Playing exclusively in a party of 2, I’ve really enjoyed progressing through the campaign.
However, we’re now around lvl 90 both, we’ve recently unlocked empowered monolith and it’s just baffling how punishing progress and time wise to play with people, the more people the worse it is :
Upon killing the timeline boss, only the one who started the quest gets the Gaze of Horobyss as a reward, so depending of the size of your party, it takes at least twice as much time comapred to being solo to progress through corruption, this is by far the worst part of playing in multiplayer.
I dont mind that much that echoes are completed for only one player at a time since we still get a reward, which is random for some reason, though it makes no sense either.
I’ve heard people, saying the system was thougth this way in case a very high geared / leveled player was boosting a lower geared / leveled one, it wouldn’t ruin the lower player web with high corruption echoes he wouldn’t be able to complete on his own, but like I just don’t care if boosted are being punished ?
Why punish normal people who just want to play the game together instead…
So please, change the way you made this so we can at least be on the same level of progress as soloplayers.
I see no motivation in continuing the grind if everything I want to accomplish is gonna take at least twice the time it should for the only reason that I want to enjoy the game with people.
Yeah, I still feel corruption should be on a slider, that you can choose. Once you earn corruption, that becomes your new max. It’s silly you have to ‘de-level’ corruption. It’s not like dungeons force you to run the highest tier you’ve unlocked, and have a special boss to kill to lower the max unlocked tier. Same with arena. But for some reason, echo corruption is carved in stone, unless you jump through the special hoop X number of times to get it to the number you want to run/farm.
The corruption slider is a good option, allowing to share monolith progress between characters on an account as well as a further progression of where it would lead.
As for corruption and monolith progression (In terms of unlocking new nodes) only being for one person: That’s fine though, isn’t it?
Generally the one opening something is the one which gets the progression, the ones in the party follow along, getting a bonus from the team leader’s progression. So getting invited by someone with 1500 corruption makes you suddenly get boatloads of gear you would never get personally… given you’re able to survive.
As for ‘story’ progression in monoliths itself:
Yes, there’s ways to improve that system definitely!
Stability itself and the quests related to that. Playing in a group should give you timeline stability, and playing the quests should only be allowed for those who have the respective stability available to engage in them. This way it’s group friendly for overall monolith progression without punishing group-play in those regards.
It’s fine but it’s just not necessary ?
Who wouln’t want to progress alongside friends ? Who would that bother ? It’s just doesn’t make sense, it’s almost as if it was made this way intentionally to bother people, it wouldn’t bring any advantage to have that.
It’s already working this way, though in normal monoliths, for another absurd reason, the first two echo quests are only completed for the party member who started it, so you have to complete it as many times as you have players in the party BUT the 3rd quest, the one with the boss, once killed, the quest is completed for everyone???
They’re not consistent with the system, it’s almost like they went out of their way to make it as absurd and painful as possible, multiplayer feels like it was an afterthought.
About necessity:
It is a very necessary mechanic. A game-dev has to stop people from simply ‘attaching’ themselves to others to be pulled through their content. A game like Last Epoch is all about the journey, not the goal itself, like most games are.
You’re playing a game to reach the goal, whichever kind that might be. Getting through all the available story, playing through all the available content, outfitting your character to the maximum… it takes different forms for different people.
So if you remove the mechanic itself it tumbles down immediately.
What stops a level 50 from simply standing back, letting your teammate do all the stuff as you just dodge and survive? Nothing. You can just get in and joind whoever does the bosses currently, allowing you to unlock all monoliths… empowered ones and even blessings in a manner of a single hour rather then engaging in the whole system for at least 5 times that (and most likely a lot more) to get the desired outcomes.
That alone is more then enough reason to have some form of progression limitation in the game. Design-wise you can’t ever allow such a thing to happen… unless you’re fine with people stopping to play immediately after. Why? Because it’s the same as using cheats in a single player game. Sure, you can do it! Be powerful, blast through everything without worries! But in the end… you’re through it in a manner of minutes rather then hours or days, you’re done… it’s over, your journey is ‘finished’.
And while I fully agree that it would be nice to progress with friends in such a way the system hinders those which would exploit it otherwise.
Which doesn’t mean you can’t adjust things, even in major ways, quite the contrary.
The question simply is:
How to allow friends to do it together without allowing leechers to get their way? Any solution not taking both into perspective can’t be implemented, simple as that.
Quest completion:
Yes, it’s currently badly done, didn’t actually know it to be that case (lack of party play from my side) but I can wholeheartedly agree it’s a mistake there.
It should be solely reliant on personal stability for that timeline, no individual questing needed, neither for the first 2 nor the main boss. It should be fully reliant on your quest status and timeline stability acquired. So enough stability for the boss but not finished the prerequisites? Not allowed to enter, instead a group-play for the prerequisites needed.
If that’s how they wanna have fun, let them ?
I mean I honnestly don’t care if people prefer to be boosted, it’s a PvE game, I won’t be affected by it in any way.
But the way things are right now, I’m prevented to enjoy and play the game with others because they don’t want people rushing through the steps and couldn’t figure a solution that wouldn’t put in jeopardy the whole multiplayer system, that’s just baffling.
Yeah, that’s the common way to say it, and… it makes absolute sense! In many cases.
But you’re wrong about one thing here, it being a ‘PvE’ game. It’s inherently, but you can’t deny the part that there’s also a community part out there relishing in the competition, that’s why ladders exist. So from that standpoint alone it’s already not a viable argument. If competition is involved then the baseline needs to be ‘fair’.
Secondly, which is also quite important, this is a life-service game. The inherent need for a life-service game to function is to keep people engaging with it long-term. Allowing shortcuts to remove that engagement, hence any way to cut short the journey is by design of their game a detriment for the long-term health of their studio and hence of the product.
So no, we can’t use that way of thinking here.
But… I have to absolutely and 100% agree with you that changes to the party system need to be done. The Multiplayer part is still a fairly new segment of the game, we can definitely expect changes to happen there and it’s a sad state that this is something which messes with your enjoyment, a very understandable problem after all.
Which doesn’t change anything about my initial statement though that the ‘leeching’ playstyle has to be utterly cut away from the game as much as possible design-wise for the reasons I stated.
Alternative ways to make… well, for a fitting word I’ll say ‘fitting’ group-play enjoyable for people - such as you - need to be implemented though.
Which the quest progression would already solve, corruption progression is by far less important, but surely not without ways to solve the issue. Like… finishing a specific amount of monoliths before you get the ability to even advance your corruption, making it impossible to just join group after group who set up a shade fight beforehand and breezing through corruption levels.
The point is… there’s always solutions available, but first it’s also important to know the baseline of what the company needs to work with to keep their game a massive success in the long-term rather then hurting themselves by ruining a clear passion project.