Years of waiting, lots of delays, now it’s been released for a while. What’s your opinion on it all?
It went very smooth, very few gamebreaking issues.
So from the multiplayer side of things I am decently happy, even though I didn’t really cared too much for the actual multiplayer part.
But what bothers me is, that Version 0.9.0 was a downgrade or sidegrade for a lot of things.
It didn’t really felt like a “upgrade”.
Yes there were some amazing positive changes as well, like performance and visuals.
But there were so many things, skills, animations, skill nodes, vfx etc, that was downgrade, didn’t work at all or was made worse as well. (things that worked fine in 0.8.5)
Especially for me, who is playing solo most of the time both Patch 0.9.0 and 0.9.1 were very negative.
The little bit of party gameplay I had went very smooth and with the exception of some rubberbanding with movement skills the playing coop with somebody else felt great.
TL:DR Mixed bag, MP part is good, rest sucks
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I’ll play multiplayer with you, Heavy.
Also, I was unaware until just now but luckily a lot of those issues got reported and fixed since then. I haven’t rechecked the few I found but maybe I should at this point. I was having some issues on Acolyte and Primalist that I could easily retest when I have some time.
3 of my game buddies were waiting for a multiplayer patch to try the game, but non of them started playing.
First was playing with me for half an hour and left because of high load times (over 30 seconds) and other server related critical bugs.
Second one just finds torchlight more interesting.
Third one tried two different characters, but didn’t finished first two chapters. It seems existing game tutorial doesn’t work really well, he never uses forge or item filter, didn’t pick idol quest reward in town etc. I also automatically skip in-game dialogues alongside tutorial, probably the most of ARPG players do the same. I think forge and loot filter tutorial should be more aggressive, forcing new players to do at least one craft and item filter rule. Game guide is sometimes useful, but sometimes scary (just put a graph instead those ugly formulas). I’ve learned about crafting from youtube guides even before buying the game. Passives and skill systems are so simple, they don’t need to be explained. But everyone seeing forge for the first time doesn’t understand even slightly how it works, forge UI must be reworked.
At least we all have same opinion on Diablo 4 - overpriced and boring, so they would rather play LE than D4. That’s a relative success I guess.
I regularly stream gameplay for them in discord, but apart from some interesting mechanics, gameplay variety is poor and loot doesn’t matter. Julra boss was interesting to explain and show, but after dying to a time travel bug (that was fixed), everyone’s interest (including me) was instantly lost. Other dungeons are just survivability checks with generic rewards. Tanky bosses are interesting for a first third of a fight, then they start repeating attacks and become boring. So add more attacks or better make boss fight shorter.
I’ve once played in a party with a random player, that asked for XP leech in chat, and it was fun. But I don’t want to join someone else, as I prefer fast tempo with no downtime between echoes, and I’m not interested in random monos or rewards. I also don’t understand, how item gifting should work in a party. Should I adjust my loot filter to anyone I am playing with? And loot is still biased towards current class, so playing with 80% players of the other class is not effective. I think resonance should stay, but the rest of the gifting system should be scrapped, with simple short allocation for loot. That won’t break any trade philosophies, probably.
Overall multiplayer is a necessary step of LE evolution, next one will be trade. But is seems to me, that game is developed too slowly in terms of new content.
Also both 0.9 and 0.9.1 were unplayable for a day or two because of rising server flames, huge downside there.
[Note: I play only solo in ARPGs. Below comments are only about solo experience, I have no feedback or opinion about multiplayer.]
As the question is “Was the multiplayer release a success?”, I have to answer: no, it was really, really bad.
0.9 was, when it came out, a considerably worse game than 0.8, barely playable with all the bugs, certainly not enjoyable.
I had to go back to offline mode after about an hour, just to be able to play.
Thankfully, I have been playing since 0.7, with most of my playtime being in 0.8.
I have built a very high opinion of LE, and some bugs in 0.9 won’t change that.
But I feel sorry for all the players who started with 0.9 and never experienced the proper LE of previous versions.
In short: it should never have been released in the state it was in March.
A lot of positive work has been done since then, sure. But we can’t get back to the first impression left on new players at release.
4 Likes
Yes. 5chars.
If you could actually log in, then didn’t have any of the fairly major issues which were hot fixed fairly quickly.
It was never going to be, they were purely porting the SP content into an MP environment which necessitated a fair few changes which were definitely downgrades.
They clearly advertised patch 0.9.0 to also have some extra things in the weeks and months prior to it with all the dev blogs and especially the 0.9 Patch Overview Video.
Kinda saying “this is not just multiplayer” but this whole other bunch of “upgrades”.
And while there were significant upgrades, that were successful some of these mentioned “downgrades” still impacted the overall feel and polish of the game.
So as a whole Patch 0.9 felt as a pure downgrade to me, even with some of these upgrades in mind.
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Disclaimer: I dont play ARPG’s any other way than solo. So of the actual multiplayer I will give no opinions.
There were some problems when the patch came, but generally speaking I did not run into the worst ones I read about in these forums so I have no complaints about that.
Therefore, I will say that the release was a success. Not a good one, not a bad one. Just success.
Yet, since I don’t view the multiplayer PERSONALLY as important, I would have wanted them to release the trade/ssf thing and the last masteries. The multiplayer should have been the last thing to release before 1.0. Even story should have been completed before it.
So while the release of the patch was a success, my personal opinion was a bit on the negative side.
2 Likes
For me, im a negative nancy.
I love the game, and think the patches have been okay. but the actual MP aspect? it feels really bad.
Not only did a lot of paladin stuff and other skills get changed that effects single player, but the MP didnt seem to work at all.
The load times are long in campaign, and the game simply stops working for me if there is 3+ people with heavy particle builds. Smite hammerdin and bowmage couldnt party together cause projectiles stopped spawning and monsters stopped taking damage.
We got hardstuck at mono lagon because if we tried to party for it, he would break.
The MP is there, it works kinda, but id say its far from a success story as far as MP goes.
Was the release a success?
I think so. I have been able to play with other people, which was something I’d been waiting for a TON.
Highlights:
– Multiple Vilatria’s mages on the screen at once: First off, when multiple Meteor Belts proc, you ain’t seein’ 
on the screen. Absolutely fabulous. Everyone I’ve streamed this to wants to get into the game. (Sidenote: Lightning Meteors just look like bolts from the sky? It was better when you saw the meteor bombs AND the lightning – Maybe make the graphics look like Ball Lightning? I dunno but something needs to be fixed here)
– Not a lot of people though really working AS A TEAM. Everyone still wants to bring their STRONK DEEPS toons and while you can lay WASTE to echoes, there’s very few people building toons for group play. As an example, I have built a freezemage around making sure that bossing, even at 300+% Health, have as little time as possible messing with my team.
What needs to be added for MP:
– Dedicated MP Dungeons a.k.a RAIDS
– Dedicated Support Passive Trees and Skill Point Node Trees
– Dedicated immediate group play SWAPPING of Passive/Skill points/Gear (essentially build slotting)
– Checkmark/Tooltip in Social for ROLES (Tank/DPS/Heal/Control) – No, I don’t want to turn LE into an MMO but still, the Holy Trinity IS the stereotype for a reason
TLDR: Right now there’s no need or reason to group up. FIX THAT.
2 Likes
Will not come, devs said on multipel occasions that they will never release content that requires a group.
Also heavily discussed and will very likely never come
I think as long as grouping up doesn’t have any major downsides, thats enough on its own already, then only people will do it, that actually WANT to do it and not because its “best” or “most efficient”.
This way you only get people to play it, who truely want it.
1 Like
I know what’s been said in the past. I’m hoping that changes over time.
network connection is ok but loading map to map sometimes take a long time, such as entering echoes, dungeons 2nd floor, especially in a party.
Bugs fixing are taking too long, server position is not match with local position from time to time, causing players stuck in somewhere; party members TP to another player usually ends up in a wrong location while playing dungeons; etc.
True, I mean they’ve never said that they’d rework LE to a racing game, but that video…
Also, LE doesn’t need to be made into a clone of the other big arpgs, there needs to be variety & as much as it is nice/qol/whatever to be able to easily switch between clear/single target, I’m glad you can’t 'cause otherwise your build decisions are irrelevant. Not that i want to denigrate your desires for LE, just saying I disagree with them.
3 Likes
That video is AWESOME! Needs to be a minigame somewhere in one of the secret access places.
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Similar situation to me. I had convinced my entire ARPG group to move with me from D2R / Grim Dawn to Last Epoch. None of them eventually came. However it was nothing to do with the launch of performance of 0.9. They were out the moment I explained the proposed trading system and the loss of skill points on skill respec to them. (Loss of progression is a huge no-no for ARPGs, outside dying).
Eventually I had almost convinced a few of them to give it a try, then we discovered the 20 Alt limit and that was that.
So from my point of view, not a success at all. A huge disappointment for me personally. I played 90% of my ARPGs in co-op over the past 10+ years, and I’ve had to play this more or less solo and it just isn’t fun for me. Especially since I gave it such a big build up to the group.
For me personally, no.
I’m glad that EHG received such an overwhelming amount of new players joining the game at 0.9 release. But that’s about it.
The quality of the game is worse than in 0.8.5. The state of bug fixing and balancing is horrible and sadly laughable at the same time. They add mechanics that are questionable and a reason to stop playing certain builds/classes.
From someone who is playing and supporting the game constantly since 2020 it’s just awful to see how the game turned out (compared to a year ago).
There are too many people not knowing pre 0.9 Last Epoch, sadly.
I reported bugs/exploits contantly, that have been fixed during open february mp testing but made it into 0.9 release again. It’s just frustrating when you have a list full of bugs that continues from patch to patch, hotfix to hotfix.
Stopped playing a while ago even before d4, don’t see a reason to come back soon.
I really hope EHG brings back the old quality because i still love the game, but it’s not fun atm.
6 Likes
So the mp “launch” was a failure because of stuff that wasn’t in 0.9 (& will be implemented later on, apart from the 20 character limit)?
Isn’t the 20 character limit also up for grabs as well? I may be misremembering but didn’t Mike say something about it was just an arbitrary number they’d picked initially and not something that’s too tied to server issues or what not and could potentially be increased in the future as they debate it?