Last Epoch: Orobyss, a major expansion, is coming to PC and PlayStation 5!

News
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But the game is considered ‘released’ currently, isn’t it?

1.0

Not 0.9… 0.10 or anything of the likes. It’s ‘the basis is done’, that is what a ‘release’ is after all.
You provide what you promise in the kickstarter as a basis and then build upon it.

Sure we can say ‘they can add it’… when exactly? Tomorrow? In a month? A year? 5 years? 50?
It is meaningless for a customer if their product arrives when their life has significantly changed and the expectation wasn’t set to take this long, hence tempering the willingness to buy into the product before it’s finished since it might not come when it’s relevant for you.

But EHG provided that it’ll be released in 2020, instead it happened in 2024… which people accepted but was the first massive mismanagement. From the end of the kickstarter to release it was supposed to be roughly 2 years, instead it took 6. That’s 200% extra to the timeframe expected. This is to be foreseen during project management itself with relevant leeway to ensure it happens earlier rather then later instead of what happened.

The next major mistake is what you describe even:

Yes, and that is a problem and not a boon of any kind.
The game was released despite the campaign not being finished. This is the issue here.

That’s a negative, showcases another mismanagement. Priorities not being set properly to enforce the company to go ahead and release because their expansion, timing and funds were not properly used to stay in the framework of the project.

Also the mass hiring regularly to bloat the company to over 100 workers total is a clear-cut sign of another layer of mismanagement. This size was existing for GGG around the times of Harbinger. Not only was PoE during that time already stable in playerbase but it also showcased a reliable amount of quality of releases. Major issues which were fixed in the first 2 weeks commonly with very few exceptions, something which EHG hasn’t provided us in those 3 Cycles yet, not even once. Not a single Cycle ‘cleaned up’ properly.
That combined with the monetization system and pricing system of EHG being completely different compared to what GGG does causes the revenue for the same amount of players to inherently be substantially lower.

Or in short: In comparison to company size EHG has magnitudes higher costs compared to incomes when we look at the specific time when they reached it compared to GGG.

Their business strategy of expanding beyond their limits is a commonly seen and flawed one, usually used by ‘AAA’ publishers a lot and leading to the regular mass-layoffs and failed projects.
To sustain that risks averse management has to happen since any mildly minor mistake can cause a net-negative of your funds, this means overhead of bureaucracy becomes large and slows results to a crawl unless the content pipeline is intricately crafted and refined, the specific area EHG always struggled with anyway. So this is clearly not the case.

The historical result of that is either a downsizing of the company early on or a failure of the complete system as it progresses, repeatedly overreaching, underperforming and loosing customer goodwill as time passes.
They’re at the tipping point for customer goodwill by now, which is a stage where recovery is becoming extremely unlikely already. Not only because massive changes had been mandatory since years by then (pre-release likely for 1-2 years, but actually since the kickstarter given the mismanagement visible) but by now those changes have to be even more severe and extreme.

If they don’t do em quickly then their product is first going to stagnate completely (which we can see already happening as they’re bleeding money) to then slowly rot away into nothingness… which is the relatively good outcome still. Games die vastly before servers are shut down, they start dieing when the playerbase looses interest, years before servers are even remotely thought about being shut down. We’re in that stage.

For us as the customer?
There is no difference.

As a customer you’re not supposed to care about reasons. You can provide goodwill… but providing this leeway regularly and repeatedly is not a positive but a negative. You’re excusing shoddy practices and normalizing them.
If you want a good product with good quality rather then lackluster mediocre stuff you gotta be critical and unyielding in regards to what was promised. You’re doing a exchange after all, your money acquired through giving up time of your life as well as very likely a positive experience (as most people are miserable from their jobs, the others are exceptions) in return for accepting a framework which they personally provided you with. It wasn’t you as a customer making demands… it was EHG saying ‘we’ll do it’. It’s their responsibility to uphold that.

Contracts don’t or they’re void :stuck_out_tongue:

No, hiring more is the guarantee of failure happening. Expansion until the setup cripples itself. Companies loose efficiency with size, they don’t gain it. Efficiency is gained through optimization of processes and allowing workers enough leeway to have the ability to enjoy their position.
Raising worker-size without having the respective systems in place to uphold efficiency has a adverse effect to it, a 20 people team with contractors for animation, art and voicelines rather then fixed workers would likely be vastly more efficient then the current 100 people sized tangled mass.

Not expected at all!

Finish the damn game before making people pay for extra shit though. That’s below the basics even. It’s not even something we should need to argue about in the first place.

Get the darn campaign done.
Fix the disaster which the factions are.
Handle itemization issues because the game systems don’t scale properly.

And then they can even start thinking about anything related to ‘expansion’ monetization.
Until then it’s simply unacceptable.

Obviously the base game on the PS5 will cost the base price, but anything beyond is also unacceptable.

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This 100%

Crossprogression and I hope to god our supporterpacks work on PS5 too. I only play it on my crappy PC because it wasn’t available on PS5… :wink:

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Honestly if this is a paid expansion I’ve lost all hope in EHG. I’ve stuck with them from the very beginning, through some decisions I didn’t agree with (prioritizing multiplayer over getting the actual game finished), and still opted to buy supporter packs and MTX to support them when they released 1.0. Hearing the Krafton news shocked me, but I maintained trust and really believed it might be the cash injection the company needed.

If this is a paid expansion I would do a full 180 on them. From a company I respected and supported they would turn into absolute liars who I would lambast endlessly. I’d demand my money back for the supported packs and even the game based on false advertising (there are many MANY instances the devs have assertively said there would be no paid expansions and that additional revenue would be made through MTX). That’s why I bought MTX. The only way this could work is if money spent on MTX also directly unlocks paid expansions. You can’t have it both ways EHG.

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If this is true, why do I who have been playing since beta still feel this as a major hurdle? In fact in beta it was a lot better than it is now! Also if this is true, why do you think that most people quit once they hit empowered monoliths and please don’t come with the excuse that it’s too easy. That just doesn’t flies with anyone who can think and breath at the same time. No one would quit because it’s too easy at the point where a game not only has become significantly harder but also where you can aggressively start scaling difficulty. That makes no sense whatsoever.

You say the repetitiveness is the major problem of this game and I say it isn’t. While I agree that the mapping system isn’t good enough and only PoE 1 has made a good mapping system in the history of mapping systems in ARPGs (yes even PoE 2 mapping system is bad), that isn’t the problem. Let’s look at PoE 1 for a minute here. You can remove ALL side content from the game. You can remove pinnacle bosses, you can remove delve, incursion, etc. Just leave basic mapping in it and assuming you can still get the necessary gear people will play that easily for a month just doing the same thing over and over again because it’s fun.

The problem is exactly what I detailed. People are not able to progress, they are hitting a very real gear wall (I’m counting blessings as part of gear as well) and they are quitting because not being able to progress and dying constantly doesn’t makes for very engaging and fun gameplay.

The very good players can compensate with skill sure, but is the game viable with 1 to 10% of it’s current population? Considering it was already not viable to the point the company had to be sold I’d say no, it isn’t. The game has to be balanced not around the top players but around the average player and as such it’s time we stop pretending we don’t see what is going on and face reality. People can’t handle the content because right now even basic progression is too hard and tombs/cemeteries have only made it much, much worse.

The game will either smooth out the difficulty spikes and make sure the player is always going to be able to keep progressing is character or the game will die out.

Granted, if Krafton doesn’t gets the memo which is, we need to fix the issues with the game, not add egregious monetization then it will only die very, very fast.

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PoE’s yearly expansions aren’t.

The supporter packs?

Just like they were saying for years that masteries were a permanent choice & we know how that ended.

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I work in Contracts, and technically they can be changed through modifications that both parties sign and agree to. In my case this is normally just modifications to update how much funding is available for our company to spend on the work, but occasionally we have modifications that update or revise the Terms and Conditions of the contract.

Also, there’s a lot of

going around in this thread.

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The real problem here is communication. There is not enough communication which will turn this news into a shitstorm, which should have been obvious.

Making an expansion for an arpg has meant two things in the past:

  1. Your ARPG has no seasonal content (Grim Dawn for example)
  2. You have not enough faith in your game / the playerbase so that you are looking for financial safty hooks.

LE clearly is a seasonal game so No. 1 is out of the window. If we look at the player numbers, we get close to the core problem: not enough whales. Any live service game is carried by players that invest huge amounts of money. Because these players make only between 0,1 and 1,0 % of a playerbase, you need a gigantic playerbase to be profitable.

You get new players by pumping out content and refining your game. EHG can’t do either of these two things. Together with the announcement that the major feature for the skill system is not coming in season 4 like everybody anticipated that leaves a grim impression.
My 2 cents:

  • the playerbase is not growing fast enough
  • the mtx system is bare bones and not capable of generating the income they need even if the player base would be growing fast
  • the team is too small / unexperienced to deliver a live service game

I think the decision to make seasons was the deal breaker for Last Epoch. They could have gone the way Grim Dawn did: Make an Expac once a while with a small team. I am pretty sure that we all would have bought a 30 or even 40 dollar expac every year or 2 years.
Now they need a huge sum of money, a bigger team and different processes to cater to the seasonal content player base.

For me this means that neither Krafton nor EHG belief they can deliver all the things a D4 or PoE2 scale arpg needs in time. No matter if the expac will have a price tag but they can always say: hey developing the expac takes time (I’d say we talk about 1 to 2 years from now) when ask why there isn’t coming more content. All major system overhauls will be put into the expac.

TLDR: EHG can’t handle seasonal content creating anymore and the expac will be used as an excuse to work on major system changes.

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I’m not quite sure why you think that contractors are magically more efficient than employees. They can be got rid of more easily, they’re more expensive, they can be more skilled but that’s not a guarantee (I’ve worked with some not particularly effective contractors & even replaced one) & they’ll still require the same kind of systems in place to manage their work flow effectively as employees.

Which is clearly why you have thousands of one man bands churning out high quality games in a few months right?

Which is disappointing given how EHG were pre-launch & death threats.

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If this is a paid expansion, then I’m out. A promise was made that ALL updates are free.

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I dont mind paying for supporter packs but I have 0 interest on paying for an expansion, please if its payed reconsider.

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Dunno, one of many reason, or several of them.

Maybe you’re bad at making builds.
Maybe you’ve got bad pattern recognition.
Maybe you’ve got bad dexterity.
And so on and so forth.

Could be a lot of stuff. Ask yourself that, not me.

Absolutely! And I called that out repeatedly by now, EHG doesn’t improve their game properly, they’re making specific areas worse.

First of all… why would I say ‘because it’s too easy’? That wouldn’t make sense for the difficulty spike now, would it?

Even for someone who doesn’t have problems with a difficulty spike, one existing is a grating experience, it doesn’t feel nice, stuff starts suddenly not being ‘smooth’ anymore. Not as much fun.

Also it’s the exact same content you’ve ‘beaten’ already. Same map, same perceived difficulty. A slider like corruption gives the mind far less enjoyment to improve compared to a distinct fixed goal of some sort.

The next is that by that time you’re already playing several hours in end-game and plainly spoken… LE’s end-game is lackluster, always was, still is. You don’t full clear, you don’t choose a focus of a specific gradually improving mechanic, you don’t go for boss-fights… you go in, rush down rare mobs (and whatever else along the way) to do a cemetery/tomb and then be gone as swiftly as you entered.
With some monoliths utterly rushing you non-stop with tons of enemies at a harsh pace and others feel like a empty wasteland.

Nothing is coherrent and reliable. Mob density isn’t, layout isn’t, mob types aren’t, mechanics aren’t, there is no player agency, that burns people out quick.

And specifically during the traversion from normal monoliths to empowered the game switches over to exalted items. From the former smooth progression system EHG built up to a sudden very very grating RNG-fiesta.

How many reasons do you need for people potentially stopping?
The difficulty itself never was the reason, it being a spike without proper preperation is though. Together with the myriad of other issues all creeping up during that time.

At which point people stop playing really swiftly.
It has the same issue as LE then, you got no control over your content and also no player agency for picking it so variety is created.

People generally can only do the same stuff ‘so long’, and GGG has a great method nowadays to alleviate that… 3 Atlas passive trees. ‘I’m sick of betrayal, I’ll run Blight’ as an example. Feels different, is a sort of ‘vanity’ for the brain, reduces mental exhaustion significantly. Hence more playing and hence more repeated playing… people don’t quit as easily.

What you describe about stripping down the game is not a realistic outcome for the vast majority of players. Only a miniscule fraction are the ‘forever players’ and those don’t give up because of a difficulty spike anyway, they’re playing for the sake of playing, any type of progress suffices there.

If I’m at the top 10% of the player population we got an issue definitely. I’m at best in the top 30-20%.

And no, the game is not viable with such a population, but that’s majorly because it’s also not viable with the current one :joy:
If it’s core audience it stays viable with a fraction, those are the paying players after all.

You seem to misunderstand. The company changed owners, the company didn’t see a cent… the owners are now rich. That’s it. The company still has the same funds on paper then before.

You mean like any ‘AAA’ published slob? Making a game for everyone until it isn’t one for anyone?

I see history repeating itself.

You don’t do that, you make a game with a specific target audience and make it as fun as possible for those people. It doesn’t matter if you get 100 active people with it or 100000. As long as you know who you target and hence work at scale towards that it works out to at least not loose you money.
You loose money when you make mistakes, just that knowing what is a mistake isn’t too clear for most people.

Otherwise games like Silksong wouldn’t be so well received… or do you think Silksong is made after the ‘average platform player’? That’s absolutely not the case and it nonetheless sold 8 million copies in a friggin week, despite the first one already being quite hard.

You pick a audience, you do everything to cater to their enjoyment, you ignore everyone else, simple as that. Excellence comes from precision, not from embracing everyone and their aunt.

It’s just nonsensical balance overall, the content is easy still.

You gotta differentiate between ‘difficulty’ and simply being a one-shot or having hefty spongy health-bars. That’s not difficulty, that’s a design-failure.
Nobody likes to be one-tapped from the edge of the screen randomly by making a single minor mistake and nobody likes endlessly clobbering onto the same mob.
Both those cases simply need to be handled, and EHG is awful in doing that, they made it worse rather then better.

Yes, that I agree with, absolutely! But it doesn’t have to do with it being difficult or not difficult. Simply fluctuating nonsensical differences are exhausting.

Which makes ‘terms of service’ updates which remove your ability to use a product already paid actually theoretically unlawful. Hence ‘we changed our license agreement, agree or you can’t play’ is not a valid option.

So unless the customer then willingly agrees… no… it cannot be changed, and if the access is removed entirely because of it it would actually be cause for a refund.

But I get the gist of what you wanna say, and since it’s been normalized for years (because nobody overreached massively, but now they do) it’s not been handled properly anymore.

Because you can give them a framework and payment is based upon completion of the stuff within the respective framework. It reduces overhead, which does reduce costs.
The downside is that it can take substantially longer and legal has to be a bit bigger to handle conflicts when contractors do their work badly.

No fulfilled contract? No money! Unlike a salary worker which gets a monthly payments no matter if they fulfill their goals or not.

It only depends on how the contracting is done, but ‘result based income’ is better for both the worker and the company in the long term. Unless you’re a shit worker… then it’s bad for you :stuck_out_tongue:

Nobody said ‘in a few months’ there, you added that.
Why would anyone expect a single person or a small group to do that? The expectation for that isn’t there after all, obviously so!
But if a 100 worker company can’t do it? :wink: You see where it goes?
Stay small, only expand when it can be afforded with guarantee and everything is in place and handled beforehand. And better make sure twice to get stuff handled first rather then scrambling around like headless chickens afterwards.

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Making the seasons was not the deal breaker. The game has always been design to be played as an online game. Grim Dawn is balanced around single player only which is why it works out on that business model but for Last Epoch they’d need to overhaul the entirety of the game to do such a radical change. Seasons with MTX as the way to make money is the correct choice but their poor choice of balance coupled with listening to the top players instead of the average players has lead to the current situation.

The MTX team certainly isn’t doing very well either, the MTX leave a lot to be desired in most cases and they certainly ain’t pumping out enough MTX either but the quality is the bigger point here.

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If only they would listen to the top-players…

Their issue is they listen to random stuff without any rhyme or reason.

‘We want pinnacle content now!’ was a really dumb thing to lean into when the core gameplay isn’t even handled.
‘We want mastery respec!’ was a really dumb thing to lean into when your replay-value is already surprisingly low for the genre.
‘We want…’ you get the gist.

You cannot simply ‘listen to your audience’ you also need to have a friggin clue at the basis what your game needs in the first place.

And yes… the MTX of EHG is lower mid at best, with far too few coming in. Their pipeline for any sort of content is simply atrocious.

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My take on paid or free is this:
The trailer ending with “Wishlist now” + Krafton strongly suggests paid content.

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While I do sometimes make my builds I make them when I know very well what I’m doing. That being said I play builds that are considered some of the best builds that exist, an example, in 1.2 I played a “Righteous Fire” paladin. One of the most tanky and very high damage builds, still got completely destroyed as soon as I started doing cemeteries in empowered.

As for me being bad at stuff. Not really, I am average at worst, potentially a little above average since I do have a lot of time to play and even then I constantly die once I hit empowered and this is the experience for most players.

This would make sense if people were quitting at various points in the game but as EHG said in 1.2. Most players quit as soon as they hit empowered monoliths. There is a very clear point that they were doing fine until then and as soon as they reached that point, something changed that made them stop wanting to play.

We do know there is a spike in difficulty, we know there is a difficulty with farming specific gear and that trading is in a bad state and we know that ALL builds rely heavily on grand blessings to shore defenses.

While my own experience is only one and not statistical data by itself alone. It also aligns with here the problem is and that problem is the difficulty. Now you can break down the difficulty into several bite sized smaller problems like gearing, getting the blessings, enemies power ramping a bit too much all of a sudden but all of that is part of what creates the difficulty.

You really believe this? Clearly you don’t know the story of PoE 1.

PoE 1 started as a hardcore game, it always had a tiny player base and because GGG wanted more players the made ascendency and for 2 and half years they made the game easier until they started making it harder again with delve. Now let’s look at the Pre delve player base retention where you had almost no side content and not even an atlas tree. the player loss over a 1 month period was about 50% of the player base. The player retention loss about a year or two after delve where you had more side content and a harder game is 50% player loss in the first week alone.

As long as the core experience is good, you don’t need that much side content. Side content is for very good players who like to go for hard challenges. The average player is plenty happy to blast maps, kill mobs by the hundreds with very little opposition and get some cool stuff every now and then. In the case of PoE it will be currency for the most part.

So no, you are absolutely wrong when you say that doing the same thing over and over again is not fun. It can be fun and PoE very much proved that, unfortunately even PoE failed to understand it’s success formula and is now a much worse game than it has been in the past.

If you get past empowered monoliths and into pushing corruption, you are guaranteed in the top 10% players. Like, the kind of players that even get to 500 corruption is less than 1%.

When you are a good player, it’s hard to recognize what is good or average because to you it feels like you are just average or maybe a little bit good at best and the average to you looks like the worst possible players imaginable. Want to know how I know this? I used to play WoT and I was a good/very good player according to data mining sites. I started watching my father playing the game at the time and I thought he was awful at the game because i could see how he was doing so many things wrong that I didn’t. When i went to look up what was his skill rating, turns out he was perfectly average. It was an eye opener for me. When you are good, you lose the ability to even understand what is average because average looks very bad to you.

True I suppose. That money is meant to be paying salaries and keep the game afloat for a while as it was said but realistically, it is naive to think that’s how the money will be used. It’s more likely a safety net that if the game fails the owners still got to cash out.

Because the triple A industry isn’t making games for everyone. They are purposefully making slop marking it for “the modern audience” when the modern audience doesn’t even exists to begin with.

That being said nothing prevents you from having a targeted audience. Ideally what would be the target audience of LE? ARPG players with average skill at these kind of games. Sure enough you can make it hardcore. Good luck competing with PoE 1 and 2 or make it for the worst players in the world, but good luck competing with the brand that is D4 at that point. You literally have nothing in the middle. You have no game aimed at the average player. The player that isn’t good enough to be doing PoE because there isn’t enough base player power and it’s impossible to make currency to buy gear at an average player’s rate and the player is not going to have fun playing D4 which is basically brain dead and the mechanics aren’t even fun to begin with.

LE was always meant to be this middle point in between D4 and PoE and is often referred to as being that but in reality is isn’t, it never was. It is a lot closer to PoE than an actual middle point between D4 and PoE and because it is significantly harder than it should, we can see very clearly the point where people are quitting the game.

When I say the game should be balanced around the average player, I’m not saying this is a game for everyone. There are no games for everyone, all games have a targeted audience, I’m just saying we should shift from hardcore ARPG players to average ARPG players.

This is all part of difficulty. If you die frequently in what is meant to still be considered early end game, then it is too hard. Sure enough you can smooth out some of the problems but I can guarantee that is not enough. Let’s go over one simple example. Many builds rely on having all or almost all of it’s physical resistance come from a grand blessing. This means that until you get it you are taking massive damage from physical which is the most abundant damage type.

You can say that I can compensate by adding that on gear and taking it out later when I don’t need but that was 1 example and getting those resistance means not getting other things that also are part of defensive layers as one thing is being traded out for another. Couple this with the difficulty to get good gear pieces that you actually manage to upgrade to a reasonable point and you have a huge gearing problem in your hands.

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Where was it designed to be played as an online game? There is a fully fledged offline mode. There is no real group content in the game. Multiplayer was introduced shortly before launch. The MTX shop was a bad joke most of the time. For MTX to work you need a huge player base and that won’t be the case with a game that isn’t even finished. That’s why everybody was scratching their head when they announced that there will be multiplayer BEFORE the game was finished.

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I’m so hyped!!!

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looked at your link .it don’t say anything about free expansions.

plus The planned pay model changed from then and when i bought the game there was no level to 20 then pay .

Things change I will look at it and see what it is and price and dec then.

I have bought exp for d3 plus the necro both where well worth the money

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Exactly. I was speaking from a general “contracts can technically be changed” POV. Unless the language explicitly states the Owner can, at their own discretion, update the terms of service. Then it’s unlawful for them to update the contract without your consent. Usually this is handled by sending a “We’ve updated our Policy” notification which you then must click “I Agree” to. But some games do have a EULA that states they have full creative control and can make any changes they want. I remember quoting the EULA for a game when people were complaining about a change the company made, and I was like “read the EULA, don’t like it? Don’t play it.”

Edit:
Found it, it was for Vermintide 2 when they had removed support for Windows 7 iirc.

8. Patches, Updates and Changes
You acknowledge and accept that from time to time, Fatshark may patch or update the Game for any purpose, including but not limited to resolving software bugs or other issues, rebalancing the Game or adding and/or removing features in the Game.

This clause states “for any purpose including but not limited to”, which means they could update the game to remove all enemies and make it a walking simulator and you wouldn’t be able to sue them. I skimmed through LE’s EULA and they don’t have an equivalent clause though. Nor do they have anything that I saw that referenced the ability to unilaterally update the EULA. So if they made changes, they’d have to notify the players, and the players would have to accept the changes by playing the game anyway to make it binding. To be specific:

By downloading, installing, accessing, or making use of any part of the Website, Materials, and/or Services, You agree to the Terms of Use and accept to be bound to the terms therein. These Terms of Use affect Your legal rights and obligations. If You do not completely agree to all of the policies, rules, and Terms of Use, You may not use the Services.

So, if they change the EULA, uninstall and stop playing or accessing their websites or you’re considered “in agreement”

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Your judgement paladin from patch 1.2 character name of Judgement_Dreed has very low EHP and only a max physical hit of 2425.

This low amount of EHP is a recipe for disaster and will result in a lot of 1 shots. It is important to build proper defences in this game as you start to enter empowered monoliths so you can better handle the difficulty spike.