Has Last Epoch failed?

General
101

Then why make it live-service?
What’s the reason?

First of all… CoF is a major mistake for a live-service game itself. Don’t get me wrong… I love the mechanic, absolutely! But it’s designed counter to the enforced community aspect which a live-service game needs.
It causes solely costs for the company but provides no returns.

No guilds. The market is half-assed at best, group-play is really badly designed as you cannot exchange items reliably when you’re not directly playing together (which hinders friend groups), rewards are not well scaled for anything but monolith running together. No hideout style area to build up stuff and show off (be it Lost Ark style island, a home like in Everquest 2 or the PoE style Hideout).

What exactly does the live-service aspect provide outside of costs?
And hence: Why have it?
And following hence: Why designing it counter to your game-type in the first place?

There’s a few interesting aspects here.

Yes, when you play 1k hours it’s likely you’ll have got your value out of it. True. But it changing away from your liking is still loosing the product you paid for, and you paid for ‘indefinite access’ of the product you personally wanted. It’s similar to taking away something you own no matter if you’ve gotten the value already out of it.

Imagine reading a book and re-reading it for 15 times… you love it, you want to re-read it, you’re one of the few doing it. But suddenly someone shows up, takes the book and leaves, and you got no way to stop it.
It was enjoyable, but isn’t anymore. Got the value out of it? Sure… pissed off anyway? Sure! Because it’s shit and shouldn’t happen, it was yours and someone has taken it away.

As for the last part, with ‘other games cost more and you play for less’. So? I use my oven a lot more then my raclette stone… so should someone be able to take my oven away which cost me triple the amount of the raclette stone because I used it 5 times as much? Got my value out of it, right?

Depends if you derive the enjoyment from the gameplay process itself or from the push towards a goal.
If it’s the first: Yes.
If it’s the second: No. Since you’re deprived of the grand success following which makes the vast majority of your enjoyment. Everything before hence feels ‘worthless’.

Plainly spoken I looked forward to the results as it’s one of my personal experiences. It’s one of the few instances where the journey for me personally wasn’t the fun but the outcome is. So no, not really, I had excitement for the outcome, which could be described as fun… but if the excitement leads to disappointment then ‘no’ I would say.
And this split is present in nigh everything, some things are huge for the process itself, others lean more towards the outcome.

Game of Thrones :stuck_out_tongue:
Prime example I would say. Top-tier stuff at the beginning, it builds extreme excitement… but the whole backstabbing and politics aspects there is only enjoyable when it leads to a half-way decent outcome of some sort, meaning for the actions.
Not having a dude which does nothing become the king after having a lovely siege where you sent the cavalry into fog as the first attack line and position your siege weapons at the front for easy pickings.

102

Regular fresh content that draws players back more frequently, obviously.

Most PoE players don’t return for the community, they return for the new mechanics. If they weren’t so trade centric they could even turn it into a SP game and people would still return to play it.
Same with most games in the genre.

It doesn’t need it, really. The only need a live-service game has of a community aspect is to show off MTX and encourage players to buy them.
But you can still find ways to encourage players to buy MTX without it, so you don’t actually need it.

A fresh batch of returning players every few months, plus the MTX sales.

It’s not. Like I said, the community part of the game only serves to sell MTX.

It’s not different from losing the product you paid for, and paid for “indefinite access” when the servers shut down.
In both cases you can’t play the game you enjoy anymore, no matter the reason.

Also, unlike a regular SP game, when you buy a server-based game you know that you won’t be able to play it forever. Once the servers shut down, you can’t play it anymore (unless someone sets up a pirated server, but that’s rare). It is, as you mentioned “indefinite access”.

LE is actually a very rare exception to this because they provide you with an offline client. So when EHG eventually shuts down the servers, you’ll still be able to keep playing it.

Will you also be pissed off when GGG inevitably shuts down their PoE1 servers? Did you expect to be able to play it for the rest of your life?
That’s not how live service games work and if you had that expectation then it’s on you for having a totally unreasonable one.

Live service games have an expectation of being a game that changes over time and that will eventually stop entirely at some point. You enjoy it while it’s around knowing full well that it won’t be around forever, unlike the regular SP games you bought.

I think you picked the wrong example. The whole point of RR’s books was to be “realistic”. Which means that often there is no pretty resolution. In fact, the series probably had a worse ending for fans because they tried to give it a sort of “moral” ending.
I wouldn’t be surprised if RR was thinking of an ending where the “bad guys” win.

And I’ll give you a counter-example which is Californication. To me, the perfect ending was the penultimate season. The last one shouldn’t have happened.
I don’t feel like my time was wasted because they did the last season. I still enjoy rewatching it, I just don’t usually watch the last one. It’s still a great show, even with a worse ending.

And there are plenty of examples like that. Supernatural had one episode too many. Should have ended on the previous one. I still love the whole series and will rewatch it regularly. Scrubs shouldn’t have made the Interns extra season. I still love it and watch it regularly.

So it all depends on how much you were enjoying the content until you reached the end. If you enjoyed it enough, you will even often enjoy it again and stop before you get to the “bad” part.

Same thing can happen with a game. And to use one in the genre we can do to D2. I never enjoyed the Uber Diablo or Uber Tristram contents. But I still loved getting through the campaign on all difficulties. I rarely stayed around to farm endgame. More often I would just create a new character and do it again.
Did the fact that I disliked the “ending” of D2 made me enjoy the rest of the game less? Not really.

PS: One more thing regarding the live service/community aspect of it:
You asked what the live service can provide when you ignore the community aspect. Which I answered.

But I’d also like to reverse that question:
What does the community aspect offer a live service game, outside of MTX incentives, for the majority of players?

There’s the competitive aspect, sure. But we all know that only a very very small percentage of players actually care and engage with leaderboards.
There’s the group play aspect, but we all know as well that most people play either alone or with their friends (so a simple LAN or direct connection would suffice).
You could argue about the market aspect, but that’s only because these games are balanced around it. If they were balanced for SSF that would be irrelevant.

So what does the community aspect offer to a live service game outside of MTX exposure to incentivize sales? In this genre, mind you. I’m not talking about MMOs or FPSs, which is a totally different issue.

103

Obviously?
You cannot do that with a SP game or a MP game? Is something code-wise stopping a developer to provide a regular update without it being live-service?

Which isn’t quite right either. It’s a portion. Partially mechanics, partially fresh economy.

Exactly, and it costs magnitudes extra compared to simply making a SP/MP game, being a normal developer. So why do it unless you lean into it?

Makes simply no sense, setup for failure.

Welcome to the ‘Stop killing games’ initiative.
I put my signature in for a reason.

As for the other stuff:
Will I be pissed if GGG shuts down their servers and doesn’t provide a offline client?
Have I paid a shelf-price? :slight_smile: No? Not applicable hence.

For GW 2 I definitely would be pissed though, absolutely!

…
Nobody said that. It’s besides the topic and story-writing wise it’s just utter garbage.
It’s not about ‘pretty resolutions’ it’s about it being utterly moronic bullshit. There’s quite a vast difference.

A marketplace for example.
A convenient group environment.
A potential setup which enforces social interaction on some level, old-school MMOs had that as a very heavy aspect for example.

What does it in this genre? Far less… so you gotta lean into those leftover aspects or fail.

104

That’s quite simple, really: easy, quick money.

Following PoE’s undeniable success, live-service is seen as an easy way to get a permanent income without having to bother finalising a game.
A release as a finished version of a single player game would have required much, much more polish and attention to detail. As a live-service? It’s ok, it will be improved in later seasons (in the many threads I complained about the campaign not being finished, I always got this answer. Always.).

Of course, it is a delusion.
Live-service does allow you to “release” something that would barely be considered a beta in the SP market, but it works only if you can permanently innovate and provide fun, good quality content at a fast pace. That’s pretty hard, especially when your foundations are dodgy.
SP game is harder to publish at first because it needs to be far more solid. But once both mechanics and story are in place, you can take your time to do great expansions on your own schedule, having already a strong framework.

Tldr: live-service is much easier to launch, and makes more early money. But harder to sustain post-launch.

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105

Yes, lets absolutely force people who don’t like trade into either trading or suffering sucky drop rates! That’s very player-focussed of you!

I think you missed the part where the person travelled back in time to when you started reading the book & took it away then.

Yes, I guess if you’re the type of personality that’s only able to enjoy the win/destination & can’t enjoy the journey.

So you’ve not paid for any MTX or bought any stash tabs? Why does it require a box price for you to be pissed off if they shut down the servers?

106

Most people don’t care about the fresh economy. As can be seen in LE where the content is the same for both season and legacy, players will naturally gravitate towards legacy where they don’t have to start over.

Competitiveness and fresh starts are only attractive to a small minority.

Because people will rarely buy MTX for a SP game, outside of a few exceptions.
If GD decided to add MTX, most people would ignore it and many would start shouting out that they shouldn’t have and it’s a money grab.

A live service model has more costs, but it also has more profit possibilities, if done right. The community aspect is kinda irrelevant for that in this genre. The genre is still, at heart, a SP game. It’s just one where trade has been added to it and that allows you to sometimes group with people, but most will still play alone.

I’m pretty sure you spent hundreds of euros already on the game. You probably paid way more for PoE than you did for any other game. And all that money will simply be unusable when they shut down the servers, so I’d say it’s way more applicable than in most cases.

Not really. As I exemplified with Californication, Scrubs, etc, there are plenty of shows that ended in a very unsatisfying way. And yet, I still enjoy rewatching them regularly.

Another good example is How I met your mother. The last couple of episodes kinda ruined the whole thing. And yet, I still enjoy watching it all the way up to there. I just kinda ignore the last couple of episodes and make up in my mind what the ending should have been instead.

You can still enjoy things even when the ending sucks if the journey until there was satisfying.

Because these games are balanced around that, usually. If they were balanced in a way that SSF was enough, then trade wouldn’t be as essential as it is.
LE kinda does that, though not fully, which is why playing offline is a pretty good experience.

Which the majority doesn’t use.

Which most people don’t actually want. As can be seen by the many threads in these games asking for either offline mode (D4) or not to have other people in town (PoE).
There’s a reason why GGG stopped making the new mechanics hubs MP and let you have it all to yourself. It’s because people hated the MP town in Heist.

In the case of D4 it’s even worse because not only do people not want to see other players roaming around in town, they absolutely hate seeing them running around in their “maps”.

So most people don’t actually like the community aspect in this genre.
Especially because the most important community aspect is one that they disabled, which is in D2 and is offering older gear to players.

It was always great to go into a game offering gear and getting a bunch of medium gear that more advanced players didn’t want anymore.
And it was always great to create one and dump your own medium gear that you no longer need to help out new players.

This is something that has been disabled from games since then, by either not letting you drop stuff in town (PoE) or not letting other players see your drops (LE).
It’s one of the most important features of a community game (just getting random help when you’re starting up) which new games simply don’t have anymore.

So if you don’t have the most important community aspect in a game, you can’t then be surprised when most of your players don’t actually care for the rest of them.

107

Welcome to the woes of live-service, where companies will fail unless they manage to pull money in relative large amounts from people.
And as we see… EHG failed there.

It’s lucky Krafton was willing to buy, because otherwise your ‘player focused’ part would be ‘game’s gone’… and that’s much more player focused, right?

Moolah. That’s why. Money, value.

Yeah, but that’s - unlike with a shelf-price - not a universally applicable thing.
For me it would be, absolutely true, but for many it wouldn’t be.

Also still gesturing towards the ‘stop killing games’ initiative for a reason.

108

If you have a server based game you can be 100% absolutely certain it will die at some point. It may be 1 year or 30 years, but it will 100% die at some point.
So the only way you can get what you want is if there are exactly 0 games that are server-based.

109

You missed my point. If spending money makes you pissed that they shut down the servers, why is it only the box price that triggers that effect rather than the MTX/supporter packs/etc as well?

110

Not necessarily. If the public gets the means to run private servers, the game could live on.

111

It’s not like a SP game where you can eventually just play it forever, even with emulators as technology evolves.

With a server based game you will either be dependent on someone else running private servers, which someone might or might not do, depending on the playerbase interest.
Or, alternatively, you’d have to set up a server yourself and pay some montly fees. Which isn’t really the same thing as playing it with no other costs, is it?

And that is only if the developers release the server client required for it (or someone hacks it, but we’re only discussing legal options here), which there is no guarantee they’d do.

112

Sure, you would either need to re-code the game to allow a single-player localization, or the public has to run servers.

But that is what Stop Killing Games advocates for - that companies release the means for the public to run private servers once the official servers are shut down.

As long as I, in theory, can run my own server, the game is available to me.

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113

Some server games will just eventually die because no one else is interested in them and they don’t work as a SP one.
You could get bots to play against in games like CS or Fortnite but that won’t be the same thing as playing against people, so one might argue it’s actually a different game.

Same as WoW where a fundamental part of the game is interacting with other people, either via roleplay, PK or raids. The first, especially, does require other players.

So if you spend money on a community server based game, you have to fully expect that it will eventually die out, even if you yourself are still invested in it.

114

It isn’t.
Hence it’ll cause me to be pissed anyway.

But for any player which doesn’t pay anything it also doesn’t cause the feeling of ownership (existing or not, as it’s a perpetual agreement and not a rental).

That’s… just not true? Especially because of emulators you can play nigh anything which has been produced digitally.
Be it Commodore 64, Amiga, NES, SNES… heck… even Playstation 4 and Xbox 1 are all available as emulators. Some better designed then others, but they all exist.

Or you can just do it yourself if you got the interest.

Or you can do a small group of 10 friends and do it.

Which… never was a point of argument anyway? That’s kinda coming from the left side there.

Exactly

The concept of ‘friends’ and ‘acquantances’ makes it a viable choice.
Any size even, could make a event for example as well! Up to you.

This argument is a really moot one, has always been nonsensical.

115

I mean… that’s what I said?

Which is also what I said after that quote?

Is it? You buy a game. You own the game. You play it for 10 years.
Then, if you want to keep playing the exact same game you already own, you now have to pay a monthly fee.

This is exactly the same thing as EHG now saying that server costs are high so, to avoid shutting them down, now you have to pay a 5€ montly fee to play.
I’m guessing you would be outraged at that situation, even though it’s fundamentally the same thing as you running your own server because EHG no longer runs them.

So how is that not the argument? As far as I can see in this thread, the argument is simply “I paid X, I should be able to play the game forever without having to spend more money”.

Except that not everyone will have friends or acquaintances that still like the game and, more than that, eventually a game simply doesn’t have any more fans.

20 years ago MoH:AA servers were all community run servers. And even then there were only half a dozen people around at most, at any given time. I doubt you could find 5 people now that are interested in playing it.
I had a lot of fun with it. But if I wanted to play it again, maybe I could find a couple people, after a lot of searching, which really isn’t playing the same game, is it?

If you have a MP where the fun part of it is playing against 20 other people, eventually that game will simply die because at some point only a couple of people will be interested in it.

And yes, that means that not even your friends will want to play it.

So yes, any game that depends on a high number of people playing at the same time to engage in the actual gameplay, will always eventually die as the numbers dwindle until eventually you’re the last person that actually wants to play it.
And no amount of running servers will ever bring the game back to you.

116

Ah, my mistake, read it the other way around.

Or I just let it run in the background, unless you consider ‘energy bill’ as a ongoing cost… which is already present.
It’s a nonsensical argument from the get-go.

Do you have to pay someone again? Nah? Great, that’s all that’s needed.

That’s your personal problem then.
And as for the ‘a game simply won’t have anymore fans’… after 5 years of ‘0’ players if ‘10’ are able to play it it suffices.
That’s called ownership, to use when you want, not when a company complies to upkeep the functionality.

For the reason to do it? Doesn’t matter either. If you wanna play CS 1.6 then go ahead and do it with friends, nothing’s stopping you.
If you wanna play Unreal Tournament 1… go ahead! Nothing’s stopping you.
Quake 3 Arena? Nothing’s stopping you.
Battlefield 1943? Why not?

It’s such a nothing-burger argumentation line… you can make a Ultima Online private Server, you can make a Everquest 1 private server, you can make a Tibia private server… sure… with modern games some setups make it hard, like Star Citizen… but heck… even there proper functionality not using the background systems in the way it’s used there would immediately make it viable for private hosting again.

It’s just utter nonsense. Functionality exists, it’s explicitly removed instead of left inside and that’s all that is talked about there… to enforce that existing, end-of-life plan.

Ya know, so when GGG for example goes belly-up because of dumb decisions or lack of interest in the future people can still play the game. EHG is one of the major exceptions there… and only because people were becoming so pissed that they went along to finally introduce a proper offline mode rather then their half-assed half-online crap before.

117

I think you’re missing my point.

If you buy a SP game, you can always play it however many times you want without any restrictions.
Want to play the original Deus Ex? Great, boot it up and play it whenever you want.
Want to play Manic Miner from the spectrum days? Great, run it to your heart’s content.

You can play any of those games every day for the rest of your life. And it’s always the same game.

But a game that relies on having a high player count will always eventually die because you simply can’t find people that actually want to play it.
Like I said, you’d be very hardpressed to find 5 people that are interested in still playing MoH:AA these days. And a 5 person game in MoH:AA isn’t the same game.

You might even badger your friends into playing it for a weekend, but you can’t find players to play the game whenever you want. Because you need a high number of human players for the game to still be the same and there simply aren’t enough people that want to play it anymore.

Same can be said about most of your examples. No one’s stopping me from running an Unreal Tournament 1 server. Or CS 1.6. Or Quake 3. Except that you won’t find enough people to actually play the game the way it’s meant to be played and you’ll end up just running 1 vs 1 maps, which definitely isn’t the same game.

So any game that actually requires a high player count will always inevitably die as players move on to other games and have absolutely zero desire to go back to those games.

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118

So ‘chained together’ would die because it needs 2 people at least?
Ultima Online would because you need ~5 people for most raids?

As said… it’s nonsense. Sure, with rising playercount the cadence of usage reduces substantially, but there’s no game around which mandates ‘have 200 players around’ for any mandatory content. The most we have is things like World vs World in GW2 for example, but even then in the vast majority of games (with very very very few exceptions) you can do everything with 5-10 people at most.

119

Most online FPS modes don’t even work properly with that few people. There are modes that join together 100 people, 50 on each team, with massive playing fields. Doing a 2v2 or even a 5v5 would definitely be an entirely different game, mostly playing hide and seek.

There are also games that rely on the social aspect. WoW relies (or did, anyway) heavily on the whole roleplaying with lots of different people. Playing it with just 2-3 friends just isn’t the same game.

No matter how much you try, some games are just doomed to die because they require a healthy playerbase around.
There is only a very very very small minority of players that enjoy PoE PvP. But there are a few. What are the chances that you can find a dozen people wanting to PvP once the game is dead and it’s running on private servers with playerbases of less than 100?

To be clear, I’m not opposed to the initiative in the slightest. I am fully onboard with it. But some games that have a heavy social aspect into it, like RP (real RP, I mean) or massive battles will simply die at some point due to lack of interested players.

I mean, just look at the amount of MUD games that have died over the years because no one was around to play anymore. Those rely heavily on having enough players to play with. But barely anyone these days would go through playing one any more.
You went from having literally thousands of MUDs worldwide to having less than a hundred active ones these days. And eventually even those will disappear.

120

Not even, there is dozens of live service games that have been running for years with small teams and not even that much content, heck we are seeing the return of classic games that had stopped being supported returning and able to keep the lights on. Grand chase a 25 year old mmo relaunched a year or two ago, and is still doin its thing, it gets like a few thousand players, but thats more then enough to keep the lights on.

OSRS even had many years it was not doing so great, and here we see it doing better then ever. They were able to keep the lights on all this time…

The problem will always be the issue of profitability, and somehow EHG managed to run the well dry faster then most.

Thats why its a fail in my books, plenty of live service games come and go, generally they stall out due to lack of interest because they were around 5-7 years then they have a declined playerbase to where its not worth the juice to squeeze.

Thats not what has happened here, there are people hungry for the game, but they somehow ran out of money.

UNDECEMBER launched in 2022, is a terrible janky crappy game(imo) with bad monetization, 5k total english reviews(mixed) and is still up and running.

Torchlight infinite is a decently p2w game, from asian devolopers, beating the corpse of a once loved IP. again, 6k total english reviews, mixed. Gets a new season like clockwork. New characters, wild balance changes to keep things fresh. Still up and running, launched in 2023(I think it was around before then, but maybe thats its steam launch not to sure)

So how is Last epoch, the 57k total english review mostly positive game losing money and needing to sell to a corporation? it just makes 0 sense unless they massively failed somewhere.

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