This is going to be negative, because this is the thing that stood out the harshest and it jammed up what was otherwise an incredible experience. There’s something funky going on with the way zones load when connecting to other people that results in the bug where the camera breaks, massive desync, busted respawn buttons, or all of the above. The part that irritates me the most is that they all work just fine in single player. I can blast through the story in a night or two solo with minimal drama, but with the boys it took us upwards of a week to chew through it thanks to all the downtime.
I think it’s something to do with my absolutely atrocious internet (1.1 mbps down, 750kb up, DSL), because I noticed whenever we were having major desync/loading issues my internet usage would spike well beyond what I’ve seen from other games, let alone an ARPG.
Specifically what would happen is that we would all pass through a door, and I would have to sit there and wait for my client to load and play catchup with the other two before I could do anything. This made bosses a particularly huge pain in the ass, because sometimes I would die and get stuck there, before seeing a respawn button that doesn’t work. Another kick in the cock was that there’s some areas that are so short that I wouldn’t even get the chance to kill something before my friends hit the next door. Specifically the Coral Pools resulted in disconnects whenever I tried to load it.
It also seems like the game shits itself when there’s too many enemies on screen, almost like it’s buckling when trying to pass off that much information. Big corpse explosions caused a lot of desync, which I experienced mostly in the Lagon zones and the zombie events early on. There was one point in the temple where there was an explosion so big that I got hung up on desync for upwards of two seconds.
I’m not going to compare LE to any other games because it’s got it’s own thing going, but I will say that I hope I don’t have to go somewhere else for a smooth ARPG with co-op. When the game’s humming along it’s perfect for me and my friends and smooth as butter, but inevitably the desync jumps out and halts the vibe.
A smaller point of feedback is that, even with the built in scaling, enemies in co-op still feel squishy as hell. It seems hard to balance, at the starts of zones we really felt the hp increase, but by the halfway through we were just facetanking things and steamrolling bosses. I won’t complain too hard about it, but I’d like to see enemies juiced up just a touch more.
Point of positive feedback to balance it out: I dunno how you guys are doing it, but being able to play ahead just a little bit, and having your friends catch up with no problems in a smooth and quick manner is incredible. Absolutely a lifesaver because I’d be way behind because of all the resets and logouts.