I watched Gav’s latest YouTube video ( Is Last Epoch Still An Accessible ARPG? ) and that prompted me to put down my own thoughts on the current state of Last Epoch.
For some context, I’ve been playing since I can’t remember when, but I’m pretty sure I started no later than 0.7.x. I’ve apparently put in over a thousand hours in that time and tried quite a few different builds, but until recently I haven’t pushed into empowered monoliths much. I’m also a CoF player, so I love that Last Epoch makes finding your own gear more viable than in PoE for example.
I’ll start with my experience of patch 1.1.
Harbingers of Ruin
This was the first time I’d ever really pushed into empowered monoliths in the game, and that was almost entirely down to the introduction of the Harbingers and Aberroth. So in my case at least, they had the effect I imagine the devs wanted. After 8 or 9 attempts, I even managed to take Aberroth down on my Frozen Orb character.
For me, the Harbingers and Aberroth are in a pretty good spot difficulty- and accessibility-wise, especially since the change to the corruption catchup mechanic. That probably means they’re a bit too easy for the serious gamers, so I can envisage needing further (and harder) aspirational content.
That said, other feedback I’ve seen, such as Gavryn’s video, highlights the dearth of mid-game content. So if many players simply can’t make it to Aberroth, I imagine they feel locked out of the best content of the game. I hope that Aberroth remains aspirational content that only strong builds can tackle, but only if there is some fun, less difficult content for all those players that can’t manage Aberroth for whatever reason.
I assume that EHG have such plans. Perhaps Primal Hunts in 1.2 will go some way to filling that gap. Nemesis is a surprisingly fun system for how simple it is, but it isn’t a goal in the way that Aberroth is. And dungeons are unappealing. I don’t know what changes they need, but I think they could do with more imaginative use of their gimmicks as well as the removal of the frustrating dead ends. At the moment, I’m just collecting lots of dungeon keys that are using up a ton of stash space simply because I’m not that interested in running the dungeons as they stand.
As part of patch 1.1 we also saw the introduction of the Evade, a feature I didn’t realise we needed, but has made the game less frustrating and made the use of traversal skills more interesting. The fact that I find Lagon a lot easier now ensures it gets a big thumbs up from me!
Boss ward was another addition in 1.1, but I’ll give that its own section.
Boss Ward
Adding ward to bosses has worked reasonably well from my perspective, but I do have some issues with it. First, non-boss enemies in monoliths have the ward system simply because the enemy type is a boss somewhere in the game. This is disruptive to the flow of monoliths and pretty annoying. If possible, I think the ward system should be limited to actual bosses, i.e. the role of the enemy, not its type.
Second, the ward can feel harder to get through than the underlying HP of the boss, particularly when I’m playing a build that doesn’t have top-of-the-line DPS. Often the HP appears to lose bigger chunks than the ward. Could be RNG or just an issue of perception. On top of that, I find the ward decay barely noticeable, which makes lower-DPS builds feel worse. Hopefully some retuning will make the system feel better.
Monolith of Fate
I don’t have a lot to say about the main end-game system of Last Epoch. It works fairly well for me: I can make noticeable progress without having to speed through the echoes and I like the variety between spires, ambushes, mini bosses and arenas (I get the feeling I’m in a minority on that one).
That said, if it wasn’t for the Harbingers and Aberroth, I wouldn’t spend much time in them. And most of the complaints about echo arenas are valid, particularly when it comes to the lack of Exiled Mages and Nemesis. I was wondering whether it would be possible to inject those enemies into the waves, but it seems like a difficult undertaking while also making them an opt-in feature.
The few things that particularly bother me with echoes are:
- Vessels of Memory and Chaos seem quite rare considering they provide an interesting interaction with the timeline web and give the player some control over that web
- It’s easy to miss that you might be fighting the timeline boss with some objectionable modifiers, so a prominent list shown when you select the boss echo would be nice
- I’d rather not be sent back to the monolith after defeating a timeline boss (unless it’s the first boss kill in a Normal timeline) since it lacks the stash and I usually have a bunch of stuff I want to put in it
These aren’t major issues at all, but annoyances like them do cause friction with the player.
Annoyances
I don’t know what EHG’s approach is to minor issues that players encounter frequently, but I’d like to argue that giving them a relatively high priority is important. I’ve worked on a popular game mod before, so I know how easy it is to put off working on “minor” issues because there always seem to be more egregious or interesting bugs to fix. And yet frequently encountering such a minor issue can easily lead to sustained aggravation. Which a player might not even be aware of until it’s fixed and they feel a release of tension.
Here are some examples of such issues:
- When TPing out of an echo, the character often ends up running to the left of the reward room for some reason (I saw Mathil getting annoyed at that one)
- Characters get stuck on scenery and enemies, where they slow down as if running through treacle (a well-known issue)
- Clicking on items seems unreliable, for example when trying to pick up an item from inventory to drop on the ground, I end up dropping a different item because somehow the game switched the original item with another one in the inventory that I moused over
- Evade often double activates in offline mode, either rolling forward and then back, or rolling forward twice (reported several times)
All of these things contribute to an impression of a lack of polish in the game.
Economy
While I don’t play Merchant’s Guild, I understand that the gold exploits are a major issue. I’m assuming that EHG recognise this, but I was a little disheartened to hear Mike on his dev stream say that EHG’s solution to the problem is to fix the issues as quickly as possible as they are discovered. The reason I was disheartened is because I expect an equal focus on preventative measures.
Such measures may be in place and Mike isn’t aware of them. If so, that’s great. In case they aren’t, two examples I can think of are:
- Force every “transaction” (including any form of gold generation that goes to a player) through a reconciliation service that acts like double-entry bookkeeping and rolls back any transaction that fails reconciliation
- Monitor player and/or system-wide gold and fire off alerts when anomalies are detected
It’s been a long time since I last worked on some financial software, so I’m a bit hazy on the first example. Regardless, I do think the importance of the market’s integrity warrants a similarly robust approach as is found in financial software.
Player expectations
I’ve already talked long enough, but I want to quickly mention player expectations, as they are a really important part of player enjoyment and there seem to be major mismatches in things like legendary items, expected corruption level, etc.
The game should ideally be setting appropriate expectations itself, but I don’t see that happening. For example, Legendaries were introduced as ultimate chase items, and yet Nemesis has made them more prevalent and many players understandably seem to view them as core parts of a build, making the current system for creating them via the Eternity Cache seem unreasonably obtuse and RNG heavy (FrozenSentinel has an interesting video on the latter).
I don’t know how to solve these issues, but the introduction of Aberroth has helped in the case of corruption, since you can’t access him until you complete a timeline at 300 corruption. That helps identify 300 corruption as the goal for most builds. Achievements for levels 95, 98 and 100 might reinforce the idea that these are stretch goals, although I doubt that will help much with those players that expect to reach max level quickly as in Diablo 4.
Anyway, I doubt I’ve mentioned anything that EHG isn’t already aware of and I look forward to seeing what solutions they come up with. Keep up the good work!