TLDR - Have absolutely no problem in recommending this game to any ARPG fans and even in Beta it is well worth the entry fee and I sincerely hope that this achieves the success I feel it deserves. Eleventh Hour Games are doing a great job.
Disclaimer: This is just a general feedback post after playing the game for over 120h and visiting the forum regularly during that time. Please be aware that this includes my opinions, gut feelings and wholly subjective views on various parts of the game. In some instances my comments may or may not be supported by fact and while I donāt intend this to be an under-the-hood discussion, I may highlight something that deserves its own thread/more detail or already has been discussed in the forum elsewhere. I may get something wrong or have missed something. Your experience and opinions may and likely will differ on some of my statements and how I found playing the game. This post is primarily intended for LE as general feedback - hopefully something in here is useful to them. Or maybe just gives them a virtual pat on the back.
Hey, thanks for getting this far.
Some basics re pc & me
As if this helps understand my views: Male, married with teenage kids, ageā¦ well lets just say I used to play Colossal Cave Adventure on an IBM XT I built myself from hand-me down parts. Played virtually every fantasy game and (A)RPG and even some MMORPGs at one stage or another since then.
System Specs: Intel i5-7500 3.4Ghz, 16GB Ram, Nvidia GTX1060 3GB, NVMe M.2 GEN3
Windows 10 Home 1903 build 18362
Last Epoch version 0.7.9f (via STEAM), Master Quality : High, Exclusive FullScreen, 1920x1200 Very Bright, Vsync On, Shadow Very Low, Antialiasing Off, Grass Off, Reflections Very Low, Ambient Occ Very Low, Volumetric Very Low, Screen Space Reflec Very Low, Terrain Quality 2048 MB and Screen Shake off
Story & Content So far
I will be honest, but I have not delved deep into the mythology beyond the available quests, but it matches the fantasy world building that I have always enjoyed in these kinds of games. Only time will tell how much will be added and to what depth we will be introduced to the lore/history. I am not expecting WoW levels of mythos but this is a pretty good start to build lots of quests on.
Love the time travel concept. Hands down a brilliant way to do what is fundamentally just new levels and areas in an ARPG. Really hoping to see future storylines similar to the College side-quest where going back in time to the same area affects a future timeline. Yes yes, I am ignoring time-theory and alternative timelines etc. in favour of a great device for more content. This simple device now allows for prequel, sequel and any other kind of āquelā content easily. The possibilities for quests because of it, I believe, are infinite and easily justified/explained in context. The time rifts are great and I hope LE is planning more of these and random ones (cow level anyone?)
The content & characters available in 0.7.9f is perfectly playable and other than limiting me trying out new characters or having more storyline content it really did not bother me. For a beta, things are very acceptable. In fact, Iād go so far as to say that I have received a product worth easily the steam price I paid.
Technical / Performance Feedback
Without tempting fate (go away Murphy), I honestly have not experienced any major technical issues with the game as of 0.7.9f. It has not crashed in 120h of play and I have not experienced anything that I would consider a serious hindrance to play. I have not lost chars, drops or levels. It installed fine. The general login process happens without any issues.
I played successfully the first 25 or so hours with most settings on the default High graphics configuration default setting. The visuals are great and the game is more than playable on my older hardware. I only have a 60hz monitor so with Vsync on, anything close to 60fps is perfectly acceptable to me. I have not noticed any prolonged or worrisome spiking in CPU or GPU usage or temperatures. I lower the more cosmetic settings in most games as I generally prefer less lag than beautiful sprays of gore and this is exactly what I have done for the rest of the +100h. There are definitely performance hits in-game related to the number of mobs, minions and AoE/DoT skills/effects but until the higher levels I barely noticed them and even when they got noticeable, it was ok and in line with what I believe my system spec can handle - any improvements the devs do will only make it even better to play.
Loading off SSD drives was more than acceptable in terms of load times but loading off of a NVMe M.2 drive makes loading of maps virtually irrelevant in my opinion - although get rid of the lengthy time tunnel animation, or at least make it shorter please.
There are definitely bugs, oddities and other issues with the game ranging from skills/passives that donāt seem to work as advertised, windows that open when they should close & vice versa, things that are hard to see because they donāt contrast enough. Thankfully, these are for the most part not game-breaking unless you use a specific skill or something directly impacted by it. In those cases, I just take it that this is a beta and things are not complete yet. Most of these potentially problematic issues have threads in the forum and it does seem like LE knows about them and is dealing with them.
Visuals
Visually the game seems on par if not better in some areas than similar ARPG titles that I have played over the years. There are a few areas that need polish in my opinion (like the character selection screen depth of field etc) but the in-game graphics during play are pretty good as they are. The zoomed out character looks comfortable and the environments are such that even after running many maps, they still feel attractive and have not yet become too monotonous.
Chars, gear, windows and skill icons all look well done for now and I expect them to be improved over time. Some of the icons for skills require some lateral thought to match with the skill name but thatās just a subjective thing I suppose. Occasionally drops item names overlap so you cannot see whatās there. There are minor things like the edges of the map window not fitting on the sides and the occasional floating log or disassociated raven that I expect to be found and fixed over time. What I did realise after starting other chars is that it would be nice if the skill icons were visually grouped a little more to match the character class. I.e. just looking at a skill you could see its a Sentinel or Sorcerer skill. Again, just a personal suggestion.
Animations are pretty good overall. Barring a few specific instances, mobs look and move as expected. Yes, there are a few places where spells go through walls & a mob will suddenly phase through a stairway or a previously horizontal AoE will appear vertical (arena map) but these are minimal. There are performance related issues when a crap-ton of things are happening on screen and I expect these to be optimised as the game dev progresses.
My main criticism of the visuals is related to contrast/brightness. I have started using the Brightness setting on very bright to try and compensate, but I think there is an issue with the contrast in some areas which brightness alone does not really address. Itās as simple as idol placeholder blocks being difficult to distinguish active/disabled or as complicated as mobs on a map that are virtually invisible until they are almost in melee range just because the map is very dark and the mob has no contrasting shade/colour.
Play & Interface
The simplest compliment I can say here is that it literally took a few minutes to understand how the interface and key layout was intended to be used and I was up and running. Anyone familiar to these kinds of games will have no problem getting comfortable playing.
In terms of general play, itās much like most ARPGs and I honestly had no problem once I understood the visual clues on screen e.g. what a poison AoE looks like, how a particular mob telegraphs a move, where to stand to get missed by some blast etc.
However, I would like MUCH more skill state feedback independent of the on-screen skill animation - which becomes impossible to see when a lot is going on. For example, the maelstrom for the primalist shows the number of active maelstroms etc. on the left of the interface, but by contrast, the void knights devouring orbs has nothing to show status and its incredibly hard to use the skill without auto-casting without this visual feedback. I am sure there are many other skills that could benefit from this status feedback.
Another point on the interface is customisation. Iād like to be able to show healing figures from leech on my char in a particular colourā¦ Or I would like to change the types of damage to show in different colours or even make crits bigger than what they are.
This leads itself to the drop filter feature request, which has a very lengthy thread on the forum. Please. Pretty Pleaseā¦ Its not needed at low levels where all gear is usually an upgrade, but when you are trying desperately to eek out another monolith map or arena level, finding gear you need is hard enoughā¦ Itās almost impossible to find that shard of Attenuation I need and I am willing to bet that I have missed more than one drop over the last 120hrs.
Arena & Monolith
To be honest, I never understood the Arena mode that most of these games end up having, but itās there, itās dull and holds very little appeal for me. Have never found a Wave-on-Wave mode that appeals to me.
Now by contrast I think Monolith for end-game or even āsideā content is absolutely brilliant. Sequence of successful maps giving you global boosts that you can change by doing the sequence again - great. I like that itās matched to levels so that when there is enough main storyline, you can run monolith to gear up or level up your char if you hit a gear or level check in the main storyline instead of the old way of re-running the main story quests till you level up. Not sure if thatās what was intended, but thatās how I see it. Has lots of potential for more content, more monolith boosts & echo attributes. Easily the best part of the game for me as it gives you a challenge that has tiers and is infinitely less mindless than Arena mode.
Character Progression
Respeccing works for me. Was a little disappointed to see skills levels had to be re earned, but once I realised that a few maps in Monolith or Arena (choke choke) made this easy and gave you a time to learn the new skill, I ignored it. Passives are easy to redo, but I found the fixed mastery a little disappointing as it means you need to level a whole new alt for every specialisation instead of just respeccing the main buildā¦ hoping this will be reconsidered at a later stage as I figure I may get more than a little bored making 3 alts per class.
Leveling up seemed on par with my expectations of this game type. Canāt say much more than that. Was not difficult, was not too easy or fast. Figure that someone will figure out a way to cheese that but hey thats for them. Would be nice not to have to force an Alt to go through the main story to level up.
Gear & Gear progression
Grief this is getting too long nowā¦
Unique & set drops seem ok - I got almost 1 unique per character level before attempting monolith - enough to make them special but not enough to make me irritated that I was not getting any. Got many more after getting the Monolith unique drop boost. Set drops were definitely less but I figure thats just a factor of the limited items in the game right nowā¦
Definitely expect MANY MANY MANY more sets/uniques going forward. A pet peeve I have of ARPGs is that over time, only a handful of end-game builds are viable and only a few uniques are used in those builds. I like variety - especially variety that makes for way out crazy end-game builds. Once the content is done, then theorycrafting and building new chars is all there is left to do.
Gear progression for higher levels 80+ is particularly difficult right nowā¦ Since completing the content, I now run Monolith for coin / random drops / shardsā¦ Then I go to the gambler to find that choice roll with one or two main T4/T5 affix I need. Then its craft it better (mostly just fracture it really) and rinse and repeat. If that IS what is intended by the devs then they have a little ways to go to make this process really work without just ending up where you started after hours of play. If that is NOT what they intend then they gotta change something fundamental wrt gear progression.
There is a lot on this in the forums so I donāt need to go into it other than to say that like leveling up, I would like to level up gear in relation to effortā¦ Itās a game, and I would like to think that after putting in some hours of relaxed gaming, my character would have progressed to a higher character level, or map or arena wave by the end of my play sessionā¦ Else it becomes workā¦.
Forum
The forum is on the whole a pretty decent place as forums go. There are as expected, a few people who behave in the usual negative online social media way by writing things that they would never say in real life face-to-face discussions and others that seem to want to prove their intellectual superiority by belittling others or going off on an irrelevant tangent to prove their point to the detriment of the thread discussion. I get the feeling that there may be hidden lurkers that are reluctant to participate because of these vocal people, but generally itās an ok place to make comments and discuss the game in a constructive manner. The forum could use a little firmer big brother hand (not quite the Allfathers ban-hammer tho) - especially as the number of users increase.
If you made it here you deserve a beer. Madman
) my items on a new toon. So I have very decent gear very early during the story. But at around 70-80 gear progression gets stuck.
