Hi i wanted to make this post after playing Last Epoch for about 600h in total and also playing Boomer Shooters games.
What strikes me is that Last Epoch dosent have verry good game feel.
So what can last epoch learn from boomer shooters.
For starters in most boomer shooters what you kill explodes in blood and gore and gets dismembered. A game wich does this incredibly well is Prodeus, you can youtube this game and see what im talking about. There is tons of gore, and whenever you kill and enemy , there is a feeeling of power and satisfaction,
Anoather thing that Last Epoch could learn from boomer shooters is Power Ups, but not the standard stuff we have, but what if when you kill and enemy you get a power up that gives you additional projectiles, or increased movement , cast, and attack speed that drops from enemy not from a pilon. Picking this up from the ground feels much better that clicking on a pilon.
Maybe you pick a powerup wich auto dismembers with one shots and when you kill a group of enemies lets say 10 enemies with one shot u get a slow bullet time camera explosion of goreā¦ idk you can think of many ways to make gameplay extremely fun.
Animations dont have to be incredible for you to have a good game feel, its just that physics of the dismemberment and gore have to be good for your charracter to feel powerfull. And currently there is no gore.
Anyways thats my sugestion .
Boomer shooters. Had to google that & find the term a teensy bit offensiveā¦ But hey, at least I didnāt struggle to get a mortgage (Iām not a boomer)ā¦
dont be offended lol, the genere has some of the best fps single player games out there, and on max difficulty they can be really challangeing and fun, i would recomend the last epoch devs play a bit of them and see what they can learn from them.
Boomer shooters are indie games, they dont have amazing animations or insane budget for cutting edge graphics, but instead they have perfected the formula for an engaging fps game that feels really good to play. The gameplay is better than any AAA game out there, you should really try some on hard difficulty and see how fun they are,.
Itās the boomer bit that grinds my gears a bit, almost like the yoof that came up with the term arenāt aware of what the generations are. Though the term does roll off the tongue quite nicely.
We also already have several relevant terms (8bit/pixel graphics) without pulling perjoratives into the mixā¦
Yes, this. Games āback thenā had to focus on gameplay because the hardware couldnāt do much. And donāt dismiss a good soundtrack/music/everything aural to highten the atmosphere.
I think this direction of thought requires more actual thought.
For context, I am 43 and I continually see people in my age-group review-bomb games because games donāt let them relive their teens where they got to experience these games when they were brand new and a lot of these folk donāt have enough self realization to understand that they are hyper-critical of games for not providing that feeling they had when all of this was brand new so many years ago.
No game ever will. That is not a reason to be a lil brat about every game after our era.
Absolutely, you canāt regain that first high/love when you experience something for the first time, but that doesnāt mean that subsequent games/whatever are shit because they donāt give the same emotional high.
Wasnāt Boltgun full of forced arena combat areas? You know, the exact kind of annoying gameplay that WASNāT present in actual boomer shooters of old.
well they had their take on it, my point was about the gameplay.
Imagine if in last epoch you can pick up sometimes a powerup skill that lasts for 10-20 seconds where the skill autotargets rares and dismembers them, and this powerup is rare to find.
Or maybe you find a portal that takes you in an arena and all your skills swap to something else and you have to defeat waves of monsters and sometimes they also drop powerups maybe they also drop uniques and exalted items wich are available only by beating the arena.
Heck there are so many things we can learn, maybe you pick a key wich opens hidden areas full of gold , like 1 mil gold, but you have to figt a boss there. And the list is endless
How would a rocket launcher type skill that is not an actual rocket launcher fit into a powerup in the game ? The skill just has to behave as rocket launcher and you press D to shoot it.
You do realize LE is a game that focuses on players making a build around specific hand-picked skill combinations and using that to delete waves of monsters, right?
For example, players that specialized their passives and gear into Lightning and Crit would love getting their skills swapped for a Fire Damage over Time skill setupā¦
gold sellers love this idea? so what we now ballance game around gold sellers ?
for example in poe you can drop divine obrs, you can drop a mirror of kalandra etcā¦
No, theyāre crafting materials, same as in LE. The difference is that PoE lets you trade crafting materials. And due to their drop quantity and inherent value, they ended up being used as currency. Thatās no different from a barter economy.
PoE2 will have a currency (gold). PoE1 doesnāt, even if players commonly refer to crafting materials as such.
Having powerups in an ARPG is a terrible idea. Although not a boomer either, Iām old enough that my first contact with games was with a ZX spectrum. I loved arcade games. But everything has a time and place. I wouldnāt want powerups on CS2, or BG3, or No Manās Sky. They wouldnāt improve the game at all, quite the opposite.
Powerups work great in games like Blur but would be terrible in Gran Turismo.
Likewise, having powerups in LE would make the game less about creating your build and more about finding powerups instead.
why not u sound verry close minded and not open to anything, you have found some weird comfort in the way this game is,
Example of powerups : Double damage - enemies are gibbed and explode in gore , your skills turn red in collor
Crit - your crits dead 200% more damage for 20 seconds - the crits damage number appear instantly and explode
See ? you can make anything fun about gameplay
My main point was that we need better gameplay feel , even without powerups
It would be more fun if there were better physics, and good dismemberment and gore
Blood exploding from enemies could change effects depending of how they died by ignite or by void damage or by lightning damage, etc.
This would require alot of work that i doubt the devs are interested in putting in.
But it will make combat extremely fun , kinda like poe has combat done so nice and responsive, if you played poe you can tell that that game has no floaty animations, everything is crisp and abrupt, making you feel powerfull, enemies scream when they dies etc.
I donāt agree. Of all the ARPGs Iāve played over time, LE has the best game feel to me, except maybe Champions of Norrath (the game that caused me to fall in love with ARPGs). It had great controls and the nostalgia factor is real for me.
I get that D4 for example has a nice feeling weapon swing when using controller. But that was the only thing I liked about that game.
The moment-to-moment gameplay / gamefeel is the reason I play LE daily. I love the combat. Surely thereās room for improvement, and maybe Iām just a weirdo, maybe Iām crazy evenā¦ But I love how LE feels.
This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. With these powerups you donāt have to focus on your build as much. Why would I tinker with a lot of stuff to do double damage, when I can instead just wander around looking for a powerup?
What you are proposing already exists and itās called Vampire Survivors. Why would you want to turn an ARPG into that?
This is very subjective, though, and will vary according to players. PoE has a great combat feel without any of that. So does D4 (in fact, one of the few things D4 does that I actually enjoy).
LEās combat is fine. Could it be better? Definitely. Does it need explosions and blood showers that will only decrease game performance? Not really.
Fair points. I wouldnāt be opposed to more gore and physics if EHG wanted to add them. But I donāt know that those visual improvements would change much about how the game āfeelsā to me. There already is some of that anyway, we have ragdoll n stuff.
Iām not opposed to that either, though I think that would be better covered by MTX.
What Iām opposed to is powerups and turning LE into Vampire Survivors.
