I think he meant that the symbology used was a bit too close to reality for his liking given a previous encounter with proponents/adherents of that particular or related real life religions.
Yeah, its interesting how that can work in different cultures/religions, how some things can be “ok” ish (the blood and violence) but others are a step too far (religious symbols, sex, etc).
My kids are 16, 14 & 12, I really don’t want to think about what they may or may not have seen (especially when I remember my own teenage years, but then I turned out “ok”.)…
I’ve been burned enough times by AAA games/studios, so I’m NOT pre-ordering anything. Unlike EHG, Activision is an established company and it should be able to finance whatever games they want without me needing to upfront a single $.
I’m not sure I’m going to play the Open Beta either. I remember (disclaimer : my memory sucks) playing D3 Beta, and the game was greatly different at release. On the one hand, the Open Beta feels like a free demo, but on the other, the Beta is only the first zone, up to level 25 and I can’t be sure how faithfully the demo is going to represent the end-product.
A lot of the fun in these games come from the endgame loop and funky builds you can create once you have access to better gear. Under this light, the D4 Beta is in a state even less “finished” than Last Epoch. But again, who am I kidding, Activision would need to royally f**k up to prevent my nostalgia factor from making me buy D4.
Ultimately, the game I’ll be playing (and potentially spend more money on) is the game I’ll find the most fun. The same argument could be made with PoE2. I’ll probably try all of the new ARPG available. So, while Last Epoch don’t want to be the only game not ready when the party is on, them being the first to release wouldn’t stop me trying other games. But, being the better experience will make me stick to the game.
I’m not a troll, I came here because I was looking forward to trying the game after its full release but now I’m wondering what is even the point after Diablo 4 releases. I was received with:
My post (which is more about the future of LE than Diablo 4 itself) was put into off-topic
People were asking me “why are you even posting”
Literally dozes of “everything is fine it literally has zero impact on Last Epoch” replies
“It’s a troll”
So sorry if I eventually started treating this forum as well as you decided to treat me. You are all literally delusional, only one person so far among 40 replies has said “this might raise some issues”. I have never seen this much copium online and I was around when people were defending the initial launch of Heist league for POE.
I guess everyone with a little bit of common sense in them has left the forums already.
I find it intriguing that someone’s first, and only, post after joining any forum is to immediately see how the company who runs the forum is responding to something a competitor is doing. Not “how is the game?” or “what sort of endgame stuff is available” or "what do you all like about the game?.
And, even then, many of the responses actually tried to understand why you would ask this. As well as pointing out a myriad of facts about why it doesn’t have any real bearing on LEs plans or longevity.
But instead of moving on, knowing that the general consensus didn’t see it as an issue, it only resulted in more pot-stirring from your responses by actually attacking people personally.
So clearly, even if we provide benefit of the doubt and say this didn’t start out as a troll, it quickly degenerated into one.
You have been fed.
Now, if you’ve got questions about the game itself, or since this is off topic, want to discuss d4 as it’s own entity, I’m sure everyone would be glad to discuss what they’ve seen about the game because, as has already been demonstrated, people can play more than one game.
If you are curious about the future of LE, here’s just some of what we currently know.
In terms of immediate future, we’re getting an update on trade tomorrow:
Patch 0.9 will release on March 9th with the following features:
server authoritative multiplayer
performance improvements
combat feel improvements
item gifting
cosmetic store (as a minimum viable product)
updated story content & UI
updated/reworked skills
updated skill VFX/SFX
update to ailments - both mechanical & performance changes
update to melee, bow, and throwing damage - mechanical change
new Unique items, enemies, NPC’s, armour, etc. – some of which are viewable in this forum thread
the usual bug fixes and balance changes
and possibly more that hasn’t been announced yet
Post 0.9 will see an extended hotfix cycle:
Patch 1.0 will see the release the remaining masteries (Runemaster, Warlock, and Falconer), and many, many final touches/additions (such as full controller support) that will be coming out either in the leadup to 1.0 or with 1.0 itself. This patch will also see a bigger marketing push:
After release we’ll be seeing the first cycle content, that will provide significant updates to the endgame:
Personally, I could not care less about Diablo 4. Since I never will be bothering about playing Diablo 4.
I do not have tons, 100´s and even 1000´s of hours of playtime in Last Epoch, but Last Epoch is the game I am actually having some playtime in, and will have more of in the future.
I did play Diablo 1, 2 and even 3. I do not need to have more of it in the 4th instalment. Let the Fanboys play it, I do not need to.
There are by far, better ARPGs out there. I stick to those, and then let the rest stick to their favorite Diablo, which is really, let´s face it, thrash.
So what I’m referring to has already been released or leaked: each world tier has its own version of legendary (much like ancient, primal ancient) that only drops on that tier. So basically when you go up a tier, you need to farm a new gear set. It’s talked about in the video below, if you scroll to Tier 3, it mentions sacred items, sacred is basically a new tier of gear. I was simplifying a little bit: because it’s more the base item and affix magnitudes that it affects, more than just legendaries. I.e. you can have a sacred rare. Also, it wasn’t clear when a rare was just a rare or a sacred rare when I hit nightmare. That was annoying. So forget trying to sift through that much loot to find the “godly rare” that you upgrade to a legendary. Also, the item tier affects the legendary essence you extract: you can’t take an essence out of a normal legendary then apply it to a sacred rare, you must get another sacred legendary to extract it on the sacred rare. In practice, most people ended up just hunting legendaries and overwriting the legendary power. Also you can still get “normal” legendaries at higher tiers. Or at least on nightmare, I was getting normal and sacred legendaries.
Now in fairness, there was a some cool stuff. The butcher could randomly spawn and it really sucked at first, because he basically ate me, but as I progressed in the previous tier, I came up with strats to down him. There isn’t as much healing in D4 as in other versions of diablo.
All the reviews saying legendaries aren’t like what they were in D3 are just misinformed: as you level, legendaries start dropping more.
Thanks for telling me something I didn’t know that I wanted to know. Is there much else I missed (played the closed beta for a bit, didn’t get much out of the initial area)?
My memory is a tad fuzzy. I did feel disappointed by hell tides, it felt like you had to be there the whole duration in order for the cinders you collect to be worth anything. I didn’t get around to experimenting with nightmare sigils. Also, my biggest disappointment with hell tides was no one fought the bosses that spawn in them. I tried fighting one of my own, only to die 15 minutes later, having wasted all that time and no less than 5 people ran straight past me. I was sadge. I was hoping for a gw2 experience where people helped each other out.
There’s also 2 classes of essence: learned and extracted, learned aren’t as strong as extracted. I.e. if you get a legendary that you also learned, the magnitude of the power tends to be higher on the legendary that dropped. The learned powers are more bad luck protection and your build is stronger using legendaries that drop for you. I found it a tad annoying because I didn’t feel like I had full control over my build. Respecs get more expensive over time but talent and legendary interactions are a thing.
Also my build was a tad disjointed. I liked werebear and storm skills, but they didn’t have a good synergy with each other. There was stronger synergy between werebear/earch and werewolf/storm (or at least legendary and/or talent interactions that were stronger). I found ways to still make it work, but I was janky, but still having fun.
Yeah, that was awesome, maybe it’ll happen when normal people start playing rather than hardcore gamers focussed on zooming to the end (probably not, but one can dream).
A lot of people do not play early-access games. In fact people who play early-access games are minority. Many people hard-pass early access games, & wait for the release.
I had missed this quote. Reading that makes me sad.
More and more and more endgame, without proper begingame or middlegame before it (campaign + normal monos together is probably the shortest, for sure the easiest, midgame of any arpg I know).
Oh well, on the bright side, to link with the subject of the thread, I won’t have any problem playing both Diablo 4 and Last Epoch, because I will be done with a LE season in less than one weekend.
And of course, even if it is bad news I don’t want to shoot the messenger: huge thanks to Andrew, as always, for keeping those of us who don’t watch streams posted!
Just reacting on that, we just came out of a weekend by invitation, only for streamers (well, nearly).
Sounds like pretty massive PR to me (which is a good thing, I am not criticising). It was thinely disguised as a “test”, but it was obviously pure marketing.
Anyway, just a tiny detail, I agree with everything else you said.
I work in the applied data science field and we have this concept that explain the LE situation, the arpg industry is extremely small in the west, so when the industry is small and the saturation point isn’t even close, the optimal strategy is usually to grow the industry instead of trying to kill your competitors. Put in more gamer terms, the arpg player base is small, D4 will bring a huge amount of new players into the arpg gaming community, some of the new players will fall in love with the genre and can end up trying out LE.
It would be a total different story if the amount of arpg players in the market can’t grow anymore and LE was competing for a pretty stable amount of a users in the market. The gaming industry still growing and is pretty much an infant at this point.
Oh for sure, I was just speaking in hypotheticals. LE is going to do well, the devs are listening and I am very confident about how LE will perform at launch.
