by Mike Weicker, a senior developer at EHG. I’ve transcribed everything to the best of my abilities, but when (or if) the stream gets uploaded to YouTube you’ll be able to click each questions source link to watch them for yourself. Currently, those links are just placeholders and don’t actually link anywhere. Responses made by Kain, the community manager at EHG, and Reimerh, a game designer and QA tester at EHG, were done in the Twitch comments during the stream so there won’t be source links for those.

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: How’s the team doing? Are you guys crunching at all to push 1.0 out?

Mike: We really, really avoid any sort of crunch stuff. Some of us have some bad habits around working too much despite protests from people who manage our time. I don’t ever do this! Nah, it’s not me at all. [Mike laughs] Sometimes inspiration strikes and you’re like, ‘I know how to fix that bug. I’m getting on my computer.’ [Mike laughs]

No, if a feature is important enough to be “crunch worthy” then we’ve given ourselves plenty of time and we’ll assign more people to it if we need to.

Kain: Depends what you mean by “crunch” - we certainly have a concerted effort for 1.0, but we’re not asking people to do a bunch of overtime or anything like that. Always want healthy developers!

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Do the dev’s ever discuss the potential of adding crafting mats of some kind, that guarantee an outcome?

Mike: We do have crafting materials that guarantee an outcome.

Q: I love ARPGs but I don’t understand the marriage to RNG loot. I don’t mind grinding for stuff I want, so if there was a currency that was hard to get, but guaranteed the things I want, I would have no issue farming it. However, after a while I get apathetic about the RNG nature of the current loot grind and it makes me prone to long breaks. Thoughts?

Mike: Yeah, we try to weave both of those things in. I’m kind of joking a little bit when I say that there’s things that guarantee the outcome. There’s certain things here that you know exactly what is going to happen. If you use a Rune of Creation then you 100% guaranteed know what’s going to happen. There are things that are static. You put a shard in and you know what’s going to happen. So we do try to keep things as deterministic as possible but if you know exactly what’s going to happen then it kind of takes the suspense factor out of it and that’s something that we do like having.

I’d say it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll ever have like a Rune that’s a, I don’t know, “fixed outcome Rune or Glyph” or something like that…I don’t know. However, through things like dungeon rewards and just more Runes and Glyphs that will continue to come out we try and give more and more options that give you more and more control over it, or at least different ways. Maybe the way that is prominent right now isn’t what you prefer then there’s other options.

So yeah, there’s always going to be RNG loot. I think you’ll probably really enjoy Merchant’s Guild as an Item Faction when that comes out because there is just that constant you’re building towards something. It’s sort of like – if you’ve ever played Diablo 2 they got a Rune system and some of the best and rarest items you can find in Diablo 2 are Runes. There are things that are more specific and rare and all that sort of stuff, yada, yada, yada but you can combine Runes to deterministically up into each other. So if you have enough El Runes eventually you can combine that into a Jah Rune. It’s something like 200K El Runes or something like that but it does eventually combine up eventually. So there’s this feeling of like no matter what eventually you’re going to get there. You just have to keep grinding. It will happen. There’s an RNG drop system but the crafting system in the Cube is such that eventually you will just get there.

Money in an auction house system is kind of the same way. If you just keep farming gold then eventually you’ll have enough to buy the thing that you want. So I would look there for that deterministic crafting system even though it’s not what you’re asking for at all. That feeling, I think, is going to be best served through that system…I hope.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Why is Frost Claw Runemaster just a better Spirit Thorns Spriggan Form? Spirit Thorns gets 80% pierce while Frost Claw gets 100% on 10 projectiles. Spirit Thorns has less ailment multi. Frost Claw doesn’t. But same skill in playstyle and use. All while Runemaster has multiple traversal skills. Runemaster is my dream Spriggan.

Mike: Yeah, this is not the first time I’ve seen this comparison. I think you know as well as anyone that Spirit Thorns is going to have its changes. There’s going to be some Primalist changes that I think will make it more awesome. I can’t tell you much about it sorry.

ReimerhArts: That’s not what Mike means. Give me 2 sec lol. He means Ice Thorns, not Spirit Thorns. [Sends Mike a DM on Slack notifying him of this]

Mike: Oh sorry, I got Ice Thorns and Spirit Thorns confused earlier. My bad.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Have you discussed implementing a dodge-roll or something similar? What is the general stance on that kind of thing?

Mike: We’ve discussed it ad nauseam. We even implemented it at one point, internally…briefly. We’ve looked at it many times. We’ve looked at having it be its own ability, having it be one ability for every class and then have each class have ways to augment it individually, we’ve looked at it where every class has the same way to augment it collectively, we’ve looked at it as having items to augment it, we’ve looked at giving it a skill tree, giving it a skill tree per class, we’ve looked at giving it a single skill tree with specific nodes per nodes. Yeah, we’ve talked about it a lot.

One of the big problems – one of our primary design pillars is class identity. We do everything that we can to make every class feel and play and look and all that differently than every other class. That’s not just like we want Mages to be different than Rogues. We want the Bladedancer to be different than a Marksman. So there’s a lot there that we do to try to keep everything unique and distinct and interesting. Having the same dodge-roll on every class kind of undermines that. A generic dodge-roll also undermines movement abilities that are already around. I’m not saying all of this to say that it’s never going to happen, but this is kind of why it hasn’t happened.

I don’t know if we’re going to add one or not at this point. There won’t be one for 1.0, I can tell you that much. 1.0 is coming sans a generic dodge-roll. So it’s not something that we’re planning on adding right now but it’s not something that we’re 100% forever against. I hope that makes sense.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will the Circle of Fortune and Merchant’s Guild be the only factions at 1.0 or are there plans for more?

Mike: Yes, it will be the only one at 1.0 and there plans for more after 1.0. It’ll be really obvious in the UI, once you see that, that there will be more factions that’ll come later. There will be multiple independent mutually exclusive sets of factions. So what does that mean? [Mike opens MS Paint and starts drawing] It means that there’ll be an A or B option and that there’ll be, at some point, another that’s 1 or 2 and you can be an A1 or an A2 or a B1 or a B2. So you can mix and match those but it’s one from this one and one from this one type of system. This could be extended to be – maybe one of them has three options and another one has two options. So it may not be just pick one of two, some of them may be pick one of three…who knows.

However, initially it’s just going to be the Item Factions. It’ll just be Circle of Fortune and Merchant’s Guild as your only two options to pick from, but down the road we will add more factions into the game. They’ll have their own purpose and they’ll have their own challenges and rewards and content and all that sort of stuff that goes with that, but the initial goal of the faction system is for Item Factions. Goal is probably the wrong word, the initial purpose we’re using it for.

These factions were not intended to be the original two factions. We didn’t actually have a set of like ‘Okay, these are going to be the first two factions that come out’ yet, but as we were looking at the trade system and what to do with it we thought ‘Hey, well we’re going to have to give players a choice at some point between these two options. How do we that? How do we give them that choice? How do we split those up with an in-game way of doing that?’

Kain: At 1.0 those will be the only Item Factions.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I noticed today that Warlock was one of the original 10 masteries, yet it’s still not in the game even though later ones are there.

Mike: Very true.

Q: Is there something that held that mastery up?

Mike: Yeah, there is actually. We had a mechanic planned for the Warlock as it’s like keystone mechanic. If I talk about Runemaster then Runic Invocation and that combination of abilities is its keystone mechanic. If you look at Druids then shapeshifting is their keystone mechanic. So we try and – we don’t necessarily have one specific keystone mechanic for every single mastery. Sometimes there’s multiples, and all that sort of stuff, but the one that we had primarily planned for Warlock was one that we were not capable of doing at the time and we really wanted to do it. So we wanted to look at ways that we could get that into the game. Unfortunately, since then we’ve realized we can’t do it, or that we still don’t have the ability to do it. Maybe it’s possible eventually but we still don’t have the capabilities of doing it right now.

So, in order to try and fix that – we tried a lot of things trying to fix it but we were unable to. So we redesigned the class, approached it from a different angle, and I think it’s way better now…which is funny. We worked in a couple nods to that original thing but I much prefer the way that we went, which is great. Maybe that type of mechanic can show up later on a different mastery or something like that, but that’s mainly why it got delayed so much. Our inability to complete our initial vision for Warlock, I think, is one of the driving factors as to why we went to a three mastery system originally. That was a big contributing factor for it.

So yeah, we were just incapable of completing it. That’s what held it up, but it’s good. It’s one of those like happy problems, I think, in the end because we’ve ended up with something that I think is more fun. The other one it trampled on, I think, Necromancer a little too hard. It’s funny, it’s actually a similar problem to – like problems you can actively see in other ARPG’s and how they’ve solved them and things like that and given how it’s not really been solved in other ARPG’s very well in the last decade I think it’s unsurprising that we weren’t able to solve it either. [Mike laughs] Sometimes we can get in front of things but not this time.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Recently a lot of creators from the ARPG community are trying last epoch and praising the game.

Mike: Yeah, it’s great.

Q: A lot of people are saying LE might have a huge influx of players when 1.0 comes out. What are your thoughts on this?

Mike: It’s awesome.

Q: Are you guys expecting this to happen and in what magnitude? Are you preparing more infrastructure to support the release of 1.0?

Mike: We have sort of our estimate of what we think the playerbase is going to be at 1.0 and how many servers we’re going to need to accommodate that and all that sort of stuff and we are definitely dramatically overshooting what we expect the server requirements to be. One of the most important things in a successful game launch, especially an online one, is smooth multiplayer functionality right out of the gate. So it’s super worth it to us to have a bunch of extra unused servers just sitting there doing nothing because we were just so over prepared. That would probably be better than just a poor launch.

Now that doesn’t mean that it’s not impossible, that there won’t be problems or anything like that, just that we are preparing for a huge influx of players. We are able to add more very dynamically. We’ll be looking at people who know what they’re talking about here instead of just someone bumbling around on the internet answering questions like me. These people actually have detailed information on how to determine what those numbers are going to be based on a lot of things that are in and outside the game. I know a little bit about what sorts of things they look at but not how to interpret that information correctly, I guess is the best way to put that.

They’re not just looking at player numbers but also like how many Google searches are related to the game, how many Facebook posts go out regarding the game, how many reactions do we get on our posts that we send out. All of these things contribute to, and there’s dozens of little factors that I don’t know what they all are, that contribute to how we estimate what the playerbase is going to be. We can also look back and say, ‘Okay, we had this many reactions to this post and we had this many people who joined us on this day’ and all that sort of stuff – so we can look at our historical data too. We try and estimate how close we’ll be, just so that we know roughly what we’ll need, but we do overestimate a lot.

Also, there’s a lot of misconceptions on how these things are needed and how they can affect the overall experience of everyone. We definitely had some growing pains initially when we launched multiplayer and I saw a ton of posts of people being like, ‘Turn on more servers. You need more servers turned on.’ I’m like, ‘Well, we’re at like 30% used right now so I don’t think that turning more servers on is going to help.’ [Mike laughs] So yeah, we’re definitely overshooting a lot. While it’s not impossible to shake a tough launch, it does put a damper on things. No Man’s Sky is doing a pretty good job of it right now.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What’s your current view on balance of player power coming from 3 sources - skill trees, passives, items? Are there any plans to maybe shift that around in any direction?

Mike: Um, so there’s also Blessings which are kind of pseudo items/passives – it’s kind of hard to describe what they are, but there is that fourth source as well. I think it’s not really a secret, I think if you’re asking this question you probably agree with what I’m about to say, is that it’s too heavily skewed towards the skill trees themselves for raw damage power and that we need a way to take some of that power and at least anchor it to items a little bit better.

Generally a pretty key way of doing that is by having a node scale off of an attribute. So where’s an example of that? [Mike opens the Skills & Specializations window and selects the Runic Invocation skill] Okay, so this Cosmic Mind node – so this is defensive not offensive but it’s the same idea. So when casting an invocation using a sequence of three different runes you gain ward per point of intelligence. So this node can be really powerful. Maybe you can say it does 10% more damage per intelligence or whatever…per three points of intelligence or whatever. The primary way you get intelligence is from, well your passives, but also from items. So this anchors the power of this node relative to your items and it means that, without changing your skill at all, you can get more power out of your skills by upgrading your gear as well. Here’s the actual node, Elemental Lore, I should have been using as a reference because that’s a perfect example right there. [Mike laughs]

So yeah, we’ve started to try and increase the emphasis on power from gear and one of the ways we’re doing that is through nodes like this. I’d say that more nodes like this are going to be finding their way into skill trees, and it’s not strictly intelligence – it can be all sorts of things. Trying to tie that a little bit more to items themselves I think is really important and then you’ll also just see more power coming from items in general as item acquisition becomes more consistent, which will happen as soon as you see the Item Factions get added. So there’s little shifts like that which are happening. We’re also just toning down some nodes and how much power they give on skill trees and toning up some items and how much power they give. So I guess you could say that we’re trying to take a multipronged approach to it and I think it’s going to be good.

I don’t think you’ll see a huge, like some patch note that’s weirdly short but has gigantic implications where it’ll be like – I don’t think you’ll ever see a patch note that says something along the lines of something like, ‘Rebalanced every skill in the game to increase the damage percentage required through items’ or something like that. I don’t think it’ll be some big sweeping thing like that. It’ll be, and has been, kind of smaller changes that’ll keep getting improved.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: How are the implementation of the new masteries going, have you worked on any?

Mike: Yes.

Q: Also, are the uniques for the new masteries being worked alongside or are they done after the masteries are finished?

Mike: Usually the unique items get added after the mastery itself gets completed just because there’s more quality checks that need to happen for a skill than a single unique and quite often the uniques will rely on code that the skills have created as well. So we usually get the skills in first and the uniques in after.

Warlock first pass implementation is done and we’re just starting to implement the skills trees for Falconer right now. I just created the mutator for the main passive – like this equivalent ability [Mike hovers over each mastery skill for Sorcerer (Meteor), Runemaster (Runic Invocation), and Spellblade (Shatter Strike)] for Falconer yesterday. I almost said the name of it too. [Mike laughs] It’s just called something generic – the Falconer gets Falconry! [Mike laughs] There we go, I’ll just call it that. That way I can’t spoil it.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Any concern that the wave of content creators coming from POE and Diablo covering the game lately could lead to an overhype when the game is still in alpha?

Mike: Um, I’m really proud of where the game is right now and I think it’s pretty clear – like what you see is what you get, and I don’t think…I think if this had happened a year ago then I probably would think so, yes. But no, I’m not worried about that right now. I think people’s feelings are a little fresh right now and I think things will probably calm done a little bit before actual launch. The only potential for a problem of an overhype and that being detrimental overall would be if we really can’t handle volume of people that are coming in for launch. However, I’ve already talked about that a bunch and I’m not super concerned.

Kain: We’re currently past alpha, well into beta, and planning to launch to 1.0 this year. I think that we are closing in on launch is contributing to the extra eyes, and we’re very excited to have everyone in the community!

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Follow up on the Warlock question: Is that a difficult or time consuming process to determine “hey, this isn’t something we can execute at this time”?

Mike: Um, I mean, it depends. It depends how bad you want it to work and how much you’re willing to put in to making it work when it doesn’t work immediately. So it kind of leads into like, “when is it time to fish or cut bait?” – is like frequently what makes a good project manager I think on a game release, or producer. That’s something that people on our team are constantly evaluating – like “hey, is this feature…what’s the cost benefit of this feature in time and effort and what are we leaving out to make it happen?” All of those things are constantly being looked at with every feature. I think it’s a skill that people have.

ReimerhArts: That’s difficult to answer. It took some time and work to determine it and it took some time to determine what to do instead. So I guess you could say it was difficult, but not really. Not sure what you’re really asking.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Would you agree that mana in a sense is shared cooldown for such abilities? Since they are impactful they certainly should have an additional cost, but at the same time just from a player perspective not being able to cast an ability due to cooldown feels okay (if not my whole bar is cooldowns), at the same time not being able to cast due to no mana feels quite bad.

Kain: I can agree that that’s one aspect of it in that they both limit overall spam (readability of the screen is also a part of this). In this aspect of cooldowns vs mana, mana gives “choice”, where cooldowns does not, and that aspect of choice is important for us when it comes to mechanics. Mana can also be manipulated in more ways (bigger pool, other skills chosen, efficiency) beyond just “less cost/cooldown”.

Teaser 1

AndrewTilley · October 10, 2023, 9:06pm

Page 2 of 2

Q: I’d love to play this on my PS5, any plans for it?

Mike: Yes, we will be going to console eventually. These are very long-term plans. We do not have any specific timeline on when we’ll go to console. We are looking at both Sony and Microsoft for console releases. This is not something that we’ve started. It’s funny, there’s a few Reddit posts out there that I’ve left feedback on the topic and they really frequently get necro’d with someone being like, ‘Oh my God, I want this! Any updates on this?’ or something like that. I’m like, ‘Nope, no updates. Sorry, it’s still long-term plans.’

So we know there’s a market out there for it but we’ve just really got to get the game out the door at a high quality and if we were to try to tack console support onto that right now it would do one of two things; it’d either tank quality or it’d cause a big delay. We’re not prepared to have either of those two things happen so we’re not prepared to include console support right now. We haven’t started talking to Sony or Microsoft about getting onto their consoles at all. We don’t have any internal roadmap for who needs to do what to make that happen.

We don’t even know the requirements we need for it yet. It’s a long-term goal. It’s something where we’re like, ‘Hey, yes we want to do that. We want to get it onto console. We’re going to completely ignore it until we’re past 1.0 and then we’ll start figuring out what we need to do.’ So it’s long-term plans. We are planning on doing it. It will not be available by 1.0. After 1.0 and it’s stable and we’re happy with it then we’ll start to look at what we need to do to add it. It’s a ways off. The biggest thing is controller support, which we’ve been doing the whole time, and being in an engine that can then port to those consoles, which we are. So the major things are there, but there’s a few things I know we’re going to need that we don’t have yet.

Kain: We’ll likely introduce console at some point, but not currently in the works.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: When 1.0 launches, will it be a midnight UTC launch?

Mike: Ah, I doubt it. It’ll probably be a – first off, I do not know the time it’ll launch at. I don’t even know the date it’ll launch at. That said, historically we launch patches early in the day on a North American time schedule so that we have a weekday – like we have the most people available to fix things and all that sort of stuff. As an example, I think patches 0.9, 0.9.1, and 0.9.2 all came out at like 11:00am CT on Thursday…I think. I could be wrong and a few hours off there.

We like to have a launch time when we know we’re planning on being available because we don’t want to be like, ‘Okay, we’re going to launch at this weird time and so everyone needs to be on-call for that day.’ That’s terrible. [Mike laughs] So we’ll try and get a more specific time and date for launch out when that’s ready but for now it’s just likely similar to what we’ve done in the past and to be confirmed in the future.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are you guys hoping to expand the monolith system more after 1.0 or are you hoping to maybe branch out to separate endgame systems?

Mike: I love being able to answer either/or answers with one word – yes. Um, I will expand on it though. Yes, we are looking to expand the monolith more through several different ways. For example, the Exiled Mage’s in the Rune Prisons is one style of way we are expanding our monolith system. You know, just having that treasure goblin style of content – something small that happens inside the same play space. We’re also looking at having, and I’m going to use PoE as an example, like you find a map device in the middle of this map and it’s like a map within a map type thing – that sort of here’s a new zone to explore that you weren’t expecting to explore. Maybe it’s some cave or some mini little challenge area or something that because you found this it’s different than what you were expecting. These are all the styles of things we’re looking at, which is basically just everything.

We’re looking at different ways to improve the timeline interface. So this is when you’re looking to select which echo to pick – how you traverse through that system, what options are available to you there, and all those sorts of things are stuff we look at frequently because the monolith is our rift system, it’s our map device system – it’s that core backbone of our endgame. It’s got to feel great and there’s room to expand it a lot and to build on what we’ve got there, which is something we are planning on doing.

At the same time we are also looking at new systems. So like adding in new dungeons, and also adding in new systems altogether that aren’t either one of those things. So we kind of take a pretty broad approach to what we’re looking to add and how we’re looking to add those things.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Any chance the map overlay transparency slider can also affect the icons? Such as player, quest arrow, etc?

Mike: Oh my God, it doesn’t affect that. That’s hilarious. If you want it to actually then go put it on the forums because I will immediately forget about that, but it is possible. I think I’m the one that implemented that fader and I’m kind of wondering how it’s not hitting both of them right now. That’s interesting. Hmm. Well it’s not doing it how I’d do it now clearly, because the way I’d do it now wouldn’t have that problem.

What you could do – in UI there’s things called canvases and it’s like individually segmented things that sit on the screen in 2D space and you could put them in 3D space, we do frequently, but generally they’re in 2D space. Anyways, you can adjust the alpha value of the entire canvas simultaneously or you can adjust the alpha value of individual images on that canvas. So you can basically say like, ‘Well okay, everything that’s on this canvas is going to be at opacity 0.5.’ Which is how I would have assumed this is done is that it’s using its own canvas and we’re just adjusting the opacity of the entire canvas. Now these extra icons might just be sitting on a different canvas as a different parent and they’re just aligning themselves. So maybe they could be unrelated, in which case we might have to tell a second canvas to do it or maybe we’re changing the opacity of everything individually which seems crazy but I don’t know. It’s doable. I can say it seems crazy because it was probably me that did it. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will Warlock have minions?

Mike: Um, the primary minion class on Acolyte is the Necromancer. One of our core game design pillars is class identity. The Necromancer maintaining its identity as the minion class on Acolyte is really important to us.

You technically do have access to minions on Warlock because there are minions on Acolyte. So yes, kind of. None of the skills we’re adding for Warlock have the minion tag, I can tell you that. However, that doesn’t mean that a minion centric build is not viable on Warlock. I’m sure someone will come up with a minion centric Warlock build and it’s going to be awesome, but it’s going to be heavily specialized into Necromancer. Because you can do a minion Lich but I don’t think Lich has any abilities that are minion tagged. Does it? Let’s go check. Shout-out to Dammitt. Lich does not have minion tagged skills on it but you can still make a minion Lich. So I’m going to say technically the answer to your question is yes, but functionally the purpose of your question the answer, I think, is no.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Did you gather some statistics for Rune Prison modifiers usage? I’m not sure about others, but for me it feels like not really useful and I’ve noticed that a lot of people are just skipping it as a whole.

Mike: I know there’s a bunch of new statistics – like character usage, item usage, that sort of data that’s being expanded right now. So it’ll probably get checked out a little bit more. We really try not to use raw data like that very much when we’re balancing or designing stuff. It’s definitely a really good tool but it’s also easy to get straight up wrong information out of it, I think – just analytics in general. Understanding the data you’re getting from analytics is so much more important and so much harder to do than just making that analytics system and getting that information. Reading it is a completely different skill.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are we getting 1-handed spears?

Mike: Not in 1.0 you ain’t. I think there’s definitely room for 1-handed spears to emerge. I think 1-handed spears will likely come with a new mastery class or possibly base class, depending. I could see having something like that focused a little bit around – visually in my head all I can think about is the PoE Huntress right now, but like a D2 Amazon…maybe a Valkyrie style character. Not a D2 Valkyrie because that’s 2-handed but something like that theming wise I could see being a good place to one day add a 1-handed spear. We might add them regardless of that, but adding a new base type is really awesome with a new mastery class or base class.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be exclusive to that new class, but just having it arrive at the same time I think is really good. We did that with Rogue and bows where it is exclusive and it arrived there at the same time and all that sort of stuff. That doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the way we’d do that every single time. I think specifically with 1-handed spears it would not be the same as that and it would go elsewhere at the same time because there are other classes like Primalist that has a spear requirement for Serpent Strike. That’s a great idea to expand the item types that it’s functional with to add 1-handed spears there, but that’s not enough to add it alone.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Not sure if you are familiar with the notable from PoE Spiritual Aid but can we have a passive like that in LE. (Increases and reduction to minion damage affect you)

Mike: I’m not familiar with that, I’m sorry. Oh, so like your damage scales with minion damage scaling stuff. I mean, that’s a really cool and transformative thing that would be awesome to do. Minion stats are a little tricky. They’re handled very differently to player stats because minions have no attribute scaling. There’s a lot of room for – like the way we can add stats for player and minion stats is different because of that lack of attribute scaling. I guess there is attribute scaling on…okay, I’m just wrong about that. There’s something we used to do.

Skills that minions use have really high base damage compared to skills that players use. So like bow Puncture has, I think, 2 base physical damage and then like just the Skeleton archer bow attack base damage is probably like 30 or something. It causes some inconsistencies with scaling if we were to have – like all of those scaling bonuses that are applied to either players or minions are done so with the knowledge that this difference exists already. It’s possible though. Yeah, we’d just have to take some care to make sure we didn’t muck it up. However, if you’d like to see it potentially actually get added to the game please go over to our forums and leave a suggestion.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: As a big fan of both time travel and ARPG’s I was thrilled when I discovered Last Epoch. What was the inspiration for the time travel theme in the story?

Mike: Well, if you’re interested…I guess I can just tell you. Chrono Trigger is the main inspiration for the storyline theming. So the End of Time was an area in Chrono Trigger where you met an old man named Gaspar, I’m indicating on the map because that’s where Gaspar stands in Last Epoch’s End of Time [Mike laughs], who helped you repair the ship called The Epoch to be able to travel through time to a few different era’s in the timeline where a lot of action’s happening and into a completely destroyed future and into an extremely ancient past. It’s not hidden very well. [Mike laughs] But yeah, only if you’ve played a bunch of Chrono Trigger would you probably notice any of those things. It’s been a long time as well.

If anyone here has not played Chrono Trigger, I highly recommend it. It’s been released and re-released a few times and there’s a ton of debate over what the best version of it is. The thing I always say “is that even the worst version of Chrono Trigger is a masterpiece”. So you can’t really go wrong, just don’t play the PlayStation version. [Mike laughs] Other than the PlayStation version you can’t really go wrong. Which is really just problematic because the early days of optical disc games had extremely long load times due to no hard drive space and low memory space. So they couldn’t load stuff in and had to go to disc a lot, so every time you go to this cutscene or every time you change into a new chapter of the story there’s this gigantic loading screen. The Steam version after a bunch of fixes is fantastic but the DS version is probably the best. The original’s a classic for a reason. I bet the Steam version works on Steam Deck actually. That’d be awesome.

Source: YouTube Link

Mike: Oh, I saw a question about Steam Deck that I just ignored. Oh, I’m sorry. I saw it and I was looking to answer it in my head but I completely forgot about it. I just remembered now that I missed it. Who ever had the Steam Deck question, I read part of it and I can’t remember what it said and I’m sorry. The general questions around Steam Deck, if you’re still here please ask it again in case I don’t answer it right now, but the general thing is that Steam Deck is a platform that we’re not prepared to officially support at the moment. The accidental Steam Deck support is getting decent and like most Linux based systems, if there’s enough interest, the community will generate a lot of the fixes that are needed for it themselves. I know we’ve been looking at Linux stuff more and trying to get fixes out for that but we don’t specifically test on Steam Deck so it’s not officially supported.

So I’d say that some day it’s likely that we’ll eventually support it, not for 1.0, but it does work pretty decently already just incidentally. I hope I answered that question.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will this game be optimized for Steam Deck and is AutoHotkey a bannable offense for skill spamming?

Mike: We have not and will not explicitly okay or not okay AutoHotkey as a program to use. There are many things you can do with it that are not okay. There are many things you can do with it that are okay. We have a very specifically crafted statement that we have released in the past. If anyone knows where that is that’s what we should be referencing in answer to this question, but I think that it essentially says something along the lines of “any automation that depends on or reacts to the current state of the game is completely unacceptable and any third-party software that creates an unfair advantage is at least subject to review but likely unacceptable” or something like that.

We’ve also stated that there’s a Num Lock trick that you can do where you can cause a key to think it’s being held down when it’s not so that it’ll cause a skill to spam over and over again. A lot of people don’t have Num Lock as a key on their keyboard so they can’t do this and therefore to other software solutions. One software solution that can obtain the same effect as the Num Lock trick is AutoHotkey, so we frequently get questions asking if AutoHotkey is okay to use. Well kind of because it’s not okay to use AutoHotkey the wrong way. So I’m not going to say AutoHotkey is okay to use at all because there’s wrong ways to use it.

So if you’re unsure of if it’s okay to use this program or not, don’t would be my advice. If you think that whatever you’re using whatever program for could be replicated with a single dipper bird [Drinking Bird] then it’s probably fine. [Mike puts a Drinking Bird on-screen] This type of thing. If you can replicate it with one of these. [Mike laughs] If you’re unsure just don’t use it, is what it comes down to.

The whole AutoHotkey thing, there’s definitely things you can do in AutoHotkey that are not okay. Don’t do it. I know I’m not giving you clear guidelines and it’s frustrating and all that sort of stuff but if you’re unsure then air on the side of caution would be my advice because we don’t have clear guidelines available for it right now. I think that the TOS basically says that “if there’s a third-party software running that’s interacting with the game in any way then that’s not allowed” or something like that. The TOS is very clear-cut of just no. That’s mostly just so that the expectation is set at a probably too harsh point in case it needs to be enforced too harsh, but we’re not here to ruin anyone’s day and especially if someone’s using it as an accessibility feature it’s not something we want to take away from them.

Source: YouTube Link

Teaser 2

Q: Do you have plans for cursor modifications? I’m using YoloMouse to increase the size of the cursor, but would love to see the option in game.

Mike: Yeah, I’ve actually talked about this before. It’s one of those things that really seems like, and I say that it seems this way because I literally went through this myself where people came into chat on-stream saying they want this and I’m like “Sure, no problem. I’ll go do it.” The next day I went in there and looked to see if I could do it and I couldn’t do it so I gave up on it. I went and talked to some people and asked them, “Hey, have you looked into this? Can we do this?” …yada, yada, yada. The short answer was “Yes, it’s technically possible. No, we don’t have the time to do it right now and it’s not a high enough priority thing. The effort to outcome ratio is not good enough.”

So we want to but we don’t have the technology, which I know sounds ridiculous because it’s like, “Well, you’ve got a sprite covering it now. Just put a bigger sprite covering it, right?” Sorry, it would be great.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: How do bans work in LE? I assume it depends on the severity of the “crime” but what are the punishments “available” right now?

Mike: Um, I don’t know to be frank. I’m sure there’s variable – yeah, there’s a lot of things to do. The most extreme one being just account is locked out – the whole account, perma ban, done, see you later, so long. So everything up to and including that would be on the table, I would assume. I don’t know, I’m sorry.

I know that there’s usually warnings that happen and that first offense punishments aren’t as severe and all that sort of stuff. We have appeals for things, like I wasn’t actually doing it or something. I will say though that every appeal I’ve looked into, every single time…and this is so funny, every single time that I’ve ever been involved with any ban appeal process someone will come up to me and say, “Hey, I got banned. They didn’t tell me why. I didn’t do anything wrong and you need to reverse it.” And it’s always, like “they didn’t tell me why.” That’s always in there for some reason and that “I didn’t do anything.” Those two things are always there. “I wasn’t doing anything. I did nothing wrong.”

And it’s like every single time – I go back to the chat logs or something like that and it’s like the first thing that’s in the chat logs is a section that’s marked with an explanation as to why and them disagreeing with the why. And it’s like [Mike shakes his head in a disapproving manner to possibly insinuate a response of “Are you sure? The why is literally right there”] So if you do get into a situation where you are appealing some sort of ban or something like that, own it and be completely honest is the only way out. The instant I see those “I did nothing” or they didn’t tell me what it was or those hyperbole lies to get out of it – as soon as I see that I’m like, “Do I extend ban?” To the point where misrepresenting moderation status on the forums is actually against the rules of the community guidelines on the forums.

However, it’s really rare that any of that happens though.

Kain: We don’t like implementing bans, as most cases are related to “social” aspects, so mutes cover them. In general, we do a “three strike” system with various suspension lengths depending on severity. Thankfully these events are so rare, that currently we discuss them in the community team on a case by case basis.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Any plans for an in-game auction house or trading will be player to player or a by a website, i.e. PoE? Also, are you guys worried getting flooded with complaints on scamming?

Mike: Please go check out the Item Factions dev blog. There is a FAQ in a collapsible section at the bottom of that post, the bottom of the actual topical post, that will almost 100% for sure answer every question you have because my goodness we spent a long time on that FAQ and every time a question got asked in the forums after that we added to the FAQ. The answers are there, please go read those first. It will be an auction house style system and I’m not concerned about being flooded with scams because it’s very controlled. There’ll be an item there and it’ll be like ‘this is what the item is and this is how much the item costs and if you pay for it’ – it’s not a scam, there’s no way to scam that. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

CaiusMartius · October 10, 2023, 10:21pm

The Master of Summary, the Guru of Transcription.

Nothing can stop him.

Thanks for this!

jeffm · October 11, 2023, 3:32pm

Great work. Thanks @AndrewTilley