Developer Stream - September 29, 2023 (Transcribed)

AndrewTilley · October 10, 2023, 9:06pm

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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