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: I kind of hate that the Cosmetic Shop is in-game now, you know just how to get me to support the game.
Kain: The actual reason the MTX shop is in the game already is to make sure it’s working for 1.0, and to have given it time for community feedback. It’s intentionally limited inventory as it’s about the system rather than sales from it when we put it up.
Q: Are we feeling more and more confident about launching by the end of the year or what’s the overall vibe? Nothing specific of course, just trying to gauge how you guys are feeling since we’re kind of blind right now.
Mike: Nothing’s changed, it’s still coming out this year. The initial implementation for Warlock is basically done. I reckon we’re going to have a testing build for Warlock out pretty soon – for internal testing, not live. Sorry, just to be clear on that. We’ve moved over to Falconer.
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: First, thanks you dev for this nice game. I like to play. I was waiting about the patch 0.9.3 today? When will it come?
Mike: Never! 0.9.3 will never arrive ever because we’re not making it. We’re going directly to 1.0, so never. But the next major patch, 1.0, will arrive later this year. Which I think is the question you’re actually asking, but I’m just being a jerk about it.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: Why is Frost Claw so lax compared to other skills like it but have harsher penalties?
Mike: I don’t have a solid answer for you. I suspect it’s basically just that this is what we thought was good and balanced and worked well for the ability now and the others are just what we thought was good and balanced and worked for the abilities then.
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: Is it possible to make the radius boundary of Javelin’s Battle Standard node darker? It is very hard to see on some of the brighter maps like Deserts & snow.
Mike: It is possible, but I doubt we’ll do that. However, if you’ve got a suggestion like that the best place is the forums or Discord.
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: Is it intentional that the knight/armor class - Sentinel is the squishiest class in the game?
Mike: No…um, and um…ah, no.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: Last time I played was the golem rework - even with Aaron’s Will and 4 golems it felt like they did no damage. Are there any more golem changes planned to make them available as a build defining skill?
Mike: Ah, nothing specific but maybe.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: Hey will there be a graphical improvement of the game before release?
Kain: We’re constantly making graphical improvements every major patch. 1.0 will be no different - though we won’t be doing a complete overhaul by 1.0 if that’s what you mean, no.
Mike: A frequent question we get with this mod, “X% of armor mitigation also applies to damage over time”, it does prioritize physical so that physical difference in armor does apply to that conversion as well.
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: Will other factions be the answer to fundamental meta game questions like trade/crafting playstyles or target farming, or will they be more like character stat bonuses like if they wear a piece of gear with weird affixes?
Mike: I think that there’s significant room for both styles and you’ll see both styles, basically. Yeah, I think there’ll probably be more in the like, ‘Here’s gameplay change stuff’ – more like how the Item Factions are, but it could easily be both types.
ReimerhArts: It is a good question, but it is far too early to answer that unfortunately. We have so many ideas, and we have to make the initial factions first.
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: What was the original mechanic you couldn’t get working for Warlock?
Mike: I’m not going to tell you just because it might come back and it’ll kind of give away something that’s not happening on Warlock that I think is still possibly something that people are considering as an option and I don’t want to spoil that yet. I guess I can tell you something. The key piece of it that failed was being able to interact with corpses that you didn’t necessarily kill and had possibly been sitting there for a while. Which is the thing that, for example, Diablo 3 solved by putting those bone piles in for the Necromancer. So when an enemy died it created this bone pile object that you could interact with as a corpse.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: What’s you’re thoughts on % increased mana regen? And if there might be something like % more mana regen in the works?
Kain: We’ve discussed it internally a number of times, however mana regeneration is a very delicate balance. We’re happy with Mana being a managed resource, and don’t want to break that balance. Skills with high mana costs tend to be more flashy, intense, and powerful which is all based on them not being as sustainable. If they aren’t meeting the bar we’d rather adjust the skills to make them worth it, than reduce mana management as a mechanic.
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”.
Q: Is there any Info about what’s the next class to be implemented? Warlock or Falconer? And when they probably come?
ReimerhArts: Both are coming out at 1.0, so those are next.
Q: Are you going to do a big marketing push?
Mike: Yes. I think we’ve started to spin up the marketing stuff for 1.0. It’s not in full swing yet, I don’t think. However, I know the marketing team’s been preparing for this marketing window for a while now.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: Is there going to be a price increase when 1.0 comes out?
Kain: No, we’re not planning on any price changes for launch.
Q: Will we see further character development? Like, will we get to see Zerricks transformation?
Mike: There will be more story stuff happening, yes. However, I can’t really tell you any specifics as to what story stuff you’re going to get to see.
ReimerhArts: Yes to more story character development. Can’t answer about specific story characters of course.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: On the topic of shifting raw power from skill trees to items…
Mike: Just to be clear, I want to make sure it’s clear – it’s not that I don’t think that skill trees can have power in them but rather that it’s just a little bit disproportionate right now.
Q: Is there anything in particular in the works when it comes to giving some older unique items a touch-up? Since some of them really get outshone by the awesome new uniques we’ve been getting.
Mike: We do look at old content to update, yes. There’s no task in the pre-1.0 checklist that says, ‘Go through every item and update them’ or anything like that.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: Will any changes to the skill level 20 cap be changed at 1.0?
Mike: No.
Q: So like something that you can do for skills after they hit 20?
Mike: There’s no changes coming to that at 1.0.
Source: YouTube Link
Teaser 1
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The Master of Summary, the Guru of Transcription.
Nothing can stop him.
Thanks for this!
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jeffm
October 11, 2023, 3:32pm
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Great work. Thanks @AndrewTilley
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October 10, 2024, 3:33pm
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