LE is good to satisfy my experimenter’s itch for sure.
The campaign also checks many boxes of themes I enjoy. Time travel, corruption, some mystery in the background - but the presentation is subpar. It lacks… mood.
And mood was always the big selling point of the Diablo franchise for me. One of the few games in which I happily keep the game score on.
LE has a great main theme, but the rest doesn’t come close.
I completely agree.
I kinda agree with most stuff you said except for this. You can get 3 characters to level 100 in 24h if you’re grinding in D4. And I know because Rax did that (it was actually less, something like 18h or so). He had 3 finished characters within a day of game launch.
D4, much like D3, is easy mode. You can take your time but it’s definitely a lot faster to finish a character in D4.
Ah, I see what you mean. And you are correct.
But I don’t have the same definition of “finished”. To me, in any game, it means having completed all possible quests and fully explored all areas Level is never a goal, it just comes along naturally as I wander around.
In Diablo 4, visiting everything and doing all the quests takes a very long time.
In LE, I consider a character finished when they reach empowered. That is much, much quicker.
Yes, but I expect a long time of doing that is caused by the open world part of it and that you spend a long time just backtracking all the time.
I admit I don’t fully explore either of the games (although I am exploring everything in TQ2) and, in fact, I even skip most side quests (I don’t even activate them). Both in LE and in D4 for the same reason: they give really pitiful rewards and it feels like a waste of time to me.
I can understand wanting to explore, but I don’t think either of those games provides enough incentive to do so. Especially after the Nth time running the campaign.
D4, to me, is even worse because it actively encourages me to skip the campaign. If only to get the horse right away.
Absolutely true, and the reason why I haven’t replayed Diablo 4 since launch and won’t for a while. But I know I will do another playthrough someday.
To me, it has all the incentive to explore a game needs. Graphics, music, quests are all very good: that’s a world where I am happy to have a stroll once in a while.
My character will get levels and find gear eventually, it is not a target.
In conclusion, we enjoy different things, and that is of course absolutely fine.
PS: if you ever feel like a change of scenery, try Tainted Grail. It is absolutely brilliant. And of course Expedition 33, a pure work of art. My two favourite games of 2025, easily. But they are ActionRPGs, not “ARPGs”. 
While the concept of a “buy the game, get all the expansions free” thing SOUNDS cool, the math doesn’t work out unless they are selling your private info and doing fishy stuff on the servers tracking your data. I am all for paid expansions and have no problem buying them.
A myriad of games do it. Heck… a myriad of games don’t even demand a shelf-price + giving you the content for free.
It’s not outlandish to expect such a promise to be upheld with the vast variety of monetization options available.
The only issue is that EHG failed to adequately provide proper monetization methods which are incentivizing people to pay for their product. The MTX store - as repeatedly mentioned since pre-release even - is beyond atrocious. The supporter packs are badly designed as well. They also don’t provide the option to expand the character slot limit but provide the maximum for free rather then allowing increasing that count and hence taking up data-space in miniscule extra amounts (the data taken up takes decades to be cost-inefficient if you provide a single slot for 10€ for example, the amount of data is miniscule for an individual, massive for all players together though).
But then you could argue that they backpedal from their ‘promise’ to have all convenience features like stash tabs (or character slots) being free.
Let’s imagine a world where their cosmetics are pretty and plenty, but they still don’t earn enough money purely by cosmetics. What then?
Their current statement is that they are unable to provide more then 15 character slots to people because it would cause database issues size-wise.
This means it causes database issues for acquisition of more servers, which raises costs accordingly.
The aspect of buying character slots alleviates those costs entirely, as well as the running costs since individual character wouldn’t cause a substantial amount of storage space to be used up, hence the costs being so miniscule that it’s a profitable method to do.
Sure, there could also be the case that somehow their database itself couldn’t handle it… but if that’s the case then EHG is lost anyway.
You earn enough.
Back in ‘Betrayal’ for GGG the statement was that as long as 5000 people play the company will stay afloat at least. That was at a time when they had a 189k peak playercount. Substantially more. Meaning they have proper scaling methods in place to act accordingly to increase/reduce their overhead costs.
Any company doing life-service has to do similar things or they involuntarily fail as the variance in engagement breaks their financial neck.
Also you’re not properly working with the right premise still. MTX being nice looking and plenty is not the major importance. Sales tactics are the major importance.
The aspect of the supporter packs not providing the full point count to freely use in their in-game shop alone is a massive downside. It’s ridiculously high incentive for people to pay into those if it’s a pure ‘you get your points and something extra on top!’ comparatively to the methodology currently.
Put half the stuff included in the Supporter packs into the MTX shop instead, scale em down hence… include the points. This way people are also nudged towards spending the points they have acquired from it simply because ‘the got a good chunk left’. This leads to spending higher amounts in total as you get another influx next Cycle anyway… hence why save em up?
If - and only if - then the same situation still happens, given that the MTX store is properly populated, quality is decent and most MTX provide a effect on top of being just a reskin you cannot really see and the supporter packs restructured while also providing character slots as a extra… or things like increased limits for filters as an example… then we can start actually talking about other methods.
But failing to do a myriad of available options and then whining about not being profitable reliably pisses off customers for a good reason. It means they squander the money the customers provide to keep them going and produce a proper game. People understand a company needs money to function… but then they expect the company to use those funds properly and not for shit which affects them barely.
If EHG would focus on polishing their game and MTX rather then providing ‘shiny shit’ by focusing so heavily into design rather then gameplay we wouldn’t even have remotely a talk about this situation either.
But then you have another reason to say ‘breach of contract’, they said something else.
From the kickstarter:
The only form of real money microtransactions Last Epoch will ever have are cosmetic, our currency for such is even named Cosmetic Points (CP) to emphasize this point.
From their FAQ:
Will there be an MTX store in Last Epoch?
Offering MTX in the form of cosmetics only has always been our plan since our Kickstarter days. This will allow us to keep supporting content for years to come making Last Epoch the game we desire and the community deserves. That being said, as Last Epoch does have a box price, this allows us to not have either power or convenience in the MTX Store. Any features that we will look to add to Last Epoch to enhance the game for convenience or power, such as items, stash features, anything that has in game interaction will be included for free as part of the core game.
That’s the point I’m alluding to.
If it is about principle, as you said, then the same principle applies here. Character slots, more filter size/options, autolooting of shards, etc. as paid options would be all against what they advertised.
I mean, I understand your point of them having to do better with their MTX store in the first place, that’s not in question. Though I only go by reports of people in the forum, I think I never seriously checked the shop.
Yes, but it’s vastly less outrageous then demanding actual content to be limited, isn’t it?
Kinda a major difference if you go ‘We ask money for extra slots… but provide more then enough slots for 95% of people’ or ‘We want money for access to the actual game despite saying that won’t happen’.
If you’re between a rock and a hard place then at least choose the less bad solution I would argue.
I’m also against it still… but it’s already a better solution then what EHG potentially wants to go with.
They said they would never release paid content that gives you an advantage in the game. Character slots don’t give you an advantage in the game.
I’m against P2W in any form and I’m fine with bought character slots. It only allows players that want to have more characters online what they can already do offline, where they have no limit.
Those are not the same things, though. The latter two give you an advantage in-game. Extra character slots don’t.
With a bigger filter or autolooting you can set up your character in a way where you have an advantage in early races, for example.
With more character slots, you have no advantage. In fact, you could argue it’s purely cosmetic as well, especially now that you have mastery respec. It only serves the purpose of keeping older characters around so you can still tinker with them. It’s only for altoholics.
If anything, having more character slots means you’re actually at a disadvantage, because you’ll spend more time leveling up new characters, rather than simply respecing the old one. And you’ll often spend less time min-maxing that character, since people that keep more than 25 characters tend to bounce around to new characters more often.
They also said they will only ever release cosmetic MTX.
The ‘no in-game advantage’ was the cherry on top.
But at least the increased limit for loot filters came from Kulze, so this wasn’t a suggestion of mine, but simply picking up and extending his point for the sake of the argument.
I agree, I don’t think otherwise.
Extra character slots are a convenience feature, I guess, though.
If anything, they’d be an incentive for people to play online. Because offline already has limitless character slots for free.
Yes.
And I’m totally fine with paid character slots.
Or paid expansions - as long as the base game gets meaningfully completed.
I don’t have a problem if new character classes or masteries are behind a pay wall, or a new story arc (again, after they wrapped up the original story)
And if that new story arc is released in full rather then giving us another ‘wait years for it to happen’.
It’s utterly unrealistic to think EHG will manage anything less then 3 years to even come remotely close to the execution of this in total.
I’m afraid I have to agree that I’m not hopeful that EHG will work as effective as to close their original goals for the story and create a meaningful Orobyss expansion with a complete new story and other content.
Meanwhile, I will do what’s better for my mental health - don’t panic, don’t get angry or upset, until there is something concrete.
Which is fair.
I’m solely working form the basis we’re being provided and which is realistic timeframe-wise.
We know how fast EHG works, and even if we double the rate at which they release content (which is doable if they optimize their content-pipeline a bit by focusing on the important stuff rather then shiny stuff majorly) we wouldn’t get any reasonable timeframe.
We’re talking after all about those things needed to be handled for the core-game before a expansion even becomes viable:
And then we’re talking about the following needed in a expansion to be minimum viable:
I don’t even think EHG will manage the core-game aspects in 3 years plainly spoken… but to pull it all off with a proper pipeline 3 years is definitely a viable total timeframe.
The issue now is… they talked about a release for console + expansion. That means their personal timeline is nowhere close to 3 years, we’re talking about ‘1 year likely’ at most. EHG does make the expansion into the console market to increase the viable playerbase after all to stop them from bleeding money, hoping to sell more MTX this way.
The expectation of the expansion being a paid one is also not unrealistic, quite the contrary. After all they said they can’t afford to sustain themselves with the shelf-price only, too little MTX sales. Hence their only reliable solution is to enforce a paid expansion to keep on working, unless they fix their MTX handling in a fundamental way.
Overall this means the base game wouldn’t be even remotely polished nor in any acceptable state by the time EHG brings out a paid expansion.
This would be a basically guaranteed death-sentence for them anyway as players would be massively disgruntled, the playerbase split on top of that (non-expansion and expansion players) and the content depth of the expansion being also miniscule on top of that.
IIRC, I think I remember something that the console port is done externally? I could be hallucinating it.