THE ISSUES
- The monolith system is incredibly repetitive
- No meaningful feeling horizontal/vertical progression
- You don’t get the sense of choice and impact for those choices
- Timelines and echoes have almost no identity
- Dungeons are forced on you to progress gear
- Resetting monolith webs feels really really bad to do
- Building corruption feels bad, corruption feels poorly implemented
I feel like Last Epochs end game systems suffer from the same issues as Diablo 4 right now. In D4, end game is disconnected, soulless, shallow, and repetitive. They do very little to address these issues, instead opting to add more low-effort new mechanics in. Old mechanics then become outdated unless they make them mandatory for progress, so you have this issue where you feel forced into doing content you don’t want to do so that you can progress your gear. The original end game system still feels just as much of a repetitive slog as it did when it was released, and inferior end game systems don’t have a point.
Design Philosophy
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End game needs LAYERED progression that is both horizontal and vertical. Each time you do an echo, it should feel like you’re building towards something greater. This doesn’t necessarily need to be player power, it can be player choice or customizing your experience. End game systems should have multiple functions, and have their own web of progression that allows them to be an individual, complex, interesting end game mechanic.
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The journey of end game needs to be purposefully designed and fleshed out. What does our journey look like when we start, and what are we working towards? Questions that need to be asked: Do players feel like there is a sense of purpose behind what they’re doing? Do players feel like they’re working towards a goal? Do players feel like every choice or move they make progresses not only their character, but their character journey? Does it feel like every repeatable bit of content is a part of a system of end game progression or does every piece feel like its disconnected from a main goal.
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End game needs to have IDENTITY. There is a design issue when every monolith feels the exact same outside of whatever boss drops you’re moving towards, and every echo feels like you’re chaining the exact same 3 objectives for hours on end. Whatever individuality timelines currently have is completely forgettable because of how repetitive they are.
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Content outside of the Monolith system should all be optional, but interesting and have their own identity and layers of progression that give them meaning. Think of it this way: If a dungeon is only worth doing to achieve a gear result or drop a specific item, it’s not a well designed system. The questions that need to be asked: Is this interesting enough to be repeatable? Are the rewards exciting? Does this offer both horizontal and vertical progression? Do these rewards offer character customization or enable certain builds? Does this add an additional playstyle option for players? Can this exist alongside the main end game system without overtaking it?
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When it comes to pushing end game (corruption), difficulty should be optional and gated behind build/gear capabilities, not tedium. Time investment should be a factor, but it shouldn’t be the major limiting factor. It’s bad design if a player has a build that can do 2,000 corruption, but they have to spend weeks doing content that isn’t remotely challenging to get there. Access to hard content shouldn’t be gated behind doing a repetitive, tedious thing over and over again, it should be awarded for completing challenging things in the game. You should also NEVER feel like you “reset” your progress. Doing end game content is all about momentum, and you should never feel like your momentum is completely interrupted by a reset mechanic. Imagine a scenario in Path of Exile where if you killed Eater and Exarch your entire atlas was reset and you had to re-do every map again. This feeling of a soft reset feels extremely bad in LE.
Examples of well designed end game/progression systems
DISCLAIMER
I am not advocating that these systems be implemented, nor am I saying that I want this game to turn into the games that have these systems. This is purely just breaking down the experience and design of end game systems that I believe to be done well.
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Grim Dawn constellation system: You find things throughout the world, which give you passive points that you can spend into a constellation-shaped tree which gives you interesting character progression, like triggering a skill on attack, or outright giving you skills, or just offering offensive/defensive layers. This offers a reason to do side areas, and offers greater customization of a character through that.
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Path of Exile Atlas Tree: This doesn’t offer player power, but choice. This is a great example of an end game system with tons of identity and meaningful choices. Each specific map you do allows you another small bit of progression towards adding content or altering the content you’re doing. This has a meaningful start to the journey, it has progression steps that involve doing repeatable content but also giving that content purpose, and it has a web of interesting end game outcomes to work towards, whether its alternate content, specific bosses, or really challenging maps. Everything feels pretty connected and purposeful.
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Path of Exile alternate content systems, heist, delve, delirium, expedition, etc. These all offer very different ways to play the game, none of them are necessary to progress in end game, but all have very specific rewards and progression systems to them. These systems have mini encounters inside maps, but they also have major encounters outside of them, or entire progression systems outside of them. Having the option to encounter a piece of content more, changing the way you experience it, and being able to focus on the things you like to do is KEY.
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Some Ideas
These are just my ideas, some of them may be very impractical or have flaws, I am not a game designer.
- 1. Connect timelines and launch them from a central hub
Remember in skyrim where you could cycle through skill trees, and once you chose it, you started with the first star in the constellation, then progressed from there? This is conceptually what I’m picturing animation/presentation-wise. Timelines being open ended webs gives them this soulless feeling of complete randomness. Maybe still procedurally generate webs, but make them linear paths that you can choose from with connections to the other paths at certain break points. You could have an introduction echo which branches out and unlocks your first timeline, you could obscure the other timelines with fog of war or celestial vfx, there are a lot of cool options presentation/UI wise that can give a sense of mystery, progression, and cohesion.
Reasoning: Connecting timelines and having a central hub gives a feeling of cohesiveness. End game should feel like its a bunch of pieces that make up a puzzle, not a bunch of pieces from a bunch of different puzzles that never feel finished.
- 2. Add in incremental mini-boss encounters to build towards timeline bosses instead of random questlines based on stability
Once you hit a stability breakpoint, instead of a quest, your next echo is a mini-boss encounter where a mini boss finds you in the echo and creates an arena to fight in, that boss then drops a 1/2 fragment. You could expect this to take just about as long as an echo does. Once you hit the 2 breakpoints and have 2 fragments, you combine them in a device UI and that allows you to open an encounter to the timeline boss.
These mini bosses can be minions of some ultimate boss trying to prevent you from progressing the monolith, or there can be many other lore-friendly reasons for these encounters. There are about a million different ways you can tie something like this into your end game progression system. These mini bosses can be timeline-specific.
Reasoning: Timeline quests feel super awkward and awful to do. In empowered timelines they suddenly become obsolete. Replacing breakpoints with mini bosses that have their own drop tables is a lore-friendly way of slowly forming a cohesive end game journey, and adds more of a reason to do specific timelines.
- 3. Add timeline-specific passive trees, or a monolith passive tree (or both)
Each time you kill a mini boss, timeline boss, or complete an objective, you are granted passive point(s) for timeline-specific or whole-monolith tree that allows you to mold the game to fit the way you want to play it, specific item drop rates, or other potential mechanics. You could even make echoes impactful by giving a passive point for every x amount that you do that takes the form of a progress/xp bar so that you can see the progress, capped to a maximum amount, so that doing repetitive echoes actually serves a purpose and gives you rewards.
Reasoning: Horizontal progression and player agency adds depth and replayability. Adding additional reasons to do echoes, mini bosses, and bosses makes them feel more impactful other than just target farming specific items.
- 4. Overhaul Corruption and Reset Mechanic
Corruption should be account and monolith-wide, and feel like its impacting the timelines. Once you complete the last timeline, there could be a quest line update where there are some big bad guy lore implications and npc interaction. As a result, the entire monolith has had visual and world impacts, as well as increased difficulty. This corruption would add new events, mechanics, etc. This should feel like an end game “refresh” instead of just more of the same. Think of the first monolith journey as tier 1, and then corruption as an entirely different tier of gameplay that adds new end game, rather than making the already existing repetitive end game 1% harder for every 30 minutes you’re willing to grind. Bosses could be void touched or uber versions that have new mechanics, new loot tables or new item mechanics, etc. Maybe the corrupted version of the monolith is accessed from a new area, or it can be turned on and off. It needs to be able to be turned off and on for obvious reasons, but I do believe it should be account + monolith-wide. There is no reason to force players to grind the same exact timelines and echoes if their build can handle much harder difficulty, even with catch-up mechanics this is a really really bad feeling part of the game.
To be clear, I am not in favor of content “skip” mechanics like how in d4 you can instantly skip the campaign and do the exact same content at level 1 that you would do at level 100. I think certain things being gated is good design. It gives meaning to each step of progression.
As far as building corruption, I don’t have many good ideas on how to go about this, I’d love to hear ideas from anyone who actually got this far!
