Eleven Hour Games doesn’t inspire trust in the future of Last Epoch

General
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Last Epoch was first released in Early Access all the way back in 2019, with a full release planned for 2020. The game was actually released on 2024, still unfinished, still without the last campaign chapters, and still changing major mechanics like the introduction of a dodge move. To me, this screams “indie developer than didn’t manage its finances properly and was thus forced to release whatever they had ready”.

Then we got the first roadmap, which quickly derailed. Notice how the May 2024 roadmap was talking about the fourth big release, which we only got in 2026 – almost two years after the roadmap itself.

We got a somewhat lacking 1.1 release, a very good 1.2 release, then a very lackluster 1.3 release… And things went spiralling down. Eleven Hour Games were sold to Krafton, and then admitted Last Epoch was not profitable.

They announced an expansion that we have no idea in which year will arrive, announced paid classes, and then released the (deservedly) much maligned roadmap, basically saying “yo, we will release stuff in the future”.

This entire thing was a mess. Krafton is well known for being inconsistent and making poor business decisions (arguably, buying EHG was one such decisions). What point was there in announcing an expansion when EHG haven’t even finished the game’s main campaign? If the idea was to excite players, the lack of any tangible information (forget release date for the expansion, a release year would have been a novelty) and the announcement of paid classes had the opposite effect.

And we arrive at the present. With EHG still following a very slow update cadence (“small indie company!”, right). And, after months, releasing another lackluster update (basically copying Path of Exile’s breach and corruption mechanics). But I want to focus on one thing:

“Hype Week”

We had the first announcement on March 16th, then one on March 17th, then March 18th, March 19th. Patch notes on March 20th and… The announcement of microtransactions on March 25th, with the season’s release on March 26th.

WTF was that gap between patch notes and the season release? Did EHG honestly think building anticipation and letting it rot before release was their best course of action? Why didn’t they announce the season’s new microtransactions between the reveals, so more people would see them?

Plus, the announcements of “Hype Week” were released on the game’s forum, on the game’s subreddit, and shown on the Steam library page of people who own the game. None of those is a suitable place where to get new players. By this point in their trajectories, the creators of Path of Exile were making big press tours, so new people would learn about the game. What is Eleven Hour Games doing?

This is what concerns me the most about the future of Last Epoch. The game has a lot of potential, combat is fun, but Eleven Hour Games does not inspire trust – honestly, it doesn’t look like they know what they are doing at all. It isn’t a matter of scope – the good old “poor little indie developers” excuse doesn’t cut it here. Poor decision after poor decision have left me wondering how long until Krafton just gives up and closes them down.

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so dont get me wrong, season sucks.

But this is the new trend. GGG released the full patch notes for mirage on feb 26th, then launched mirage on march 6th, basically a week later.

This is so people have time to comb the notes and “theory craft” etc

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I don’t think so, I think this season is great and I’m happy for any new content we get after all the negative backlash from the community. EHG and Krafton are committed to this game through the expansion and PlayStation release at the very minimum.

EHG is hiring and expanding their team while other studios are laying off developers or closing studios altogether. We should be happy we still have much to look forward to with Last Epoch.

I missed the part where we are even paying for these content releases, at least until the paradox class with the expansion and even that won’t be expensive compared to almost everything else in life :slight_smile:

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Would you care to expand on why you think this is the case? Regardless of your opinions of our objectives, releasing seasons that ‘suck’ surely isn’t something we want. We’d be happy to hear how we can improve!

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lmao to this topic.
EHG already failed (financially). but theyre doing their best to keep it going.

id rather cheer them on rather than pour water on them.

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Season would be an 8 maybe 9 out of 10 for me if you guys hadn’t absolutely gutted 2 things.
1: Imprints
2: Explsoive traps
As it stands now its about a 4 - great new content, I even like the corruption but man imprints 2-3 days and not a single 77 item it’s actually ridiculous for people who are more than casual but get 0 payback for the time and effort they’re putting in now. Gutted.

Rule of thumb with nerfs is like that of spicey food - start low and increase over time IF needed.

Buffing umbral was excessive and not needed but I don’t play it so ya know, still sad to see people 3 second 1 shot kill the pinnacle boss of bosses. Should make you guys feel a little silly too that you don’t have good play testers.

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The thing I agree with is that the communication was/is one of the main problems of EHG.

I still think the multiplayer implementation was the key element that went wrong in the development cycle. When they started working on this and hat 2 builds of the game simultaneously this was too much of a struggle. Things went down from there. Too many bugs, missed release goals, everything went slower.

The struggle with trade was a big controversy as was the selling to tencent and then krafton. LE lost its Indi bonus that protected them from bad reputation for years before.

For me LE is a great game and I’ve played it a lot since EA on steam. It has a great spot between PoE1/2 and D4 (while D4 is definitely not a great game for me personally).

The new season I like better than the last one. The improvements are all very nice. But it feels like they’re still on the road to 1.0 and bring all the systems in line.

What I like the most is the skill system and the faction system. The progression curve from start to finish is very good, imho.

The “new” skills if this season are a downer for me. They don’t add any meaningful variation to the gameplay. Bladestorm has its own skill tree now. While this is okay and a good decision, this adds nothing to the gameplay we had before. Just developing a bladestorm build is a bit different now with some more options. And Shadow Rend is kind of a version of a variation if Synchronized Strike. I struggle to find synergies that feel really smooth.

Endgame gets more interesting with the additional stuff. New items and corruption system (which is far more interesting than corruption in Poe 1/2) are nice.

LE has far more meaningful Uniques than other game where 99% of uniques is garbage even for leveling).

I hope that LE becomes profitable to carry on. The pricing in the cosmetics is absolutely fair. No selling of power or even convenience. Until this day no shitification.

30k players is ok if it’s enough to pay the development. Warframe had this kind of numbers for a long time, too. LE doesn’t need to compete in numbers. It’s great to get a growing player base but pretending that the game is dead with 30k players is absolutely not valid.

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It’s clearly NOT1

EHG literally came out and said they were finnicially not viable. Which are Kind Word to say they are losing Money…that was when the player counts were far more then now.

https://steamcharts.com/app/230410#1y

Now Look at warframe,. I think when warframee had 40K, they were a smaller team, also they were on an upward Trend in Player Numbers.

Also, unlike LE, and in fairness every arpg, the Graph is more stable with every high Valley number. unlike arpg where its a big sin curve. Also barred a few weeks of Season, LE number dropped to 4 figures for most of the time.

What I will say, in line with your Point , is that LE need to build their Studio to be Financilly profitable at 30k+ Peak, and 2 week „half-life“, at a 3-4 months Season cycle.

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Funny enough all of this is not because they couldn’t finish and needed to release, but quite the contrary. LE was massively popular and successful during the first few months and years of EA and grew into much, much more than initially anticipated. At the end of the day, that is what EA is for to a certain extend. Adding new mechanics, changing existing mechanics etc. All of it was based on community feedback and even though the road was rocky and not everything went super smooth LE grew into a much much larger project.

Also the current Patch 1.4 is great IMO and not sure why you don’t like because you didn’t elaborate. (other than you think it’s a copy of something else)

Regarding Hype Week I agree that it is not really executed very well. I think having patch notes a few days before patch launch is fine, but then between patch notes and launch there needs to be more infos/newsmetc to keep engagement going. Also releasing literally everything the patch contains on a 3rd party website together with patch notes before the patch is even out is very weird to me. Don’t get me wrong, I love LE tools and I love theorycrafting and tinkering with builds. But having literally all new items and corruptionoutcomes being revealed already just feels wrong.

While the last few major patches were no things that completely blow my expectations I still think LE is on a good yet slow trajectory towards a much much better game. It probably will take another 2 or 3 major patches until it can truly compete with the big players but we are going there.

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Ask any project manager if scope creep is a good thing. If it derails a project, which it kinda has here, then it’s a bad thing.

That’s not what the player numbers show though.

I’m glad you’re enjoying it, I’m not sure why I’m struggling to enjoy 1.4 & even get out of the campaign. I’m still enjoying PoE & slowly working through maps (got to T13s yesterday).

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I think they need to push the advertising for next season with the streamers and podcasts and man radio/tv/twitter/insta lol just everything so many have left from years ago and dont realise how much it’s changed. When I see people in chat say “im back from 2 years ago WOW” its actually really cool. They need to fix imprints though haahah

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I started the season with a fresh Beastmaster to try out the new chest armour that turns crows/spriggan to fire. I had a blast levelling through the complete campaign all the way to the end.

After hitting the lvl 100 monos in the early 70’s, it quickly becomes clear what sucks-Monoliths. At this point it really does feel like flogging a dead horse and I’m beginning to think that the ‘Mapping’ style endgame is simply the wrong choice for LE.

I’m reading more and more comments by players that the best and most fun part of LE is the Campaign and I 100% agree with this. LE should play more like Grim Dawn where you can replay the Campaign multiple times and with each play through things get added. New secret areas with quests, bosses evolve with new attacks and items that can drop. Also the levelling process could be made to last into subsequent play throughs of the Campaign, so that by lvl 70 you don’t feel like you are ‘done’ with your build. So much could be done here to make an endgame unique to LE, instead of putting so much time into Monos, just to have it feel like an inferior PoE mapping system. PoE maps are fun and work for that game but Mono’s don’t feel fun/right for LE.

Why can’t the endgame be the Campaign? Every ARPG following the PoE mapping model is getting very old now. I wish we had a choice to do the Campaign or do Monos as a way to play the Endgame. I Kickstarted LE in the hope that this would be included but sadly it never came to be.

TL;DR Monos are boring and I think they always will be. Do something with the Campaign mode to allow it to be the endgame.

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Well for me personally the “bad things” that came out of it are not really bad. Shifting “release” backwards is something I personally didn’t care about at all. During the 0.7.X and 0.8X patch cycles the game got updates every 2 months which felt awesome and the growth was very good. With 0.9.X things slowed down, but at that point LE was already way more and better than what I wanted it to be. But the “release” is something I never cared about especially for games like these which I usually play for long periods of time and there is no noticeable difference for me between released or not released.

The initial negativity after release and 1.1 and 1.2 left the game in a tough spot were a lot of ppl left it behind and I think LE still needs a few more patches to get to a point we’re the community is growing again. But as somebody who sticks with the game I do see all the small steps which from the outside might not be noticeable. I know a lot of people who want to return to LE but from the outside it doesn’t look like it’s worth it returning right now. So I think with a few more solid major patches the game will be in a much better place to begin and regrow the community. LE is in a very weird spot anyway, similar to Wolcen. Release was majorly successful in terms of player numbers and attention, but both at the end of the day we’re pretty small indie games that were not ready for such a major audience.

Random corrupted drops during the campaign just feel very cool and useful and this new mechanic finally is a horde-style mechanic after waaaay too many single boss mechanics. It makes great Aoe feel much better and worth building around. I think when we get 1 or 2 more horde-style mechanics the gameplay will be even better.

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So you’re ok with EHG being unprofitable & having had to sell their company to a publisher that doesn’t have a great reputation? You’re ok with seasons being >>>3 months long (somewhere between 6 & 12)? You’re ok with balance being all over the shop? You’re ok with there still being lots of bugs in addition to all the new bugs that each season inevitably (because software development) adds?

I’m glad you’re happy with the state of play, but there are quite a few large problems that have come out of the scope creep & EHG not being experienced in arpg development. So if you’re happy with the possibility of EHG being shut down because they unprofitable & don’t appear to have been able to translate the massive customer goodwill into a longterm sustainable business then I guess you’ll be happy to play LE offline with no new content.

Yeah, there are small improvements, but there’s an aweful long way to go till they’re profitable given that they weren’t profitable in 1.2 & that was well received & they have a larger team now than then.

Yeah, I’d agree with that, and yet the gameplay doesn’t engage me enough to get me into monos let alone empowered monos. And it’s frustrating that all of the Omens are up against a wall so you only have half of the area.

Also fair, it’s more variety. And yet… :person_shrugging:

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Its just not enough content sadly.

what you guys do put out is decent if a bit buggy or overtuned.

But I am more of a “explore all the new builds” type of player, I dont care to chase corruption, or fight ubberoth, or anything like that. I like to play a bunch of new builds and see what works.

This patch added a few unique items and a decently cool new set, but otherwise the amount of new builds isnt that crazy.

The season cadence is just too slow, and the balance for certain things just too out of whack.

Tldr; keep it up, but pick up the pace so you can iterate on the things that need iteration faster.

And maybe the first major patch that is happening today will fix somethings

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The problem is, the competitions are not standing still….not forgetting new competitions.

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Yes, they said that. But as any other company I don’t think they just state “we’re not profitable” and carry on as if nothing happened. For sure they have introduced countermeasures to reduce waste of money and resources of their development process to make EHG more profitable. That’s what companies usually do when they don’t want to go bankrupt.

Also the pure number of players doesn’t say anything about how much these people spend. I’d guess that people that are still playing LE in its current state are more dedicated to the game and are more likely to spend money.

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Just to be a little light-hearted about this. I am the EXACT opposite with spicy food.

For me, the analogy would need to be sweetener. Start VERY low and I’ll tell you if I need more.

:rofl: :wink:

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This is very interesting and I’d like to weigh in. My favorite aRPG of all time is Grim Dawn. Love that game. I don’t know if the three run through style they have though is something that would be good for more modern aRPGs as there were a LOT of people over the years who hated the run through the campaign three times which is why they eventually build in some heavy duty skips. (I wasn’t one, I always enjoyed the campaign.)

I do enjoy LEs campaign and have run it numerous times. So I think what might work better (and borrows heavily from the idea you have) is to incorporate all the various things of monos INTO the full run of the campaign. I’m going to bring up d4 here because I was finally able to get around playing that last month for a good bit to try it out (long story, computer issues and what not.) One of the few things I DO like about D4 is how the world map becomes the playground after you finish the campaign. And there are so many side quests and alternate quests you can do a wide variety of stuff that you find interesting and then all of the end game stuff fits into that.

I think LE could unpack the whole monolith concept and fold all of that stuff into little fractures of timelines you continually discover and unlock all throughout Eterra. Back in the day there were a number of side areas that you’d pop into that seemed to have no purpose. We speculated a lot back in EA what those areas might become but they seem to have been basically pushed aside (I think they’re actually still there they just don’t do anything still.)

So I agree, I’d love to see the entire fracturing of the void and the timelines shattered incorporated into the world itself so it becomes the playground.

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Perhaps people are now starting to realise that running through the campaign can be a fun end game if it is done correctly. The more modern end game systems can feel totally disconnected from the game world and feel like more like a sub game to fill it out. Monoliths have this issue and don’t really feel like I’m playing in the same game world.

Grim Dawn, Titan Quest and Sacred all managed it so why can’t LE? I have thousands of hours played in those without getting bored and needing maps to fill it out.

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