Some time has passed since the premiere, so it’s time for feedback from the “uber casual” and more “watching” than playing point of view.
Let’s talk about graphics from a non-technical perspective. This may be an unpopular topic, especially in the ARPG/hack’n’slash genre, but… it’s probably worth keeping in mind.
Unfortunately, the game suffers greatly not only from the competition, and I’m not just talking about the limitations of the game engine, they are not that bad and there are plenty of examples of how much can still be squeezed out of it, it’s more about that game internally is unequal. Much of the visual content still feels like a beta release.
A few examples:
- Our Hero
- the inability to modify the appearance of the character greatly disturbs the immersion and fantasy of the game. A holy warrior is no different from a dark void knight. A magician of any specialization is an old man who constantly calls everyone a fool. Acolyte is always a twisted creepy etc.
- appearance of items. Why do only unique weapons have their own models, what about armor? The appearance of what a character is wearing is an important part of the gameplay. MTX is no solution only option.
- NPC appearance
- key characters for the plot are refined in the same way as the player’s character, but it is enough to approach, for example, a salesman and we see a weak generic ugly model.
- the pop-up conversation window with the NPC usually has a good-looking NPC art, unfortunately as above. art corresponds to the model only for plot-important NPCs.
Ultimately, this “something” is missing. All effort is directed towards gameplay, mechanics, balance and fighting bugs. Appearance is not a secondary issue… we absorb the game mainly through our eyes.
Overall, Last Epoch is a great game and I keep my fingers crossed for further development, the only thing I ask for is a balanced development of the game as a whole: mechanics-gameplay-visuals-sound-location-story.