OK diehard fans and people who think every game should be Dark Souls, you’re not going to like what I’m about to say.
I’m someone who plays games to relax and as a little older gamer I prefer easier games, as my twitch reflexes aren’t what they used to be. Up until the Emperor I was having a blast, playing my lightning blast sorcerer with his power steadily increasing. Then as everyone is well aware, as soon as you finish the Emperor and go to the divine age the devs apparently decided the game needed a BIG difficulty jump. (If I had had to guess I would say that used to be the endpoint of the beta and the “every game should be hard” crowd complained it was too easy). So I carried my ass back to town and reforged protections onto my gear where I could and swapped out my DPS idols for defensive stats.
Well that worked sorta…I was quite survivable in most fights…and it made every fight feel like a slog because I had traded away a huge chunk of my DPS. That was the beginning of the end for me and Last Epoch for now. But still I slogged on, I wanted to finish what I had left of the campaign. I trudged my way to the Isle of storms and tons of mobs that all felt like giant buckets of hitpoints, not fun. Onward down into the temple, more big buckets of hitpoints that aren’t fun to fight. Side note, why can mobs like those stupid land sharks get out of my buffed black holes so easily? So on I went to the Architect…yeah, I know, the death of many a player.
This fight isn’t fun. I’m sorry, it’s not. This big ass arena where she keeps teleporting around and you have to chase her to maybe get one or two pokes at her before she teleports to another corner. The whole time being shot by her and her adds from off screen. Then when you die, not only do you have to start the fight over, you have to fight your way back to her.
This leads into a more general opinion of many bosses. It seems the primary way used to add challenge is “more adds”, this is pretty unimaginative.
Trying to make the game “harder” and slowing progress is what killed the last ARPG I tried out, Wolcen. ARPGs should be about killing lots of things fast while farming, they aren’t meant to be like regular RPGs where you’re progressing linearly through a story where you are usually fighting a lot less stuff.
I know lots of people here like to trash Diablo 3, but in it’s current condition, I think D3 does a lot right. One of the top things being it’s difficulty system. You can start on “Normal” where you can look on the direction of mobs and they die. Then proceed up through “Torment XVI” difficulty where it’s much more of a challenge. You’re rewarded with higher drop rates the more you up the difficulty. Now I will concede that T16 tends to be fairly easy due to too much power creep, but Last Epoch can avoid this mistake.
EHG seems to be clinging to some older gaming concepts like areas having set levels. In my opinion there is a reason this is dying out in most RPGs, people don’t generally like being limited in where they can play in endless open games.
Last thoughts…levelling. The game has a max level of 100 out of the gate, not sure that’s a great idea as it gives less room to grow, but whatever. I’ve heard that EHG has made statements about slowing down leveling after launch, please don’t do that. I know it’s mostly to please the evangelical D2 fans who think painfully grinding to 99 is some sort of achievement beyond showing a willingness to grind for 10,000 hours. Last Epoch has a bunch of interesting classes and sublasses, but people will be less likely play alts if they all have some sort of endless grind in front of them to level cap them.
I guess that’s enough for now.