Multiplayer Dev Q&A with Steelmage - Transcribed

AndrewTilley · September 23, 2022, 2:08pm

Dev Q&A Continued…

Q: A big part about going from single player to multiplayer, specifically in terms of server authority, is that those arena leaderboards are now going to be very secure, right?

Judd: Correct.

Dan: We’re really excited for that. I do love to see those and we’re well aware – we watched the ladders over the entire lifespan of Last Epoch and we can tell when there’s a cheater, we can tell when people are cheating but it looks like they’re not. We see all those instances, but when it’s fully online and fully authoritative then yeah, we have a lot more control right up front from it and we’ll have the ability to actually view player behaviours if we’re finding any other kind of exploits. We’re super excited to be able to provide a leaderboard that we can trust as a real competitive experience. We’re super stoked to get that back.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: There was another question as well asking about the possibility of other kinds of leaderboards?

Steelmage: So I know you guys like events, which is really cool – like community events and maybe you guys run your own sort of races and stuff like that. Outside of that, assuming you’re continuing to support that, are there plans maybe to have campaign leaderboards or maybe boss leaderboards or anything like that?

Dan: Can I leak-ish what we’ve been thinking about?

Judd: What we’ve been thinking about. There’s nothing set in stone yet. There’s definitely lots of conversations happening but yeah, Dan go ahead.

Dan: Yeah, we – me myself personally I’ve always loved non-traditional achievements. I love to do things that are say not standard or really bizarre. I love things like the insane achievement in WoW or like some of the really bizarre unnecessary ones. It’s something we want to explore. We’d love to add leaderboards for things that are non-traditional and don’t pertain to simply just being the highest skill, fastest, longest playing player. So we are exploring it. Like Judd said, there’s no plans yet but there’s a bunch of us who love those kind of leaderboards and achievements and it’s something we want to think a lot about.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: The current dungeon system is great but has minor issues with certain boss mechanics feeling impossible for certain builds, something that goes against not needing a dash on every character design and mobs being able to off screen you. Do you have plans for this?

Mike: I mean the short answer is we’re still tuning them, we’re still tuning all the bosses, and there’ll be some changes that are coming in 0.9 for sure. I think the higher tiers of the bosses are designed for people who’ve done them quite a number of times and hopping right into those higher tier ones is definitely a risky endeavor for most players – so I’d be careful about that. We do want them to be challenging and the mechanics to be tight. So there’s…probably the mechanic that’s “requiring a dash” that’s being referenced is the Lightless Arbor phase one boss where it like smashes the ground pretty big. You can do that without a dash on the highest tier, it’s really hard, but it requires anticipating the attack basically and it’s probably too fast right now as it is.

I think that looking at having mechanics scale with the tier is something that we’ll be interested in doing as well. So we already have that where early tiers are easier than harder tiers mechanically, and we’re probably looking to expand that as well so you can learn the fight a little bit better because sometimes you hop into tier one and you don’t realize it’s a one shot, you die, and you have to do the whole thing over again. That’s another problem we’re looking into. There’s different problems at opposite ends of the tier spectrum there that we’re looking at addressing.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will there be changes to the monolith system to make the process less painful for players that enjoy making alts? Currently, having to get empowered monolith’s on every character is a chore especially when the mid portion isn’t as challenging relative to the strength most builds can achieve at that point.

Mike: Yeah, I think this is definitely more of an issue for very enfranchised players – people who are very familiar with the system and have a lot of gear that they are able to pop onto their characters early. It is sort of a process that we think is important for people starting their second, their third character ever and they’re still in that learning process. We’re still exploring ways that we can cater to both of those types of players. It’s a work in progress still. We don’t have anything specific to share on how we’re going to address that yet.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What’s the plan for more outdated skills that are not being used? For example, skills like Tempest Strike, Summon Bear, Ice Thorns, etc.

Dan: For sure. Plans for Tempest Strike are uncertain at the moment. There’s a prototype of it as a much higher power, higher cost skill that feels good, but the rest of the selection for Primalist would need to be adapted to account for what we feel Tempest Strike delivers. For Summon Bear, it’s very clear – it will receive a new model and a skill tree. Ice Thorns is going to be replaced. It was almost removed in one of our prior patches but we ultimately felt that we needed to keep it for the time being until we have another solution.

For outdated skills, we tend to certainly target those as the highest need for improvements – the things that look the worst are definitely critical to us, and things that perform bad from a balance standpoint does matter as well. We’ll have better data on those kind of things as we’re actually online and can kind of see those things a bit better.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Any plans on adding auto-cast for various skills of all classes?

Dan: Yeah, for sure…I mean the fundamental there is that if something is regularly being auto-cast in every situation that there’s no decision making be made into that than that’s an issue with the actual skills design itself rather than the act of automating. If it’s most effective to use it passively why is it actually an active skill? For most builds we do want players to feel like they can put five active skills on their bar to have a variety of tools for killing enemies.

We do like a certain level of automation for people, you know, with RSI. We want to reduce the amount of clicks, the things we were talking about yesterday, but when it comes to auto-casting it’s often – when it gets to the level of say the auto-bombing build that is public right now it’s often an issue with a skills design and we want to try to change how that is enabled without completely destroying the identity of what the result is.

Steelmage: Yeah, I’ve got one of those at level 100 in hardcore right now.

Dan: I know.

Steelmage: That’s a fun build dude. Maybe there’s a place for builds like that. I guess it’s like you said, maybe at that point there should be an aura or something.

Dan: Yeah that build in particular is super cool. We would not just go and destroy the viability of what that is but we want to kind of adjust how it’s modified – there’s an ongoing conversation right now about it so I can’t speak too much specifically about that build at the moment.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: This guy’s asking about cutscenes…well, they’ve already mentioned that.

Judd: Yeah, we have a number of cutscenes being developed right now that you guys will experience throughout the campaign, oftentimes at the start and end of chapters, but we have quite a few of them coming along. We’re really excited about getting those to everyone. Those won’t be in 0.9 but we’re hoping to have those in the game by 1.0.

Steelmage: That’ll be awesome. I’m a cutscene enjoyer.

Mike: It’s going to help a lot for just getting the storyline across and getting people immersed in it. I think it’ll help a lot.

Judd: Yeah, there’s a lot of presentational elements to the story being improved right now. A lot of the chapter content that was developed in the game was done early on when we were a much smaller studio with way less resources. We now have a new world and story lead, we have all the dialogue being rewritten, we have NPC portraits, we’re having custom NPC’s being developed for all of the major characters, voice acting across the game. If you look at chapter nine, the latest chapter we have in the game…we call it chapter H internally, but it’s the one – I won’t spoil it in case somebody has gotten there. But if you look at that, every chapter that we go back and retouch we want it to be at least that level of quality.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: So right now it’s not too clear when one act finishes and another begins. The story is great but sometimes it can feel difficult to care. Any plans on improving how the story is related to the player?

Steelmage: I think I have noticed that, like sometimes I’ll enter a town and I’m not aware that that is now the beginning of a new act.

Judd: Yeah and that goes back to the kind of answers I gave a second ago – just the story presentation that we are touching on right now with the addition of cutscenes, dialogue being fully voice acted, some chapters being completely reworked. I don’t think we’ve actually announced all the chapters that we’re completely reworking, but those of you that are long time players probably can point to a couple that you would suspect and those would be the targets.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Any plans on making XP useful after level 100? I keep suggesting converting XP into something useful like crafting materials, adding on LP, or something else to just keep XP relevant.

Mike: We have some plans and we’ve definitely seen some really good suggestions from the community. I don’t know if I’ve seen exactly what I think the front runner is right now, but yeah…

Judd: We actually do have an answer for this, but it’s not time to unveil that just yet. But yes, we will have a reason to continue.

Steelmage: I will admit I was playing my level 100 character before we did this and the XP bar not really doing anything is a bit – I mean this is a big problem in PoE as well, the only difference is in PoE you’d never hit 100 pretty much because it takes forever. However, when you do it’s like…yeah you do have that problem in PoE.

Mike: That level 95 to 100 stretch of experience is something we’re definitely looking at elongating a little bit as well. The relative power you’re getting from levels at that stage is so small compared to the relative power you get at earlier levels that it’s less important to even hit 100 and it’s more of an achievement than a requirement for a build.

Steelmage: I remember a thread about this. I think there was one about death penalty as well and people were really like, how do I put this…it’s a hard sell to say you’re making the grind a little bit longer isn’t it?

Mike: Yep.

Steelmage: It’s not going to be that bad, I imagine?

Mike: No.

Steelmage: It’ll be fine chat, it’ll be fine.

Mike: Some of it comes from the idea that the game starts at max level. There’s other games that have like – I’ll use WoW as the extreme example. WoW doesn’t really start for a lot of people until you hit max level and we’re definitely not that model. Endgame in Last Epoch starts way before you hit max level. Hitting max level is not your mark of like ‘okay now I get to start playing the game’.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will we see the return of Flanking Strike in some fashion?

Steelmage: I’m not familiar with this but it’s a question from the Reddit.

Judd: I loved Flanking Strike. The initial concept for Flanking Strike – we never really got the functionality in to be exactly what we wanted the skill to actually do. At this point…probably not, but we’ll see. We will be continuing to add skills to classes well after release. We’ve talked a little bit about the fact that we are very interested in adding additional masteries to classes which would give us an opportunity to add quite a few more skills. So Flanking Strike itself…maybe, maybe not. We didn’t get it in the correct way the first time we had it. We eventually did have to remove it so we’ll have to see on that one.

Mike: For anyone who doesn’t know, Flanking Strike was an ability that dashed you and one of your minions to the target and so both of you attacked it simultaneously from range.

Judd: When I had first concepted that it was that your companion would take aggro on the target and then you would dash and intercept and strike the target. In my head it was way cooler.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Could it be possible to get random damage types on unique’s? Like fire or cold or just generic damage.

Steelmage: I think you guys have talked about this. This is the adaptive damage system, right?

Dan: Yeah, so our changes there to additive damage are going to significantly increase the viability of options. In the past we added adaptive spell damage which was really popular and we love. We realized that’s something we wanted to do to enable and empower melee builds without feeling limited. I’d say we’re definitely going to keep looking at how to improve the viability of items for a wider variety of builds. We don’t want to like – I don’t want to say we’re going to move towards homogenizing things. That’s not what we’re doing. We want to make things generally useful, which is our goal. We want to mix that with really specifically curated ideas.

I mentioned yesterday that right now we actually have 300 planned unique items and we want those to be not one direction or the other. We want some to actually be for particular builds, or be more generally useful. So yeah, I think people are going to see a huge difference in the open beta with the additive damage changes that we’ve done.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Since there’ll be cycles in the future, will there be a challenge system to them with seasonal rewards? Also, asking about cosmetics, will there be cool wings?

Dan: For the first part, we definitely think challenges are very cool and it’s something we want to explore. We were talking a little bit about it earlier, but non-traditional challenges that aren’t just say beat the boss at X duration – we want to look at other stuff besides that. Having exclusive reasons to come check out new content in a cycle is something we really want to consider as well of course. For cool wings, I think Judd could answer that.

Judd: Yeah, so with our cosmetic system we definitely do have a back slot and we’re planning on doing a lot of things, such as things like capes that are really cool. We don’t have any wings that we are proceeding with creating at the moment. However, considering that the game is going to be producing these for many years into the future I would suspect that we’ll eventually have some wings. We’re probably not going to lead into them as hard as some other games in the genre though.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I’ve seen many questions regarding game balance in regards to trading and SSF, but I would like to ask a similar thing but something that’s more important to me. Is the game going to be balanced around hardcore? Especially if trading becomes popular then player power will rise up which might possibly indicate a need to raise monster damage which then disregards hardcore.

Dan: It’s a great question and I apologize that many of those cases that ask about whether or not we make decisions based off a particular thing the answer is almost always no. Will we be balancing around hardcore? No. Will we address hardcore game needs? Absolutely. We’ve definitely been making a solo self-found experience for a number of years because we’ve had it offline. It’s a great game that you can play yourself and now as we go online and we’re testing different formats for how trade will work we need to see how that has an impact on the years of effort we’ve put in behind the rest of the game.

With that said, hardcore mode is very important to us and we want to see what our changes do to it and then make adjustments to make sure it’s still a great experience. We don’t approach balance considerations by say picking a target first and aiming for it.

Source: YouTube Link

Steelmage: I just noticed, and I know you covered this yesterday, but I’m going to bring it up anyway. Who’s casting the ice, is that you Judd?

Judd: It is, yes.

[Judd is playing a Mage and using the Glacier skill]

Q: It’s really hard to see the ground with the ice everywhere so are there plans to do something about party play visual effects and all that?

Judd: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is something that we answered yesterday as well. Visual clarity on the screen is very, very important to us. Now that we actually have multiplayer up and we’re testing this we’re implementing new systems so that we can have certain portions of the effect appear on the client’s screen and not everybody else’s screen. For example, I typically play a Meteor build because I just absolutely love Meteor and we found that the targeting reticles on the ground are too visually obscuring for the other players in the party so we’re going to make it so the targeting reticles aren’t visible by the party. We’re also looking at all the skills in general and if they are obscuring the screen too much we will reduce them as needed. We’re very much on top of that one though, and I can absolutely see how Glacier is a little noisy right now.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What’s your favourite boss in the game and why?

Mike: My favourite boss is the Shade of Orobyss because of how varied it is and you never really know what mechanics you’re going up against when the fight starts. There’s always a bit of uncertainty in the fight and I just love that. You have to adapt on the fly how you’re going to play the fight when it starts. You can’t go in knowing like ‘okay, I got to prepare for this ability, this ability, I got to stack this resistance’. It’s always like ‘who knows what’s coming’ and I just love that.

Dan: For me, it’s Argentus because before we released Argentus we had – Argentus was incredibly overpowered and was using their abilities at a much higher rate than what we shipped. I remember I was testing it on – I believe it was a Sentinel at the time I was playing and I had a whole bunch of people jump into the voice channel watching me stream the test version of the boss that was way over-tuned and I was just sweating for like 20 minutes trying to kill it. It was just super epic, I love that fight, it’s just really intense. It’ll always be something that I remember being a really cool moment.

Judd: I’d probably go with Majasa. I was very impressed with what the team was able to accomplish – flexing some new tech, doing phase changes, implementing a lot of cool new VFX, and stuff for that fight. I thought that fight turned out really well. There’s just a lot of cool moments in development with Majasa and I’m happy with how it turned out.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are you happy that every class has unique movement skills rather than giving the same options?

Dan: Yes, definitely. We love having a specific variety in the distance, the type, the cooldowns, and the different mechanics of movement for the classes. I think it’s really important for the identities of the different playstyles of the classes and it’s something we have a lot of fun trying to adjust over time. I personally really love having the movement abilities being significantly different per class.

Mike: We actually did experiment with having a static movement ability – for every class having the same movement ability, having it be a set button on your bar, and all that sort of stuff. So we have experimented with different ways in there.

Judd: Yeah, we have a lot of conversations about class identity and we make sure that the vast majority of decisions that we make do refer to class identity and push that further. When we’re talking about adding some type of movement skill that everybody has there are some gameplay advantages to having that because you can create fights and know that everybody has this one button that they can use at the given time, but we prefer to make it so that all these classes feel distinct.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: On the topic of skills, someone was asking about the possibility of global skills – specifically in regards to unlocking a skill by maybe some sort of endgame system.

Dan: So in terms of like a global skill, there’s a lot of actual technical challenges behind it. For example, making sure animations like character models, the casting VFX, all of that need to kind of line up and look nice. You can really kind of get into a pretty ugly place with abilities by mixing and matching them. We’ve definitely explored the concept of what we can do to add some variety in future endgame systems that we’d want to add to the game. Nothing that we have planned we’d be discussing here but we’re really interested in thinking about that option but at the time being it’s really difficult to kind of have cross-skill viability like that. Though, we’re going to keep thinking about that through the future.

Steelmage: Yeah, maybe like an expansion down the line – some super endgame stuff.

Dan: Well, we had interesting – like the dungeon mechanics, dungeon abilities and I think that’s a space where you could see us now that we’ve learned some lessons about how that works. We’re probably going to get a little bit more innovative with the dungeon abilities, for example, in the future.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: So should we just talk about trade again? I mean, because a lot of people keep asking about trade. Could we talk about that in a sort of generic sense because I know nothing is ready to announce yet, but do you have any like stories about discussions regarding trade? Like what happened with the bazaar?

Judd: I mean, trade is just so important and the implications are so large that we’ve had discussions about trade more than absolutely anything in the game period. We’ve been having those discussions at this point for five years without actually putting out anything in the wild. We have, as a very large proponent of players in the genre, we’ve played all of these games and people that we continue to hire play these games for thousands of hours and we know what comes from just even small decisions to trade.

We know that we’re not going to make absolutely everybody happy with any type of trade system that we put out there. So we really have to go back to the roots of what is Last Epoch and how we’ve built this game to be played and make sure that the trading system that we implement into the game does not overrule or adulterize what we’ve created here. We’ve created a game that the experience of going and finding loot and crafting that loot does feel good at the moment so we want to make sure that doesn’t change. There’s been an absolute ton of conversations on trade – it’s been excessive.

Steelmage: Yeah, I’d love to peep one of those conversations but maybe after trade’s released.

Judd: Yeah, you know, I can at least say that with the conversations that we have with trade we finally have nearly the entire team on board with the decision that we’re trialing in the near future. It makes sense to nearly every single person on the team and that’s a really good indication that we’ve arrived at something that we think is good for Last Epoch.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: If you could go back and give your past selves advice when you were first starting the project, what would you say?

Steelmage: So I think I heard you guys talk about your roots and how it started out as very bare bones sort of like, you know, like a dream.

Judd: Yeah…yeah, a lot of lessons learned on the way here. We’ve had a very non-traditional path getting from where we started to where we are right now and we’ve learned a ton of things on the way. It’s hard not to just say like, ‘go ultra-hard in securing funding to start off with the server authoritative model from the get-go’ because that probably has been our biggest challenge. We’re very happy with how we’ve progressed in that now, but it’s definitely been the biggest heartache.

Dan: For me yeah, the blood answer is have a ton of money to make server authority from day one. Other than that there’s not a whole lot I would change because this has been one of the most fun things I’ve ever gotten to do in my life – is we get to make an ARPG. We’re improving it every day, we’re building it, we’re here together finally playing after all these years. I’m still pretty overwhelmed by that honestly. So yeah, I wouldn’t really change a lot.

Mike: If I was going to say something I would say to myself ‘it’s going to be worth it, just keep pushing’.

Dan: Yeah, same here.

Judd: It’s been a blast. I mean, it’s a dream come true being able to be at the state that we are and the journey has also been very, very enjoyable.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Has anyone asked about num-lock skills being available to people without a numpad? Like your Void Knight auto-bomber.

Steelmage: Yeah, like they said, if people are num-lock tricking than the skill’s probably going to be fundamentally changed to not delete that playstyle but not require the num-lock trick, right?

Dan: Yeah and we’re super mindful…like if someone doesn’t have a numpad and is trying to automate there’s an accessibility request there which is something we care a lot about. So things like that we are mindful of. Again, we’re really mindful of how many clicks it takes to play our game and we’re – if Judd’s RSI says anything to you we’re very happy to keep that manageable.

Judd: Yeah, but we have the five skills in the action bar and we want those to be active skills. If you notice there are a number of skills that we could just leave as more so passive abilities – like your companions on the Primalist or your summons on the Acolyte or your auras on the Paladin, but we try to make it so that if you have a button on your bar you can press it to activate something. If it just always needs to be pressed then that is a passive effect.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: A lot of people are asking about pricing and stuff like that regarding MTX, and also I see this a lot…people ask constantly about a Steam sale.

Judd: Yeah, I mean pricing for MTX is something that we’ll release at a time where we can give reasoning behind it. It’s probably not the best method of communication just to unveil that type of information over a voice chat here, but it’s reasonable. That’s vague, I understand and I apologize.

Steelmage: It has to be vague, yeah, I understand.

Judd: It has to be vague right now. What was the other question?

Steelmage: People keep asking about a Steam sale.

Judd: Oh yeah, so we did announce that we were going to have our last sale up to 1.0 recently. We don’t want to go back on that. We will have sales in the future for sure, especially when we’re doing events similar to this but the price right now is locked in up until 1.0.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What was the inspiration behind the story and the time travel mechanic?

Judd: Yeah, so when I had initially concepted the game I was – and really just building the team, I was trying to find people that absolutely loved a few different games; Diablo 2 being one, Path of Exile being one, and then an old school SNES game called Chrono Trigger. I was just absolutely in love with it as a kid. It made a big impact on me. I loved the storytelling that they were able to come up with because of the time travel mechanic and I knew that it would give us a lot of options for an ARPG because if you have time travel, I mean, just the options are endless. You can see that we have built our endgame with time travel in mind which means that the possibilities are just absolutely endless there. So the answer is Chrono Trigger and the possibilities that time travel brings us.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are you guys excited, are you nervous? You must be nervous going into next year, right?

Dan: Definitely all of everything. You know, there’s a lot of games coming out, there’s a lot of challenge behind making sure this is stable, and a consistent release. There’s a lot of challenge to like move – one big thing that’s been, for us, interesting internally is that we’re changing from dropping a major patch every three months to having to actually close the game into a 1.0 version of itself, which is a totally different way of shipping the game. So that whole process has been really interesting. As people know, we kind of went offline with releasing patches for the time being and that’s changed how we develop the game too. So a lot of it is very exciting, very scary – a mix of emotions. I am so happy that we get to do it though.

Source: YouTube Link

Multiplayer Dev Q&A with Steelmage - Transcribed

Dev Q&A Continued…

[End of Q&A]