Multiplayer Dev Q&A with Zizaran - Transcribed

AndrewTilley · September 23, 2022, 1:58pm

https://i.imgur.com/HQlI9fU.png

Below is a transcription of the Multiplayer Dev Q&A hosted by Zizaran that took place on September 14, 2022. It’s not a complete record of the encounter, but rather focuses on the Q&A aspect.

I’ve transcribed everything to the best of my abilities, but you can click each questions source link to watch them for yourself.

Also, the entirety of this Q&A session is spread across three posts within this thread as it far exceeded the 50,000 character limit, so please continue reading beyond this initial post.

Introductions

Judd (aka Moxjet200): the founder and CEO of Eleventh Hour Games and game director of Last Epoch. He basically touches a little bit of everything relating to Last Epoch, and has grown the studio from a much smaller team (~5) to the size that it is now (80+).

Dan (aka Stanzwar): originally started as a game designer with EHG, but is currently a producer who has led the production and release of the game for a number of years now. He is also trying to head up leading the design of Last Epoch’s game content, high level systems, and all of that.

Mike (aka Mike W or Mike Weicker): a senior developer at EHG that spends a lot of time working on skills and hooking up UI stuff.

Zizaran: a streamer on Twitch focusing primarily on ARPG content.

Dev Q&A

Q: With multiplayer, how is Last Epoch going to deal with “ease of access” to gear? There are criticisms of the trade systems of Path of Exile (free trade to all) and Diablo 3 (essentially 0 trade). What are long-term and short-term plans for Last Epoch in relation to trading gear and crafting materials?

Judd: We’re mindful of how our systems up to this point have been created to enable a great solo experience. With the Monolith giving an amount of target farming paired with our directed crafting system, gear drops in multiplayer will be individual and a core goal for trade in Last Epoch will be to ensure that it does not significantly take over progression from those systems. Again, when it comes to trade, we’ll be trialing a version of trade in the coming weeks within our CT program that we hope to get good feedback on.

Zizaran: Cool. It’s going to be a hard problem to solve. It must be interesting entering a genre that has so many other games in it as well.

Judd: Oh absolutely, and trade is so incredibly important to how progression in these games come about. We completely understand the implications that implementing any type of trade inside of these games have and we’re approaching it very carefully and thoughtfully with all the experience from the other games in the genre before us.

Dan: Yeah, a lot of the time talking about trade we recognize breaking down all of the problems that other games have made numerous attempts at systems and we kind of had history to understand it.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I feel like most builds end up using 3-4 mandatory skills and the only differentiating factor is often the main damage ability. Do you agree that we could use a few more utility skills for each class or is the current state of utility skills good as is?

Mike: I think that there’s definitely room for more and I think there’s a lot classes where this stands out more than others and those are generally the ones that don’t have their third mastery yet or are missing some skills in their base class. Like Rogue has the fewest skills right now and that one’s probably missing the most variance in utility skills that it has access to. We’ve really been trying to re-look at how utility skills come into the game and if you’re adding them by turning a non-utility skill into a utility skill in the skill tree. Also, Runemaster is going to bring in a lot of utility variants for the Mage. Mage is also one that probably shows up a lot as an example for this question.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What do you think about gear upgrades? I feel like items other than build enabling unique’s have too little impact on survivability and damage. You deal similar damage naked and fully geared with the huge damage multipliers coming from skill trees. Due to this you cap out fast and the urge to min/max is not as strong as it could be.

Dan: Yeah, that one’s a really interesting question and anyone who kind of knows our community has seen a popular video by McFluffin about gear in our game. For us, we definitely want to shift some power from passive trees and onto items again. We want to kind of consolidate some item modifiers so that they’re offered in fewer spots. We don’t want to aim for gear to be as high of a portion of your total power of build customization as other games though. Some of that is actually quite intended but we do want to pull more power into gear than the current state it’s in.

Zizaran: Yeah, I think that’s one of the things whenever I’m telling people about Last Epoch compared to other games, especially compared to Path of Exile, is that it’s a lot friendlier to respec and like messing up a build isn’t as punishing as it is in PoE. In PoE you’re forced to watch a build guide. Like I don’t have a guide open right now, I don’t really have a plan and I can just plan as I go.

Judd: Yeah, that was very intentional when setting up the system.

Dan: Yeah, it’s something – like I personally love, as a player of ARPG’s, to be able to kind of just sit there myself and tool out a build and not feel like it was a total failure so we definitely love that philosophy, but we still need to make further adjustments to give a little bit more power into gear.

Source: YouTube Link

I thought about fixing Stanzwar’s quote above to say the correct creator of that video, LizardIRL, but it was too funny (especially in the chat) so I decided to keep it as is.

In a later question, Dan confirms that they do have servers in South America. Also, during the Dev Q&A with Steelmage, Dan includes Asia East in addition to the Asia Northeast & Southeast server locations already mentioned above.

Q: The current endgame (monoliths) is purely objective based. In this state the multiplayer meta is going to be playing the fastest build rushing as many objectives while killing the least amount of enemies necessary (literally ignore them and run past them), as opposed to something like PoE where you need to kill enemies to get map drops to progress. Killing enemies in monoliths should feel rewarding or at least boost the final objective reward in some way.

Dan: Yeah, as a goal we don’t really want to encourage players to fully clear echoes or zones in general. Without the movement of PoE we don’t think that this is much of an enjoyable experience to compare them and kind of going through the whole of each zone should be more of a sense of discovery and have an increased variety being the experience for us. We do want to encourage players to kind of explore more and kill enemies on their way to the objectives. We have some ways that we’re currently doing this – recently we implemented bonus to stability that was added in our last patches, and there’s the regular monolith reward chest which actually scales with the number of enemies slain now.

We’re really happy with those changes at the moment but we do have some additional ideas to kind of increase the incentive for killing enemies in echoes and not just rushing. One of them being that we want to add more objective types that are closely tied to killing enemies, we want to improve the loot from rare monsters in general and kind of just clearly tell players and telegraph the importance of killing them for gaining dungeon keys and other important drops for endgame, and we also plan on adding more random events and things to do in echoes. So we want exciting things to just pop up as you’re playing – hopefully kind of incentivizing you to continue to pace in the zone rather than just moving on as fast as possible.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What is the reason behind locking bows to the Rogue class? Ranged attacks are such a fundamental archetype to ARPG’s even if it’s super cool that throwing is actually a thing in this game, even if it needs work.

Mike: Yeah, when we were initially putting bows into the game it was a bit of a limitation we had on our animation pipeline and just the resources we had to get it in as quickly as possible and the timing of it. So we stuck it on one character only that was the most thematic and it helped us get that done faster, which is really good. We have a lot of conversations about expanding that up into other classes. We really enjoy how throwing has come about as a physicality ranged thing that’s not a spell for a lot of other classes as well. It’s something that we are looking at expanding down the road. It’s not set in stone forever but we’re not ready to expand it yet.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Someone asked a question a little bit later about minion AI too.

Dan: We’ve actually made a ton of improvements to all pet AI. We’ve actually implemented that across almost every pet class at this point. We have more to do, but yeah.

Judd: There’s some additional minion improvements that we want to make in terms of how they pursue enemies and how they follow the character. We can do things like take character positioning into account more than we’re doing right now which should have them engage more quickly. So those are all things that we’re discussing and hopefully going to implement before 1.0. They come up quite often but yes, the minion improvements that we’ve made that people often point to the wolves – those have been extrapolated largely and they are feeling quite a bit better if people here have not played Last Epoch in a year or so.

Source: YouTube Link

[Judd discusses the history of Last Epoch/EHG]

Judd: It’s funny because we’ve grown quite a lot since those earlier days. Back in 2017 Last Epoch started off as a passion project which was me going out on Reddit and finding people who just absolutely were obsessed with ARPG’s and saying ‘hey I want to make an ARPG, I have some cool ideas that I’d like to pursue, we have no budget, we have less experience but we really want to make it happen…who wants to join us?’ Then we had a number of folks join us, some for a temporary amount of time, but we still actually have quite a lot of those people that joined us in the early days when there was no funding, no money in circulation, it was just let’s boot up a game engine. We were using store assets and stuff like that to get the baseline set up and everything. We’ve gone from this completely unfunded studio with five people working after hours when they’re coming back from their regular jobs to now having a studio of over 80 people that are working with us full-time around the world.

Yeah, it’s really been fantastic to see the love that the community has given us and the resources that that’s provided us and how we’ve been able to scale. However, because of that there are so many things that we have to go back, I guess we don’t have to but we want to go back, and rework these things because now that we have so much more talent and so much more bandwidth we go and look at the stuff that we created in 2017, 2018, 2019 and we’re like ‘oh my goodness’. To get this to the quality level that we want to get to, to really be competitive in this space, we need to improve these things drastically. So leading up to 1.0 there’s still a lot of updating – going back and fixing a number of things before we get to the point where we’re just completely looking forward. With 1.0, it will be our big kickoff point to where we say hey this game is in the state that we are comfortable with saying that it is a 1.0 version and again that’s just kickoff.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I guess it must be very, very difficult adding multiplayer later instead of initially?

Dan: Yeah, for sure. There’s definitely a lot of challenges trying to build the tracks behind you as you kept going. For us, as Judd was saying, we had a very modest beginning with not a ton of budget at the start and not a ton to kind of keep us running. So the most important thing we could have done was get Last Epoch out to players, start getting feedback, and start improving the game. This brought more people in and let us enact more changes to feedback which improved the game and kind of let us actually finally start being able to afford building the multiplayer part. It’s certainly not ideal. If you had all the budget in the world to make a game from day one that’s preferable, but we didn’t so we’re really happy with how things turned out considering the kind of path we had to take to get here.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: So I’m not really able to see this part so I’m just going to have to take your word for it, but how does things like ping affect you guys…I’m trying to think of how I want to ask this question. Obviously in Path of Exile we have lockstep and predictive, how does Last Epoch go in terms of things like desync and things like that?

Dan: So right now we will start – that’s a great example of something that a game like that has had 10 years to kind of engineer solutions to. For us, we’re going to be starting with kind of a predictive model so everything we do at the beginning to improve experience will be predictive. I’m sure players are thinking about things like desync – these are things we are aware about, so upfront we do want to make sure the predictive system feels great.

We’re making sure that we have a huge variety of available data centers for players to access to kind of reduce any accentuation of those problems and then as the game gets past launch and we have more time to focus on continuously improving those systems you’ll see us try to get closer to some of the technology that games like Path of Exile have.

Zizaran: So potentially early on multiplayer might be riskier for hardcore then?

Dan: There’s definitely an element of that in the predictive system, for sure. Might as well be honest in that regard.

Mike: It’s kind of halfway between PoE systems right now – we’re not fully predictive, we’re not fully lockstep. It’s not quite analogous to either one of them with the way we’ve set it up.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: How is monolith planned to be adapted to multiplayer?

Mike: Yeah, so we’re trying to keep that as seamless and feel as similar to single player as possible. We’re trying to keep it so that you’re not needing to, like, game the system with each other just to make it easy in every way you can. We’re trying to avoid exploits where we can. The way it’s going to work is when you complete an echo without leaving or dying you will receive the echo specific reward even if you’re not like the owner or the person who started – the party leader. All players get the stability for that echo in their monolith progression, moving their timeline along, and then when you complete the last echo of the timeline it will unlock the next monolith timeline, it will give you a blessing, everyone gets all those things – all of the rewards are for everyone so everyone gets everything.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Let’s talk some timelines. Do you have any rough timeline as to when multiplayer is going to be available for everybody, when we’re going to see more people streaming it, and potential release dates? Are we looking a year away, two, three?

Judd: Do you want to – I’ll let you dive into that, however much you want to share about that one.

Dan: Sure, so right now we’re in the closed alpha process of testing this. We’re adding a lot of players. We want to go to open beta when we feel it’s ready to kind of open up and unlock the NDA and let lots of players in and test it themselves without like a controlled environment like this. Our release timelines still aren’t out in the world, but we are trying to aim for open beta this year, if possible. As you can see we’re getting pretty close at this point, but I will avoid specific dates still for the time being.

Judd: We try to avoid specific dates this early on because there’s been a couple times where we’ve tripped up a little bit and we’ve had to push back release dates more than we had wanted to so we’re a little apprehensive to put release dates that are four, five, six, seven months out in front of people.

Zizaran: That make sense. I mean, you really only get one chance at a release date and I think everybody here wants to see Last Epoch succeed. So it’s good to get it right.

Dan: Yeah, I think for us what we’ve always kind of done since the beginning is realized quality is going to be everything. We need a quality release, we need to improve the quality of the game, the quality of the game performance, the experience…so, I mean, that’s really what we care about the most over everything is to make sure that the release feels really great when it happens.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Do they have plans for a sixth playable class and if so what would they imagine it’d be?

Dan: So right now we’re – we definitely have some things we’ve imagined for the sixth class. In the future that’s something we would want to look at, but for the time being the things we’re really keen on doing are adding additional masteries post launch and definitely just significantly upping the rate at which we output skills to increase build viability. So a sixth class is certainly something we’re going to be thinking about in a post-launch world, but adding to the build diversity of what already exists in the game is a place where we still have a lot of easy wins there that we have a lot of ideas ready for.

Judd: If you guys look closely you might see some missing archetypes, and if you see them then we see them.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What is the next upcoming mastery? Like is Falconer the next one that’s coming?

Dan: So the remaining three are the Runemaster, the Falconer, and the Warlock.

Zizaran: Which one’s coming next?

Dan: Well, it depends. We’ve started our ideation process on the Runemaster first so it’s probably reasonable to say that we will complete that before the others. We’ve made more progress on the Warlock and the Falconer than the Runemaster so we decided to start there.

Judd: I’d be fine with giving a world first answer to that question if we’d like to guys?

Mike: Go ahead.

Judd: Okay, so we will be releasing all three of those classes at the 1.0 release of the game – all at the same time.

Zizaran: Oh, very cool. I was going to ask if you could pivot to do Falconer first because I personally love summons in this game.

Judd: I’m super glad that you’re excited about the Falconer because that was actually something many, many years ago when Diablo 3 was not even announced – my cousin Kyle and I, who are obsessed with these types of games, actually submitted the idea of a Falconer to Diablo 3 and we had won BlizzCon tickets because they liked the suggestion so much. They didn’t take it, but they liked it a whole lot and so ever since then when they didn’t create the Falconer I was like ‘I’m going to make a Falconer and it’s going to be awesome’. We’re so close to getting there. We have the skills ideated, we have some mock-ups in the engine, and stuff like that at this point and I’m really, really excited about that class.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Okay, I have to ask. Is there going to be different types of birds or just one bird?

Judd: There’s going to be one falcon that stays with you permanently – oh, I don’t know if I should be saying this, I’m going to say it…that’s fine – there’s going to be one falcon that stays with you permanently. There won’t be different types of falcons, but we know that it will be a fan favourite for the MTX system in the future.

Zizaran: Okay, so there won’t be like one falcon and five ravens?

Judd: Correct.

Mike: Ravens are Primalist.

Zizaran: Yeah, yeah, I know. I was just hoping we would get a lot of different types of birds.

Mike: It’s still really early in the development process for the Falconer so we can’t really say much about it because there’s not a lot done with it really.

Source: YouTube Link

[Judd provides some insight about UI/UX changes they’re working on]

Judd: As you’re walking around and talking to some of these NPC’s you’ll see a couple new things here as well. We have updated the dialog system, and we have character portraits coming for all NPC’s that are custom. If you look closely you’ll notice that the font over our characters, and if you look at the dialogue system, the name of the NPC’s that you’re talking to are using a new font face which is a custom font face developed specifically for Last Epoch by a guy named Mark Simonson who is a famous guy who creates fonts. He works at Font Foundry right now, but he’s created fonts like Proxima Nova. If I have any UI nerds in chat I come from a UI/UX background so I was very excited to be able to finally make a custom font for Last Epoch.

Zizaran: That’s very cool.

Dan: You can tell Judd loves this.

Judd: I really do.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will the monolith grind be adjusted or will there be any way to compensate for it on alts?

Mike: So in multiplayer, just in general, you’re going to have access to playing with friends and that’s going to give you opportunities to speed things up quite a lot. If you really want to just stick with it solo it is something that we are, I guess, observing feedback on closely. It’s still not an entirely finished system and we don’t have specific plans for like okay ‘well this is getting moved up, this is getting moved down’ or anything like that. It’s not set in stone.

Dan: I think the main quality – yeah, we definitely recognize that for well geared alts there’s kind of a struggle in the middle of getting from content that you can steamroll to the content that’s actually really challenging. So we’re definitely mindful of that existing gap and we want to keep observing that into the open beta process to see how it plays out.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Yeah, especially like how much are you going to balance around like people that exclusively want to play SSF? Like what is going to be the intended way to play the game? Is it going to be multiplayer, SSF, hardcore…

Dan: I’d say, for us, the…there – I try to caution people when they ask what’s our intended way to play. We don’t really want to try to design what we think is the way we want to force players to play. We’ve always kind of made things we enjoyed and made things based on our belief of like we want a level of complexity that is accessible and we let players kind of help us with the feedback in terms of the direction to go there. We do not have a directed vision regarding how we want that to play out. One thing that’s important to call out, I think, is that over the years we’ve been very clearly been making a SSF supportive experience because we’ve been making an offline game and we’re very mindful of how to connect that into a multiplayer experience and kind of give that more legs as it goes online. We are not picking a specific direction and we’ll do what feels good for the game.

Judd: I’ll say that, with our internal team, the majority of us really do enjoy playing these games together and so we’re definitely keeping that in mind but we definitely understand that there is going to be a large percentage of players that do want to play solo by themselves and so all content in the game will be completable as a solo character. You won’t have to group up for any type of content or anything like that.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: So sometimes cosmetic can affect gameplay in terms of a skill being a lot more or less visible. How are you going to deal with that?

Dan: We’re very aware of that problem and we’re trying – we’re doing a really kind of rigid quality review process overall trying to understand those things as we make them and we’ll be very open to feedback about that if things land and if something becomes more readable. We’ll find that – that tends to be more of a problem in our base skills design than a problem with the MTX visual itself. So if we see things like that we’re definitely going to be mindful to look at improving the actual experience of the bass skill.

Judd: Yeah, if we’re talking about like visual clutter that’s something that we’re actively targeting right now, now that we’re actually inside and play testing multiplayer multiple times a week as a team. We’re able to see the things that are too visually noisy and need to be toned down. For example, everyone knows that I absolutely love playing a Meteor build. It turns out that the targeting reticle on the ground for Meteor is too noisy and so we’re taking steps to say that that only shows locally on the individual’s client and not shown on other people’s screen. Anything else that we’re seeing that is just too visually noisy we’re making sure to target and reduce as needed.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: So obviously, especially for those in the audience that don’t know, Last Epoch has in-game stash tabs. It’s not like Path of Exile where you buy it for real-life money, but rather you buy stash tabs for in-game gold in Last Epoch. Is this ever going to change in terms of will there ever be special stash tabs that you buy for money or will it always be tied to gaining it in-game?

Judd: It ties in with our hard stance on not selling convenience or power for money. The game does have a base cost which allows us to bring all those quality of life improvements to the game without actually needing to charge for those. So any type of UI/UX thing like that that we add to the game will be free.

Right now we don’t have plans to introduce specific types of stash tabs for individual types of items as we do have a fairly robust system for stash tabs already where you can change labels and colours and icons and you have tab grouping and things like that. We actually took quite a bit of time to ideate how that could be implemented in a way that is very flexible. So for stash tabs specifically, we don’t have current plans to expand upon that but if we do find opportunities for increasing the user experience/quality of life in regards to stash tabs we’ll absolutely consider doing that…for free.

Zizaran: Very cool. That’s a good answer. Free is good, I like free.

Dan: Well, technically you’ve paid for it with the base game.

Zizaran: Yes, that is true.

Judd: That is true.

Source: YouTube Link

AndrewTilley · September 23, 2022, 1:58pm

Dev Q&A Continued…

Q: I don’t know if your stance has changed on this, but at some point you guys talked about having a free demo to let people try the game out before playing. Is that still the case?

Judd: Yeah…so, so that was a funny one. We had always intended to give a free demo of the game so people could get in, get like 10 levels under their belt, and understand that the game is awesome and that they should want to continue playing it. It’s something that we always wanted to produce but we’ve always had so much in front of us to produce that it always got backlogged. At the point that we’re at right now it’s still backlogged. It might be something that comes up in the future if we have the bandwidth to do so, but I wouldn’t say that a demo for the game is coming soon by any means.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Especially post release, or maybe even before if it’s something you want to experiment with, how are you guys going to approach having leagues or seasons?

Dan: Yeah, I can talk to that a little bit. So right now we are looking at kind of exploring the concept of what a cycle will be for us. We don’t have a ton of hard answers there yet on what we want to do. I don’t think we want to completely imitate what the Path of Exile model is and have like say a main interactable mechanic every cycle. We might do something different. We might add temporary game modes, we might add uncertainty into the kind of overall game loop of the game, but on the whole we’re certainly interested in adding cycles but we want to kind of differentiate ourselves.

Zizaran: I’m hearing the word cycle a lot. Is that what we’re going with? So it’s going to be a PoE league, a Diablo Season, and a Last Epoch cycle?

Judd: Correct, correct. So that you know, every time we release a cycle it will be a fresh start for characters, your characters that have existed will transfer into a standard league as you guys have come to assume they will, we’ll be releasing new unique items, balance changes, we’ll likely be implementing new skills, and lots of content like that that we will continue to implement into the game for many years to come – in addition to other mechanics, systems, etc, etc.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: So things like stash tabs, since they are bought in-game, I’m guessing they will also reset on a new cycle?

Dan: In what regard?

Zizaran: So I’m guessing a cycle will be a full reset for everybody. Like if I played for 10 years I won’t have the advantage over anyone that’s just started playing. So I will have to buy new stash tabs.

Judd: That’s correct, and those will be purchasable with in-game gold. However, the stash tabs that you have – I believe there are actually still discussions about how to transfer those over to a standard league nicely when a cycle begins. That’s one of the design questions that we have to answer in the near future. We might actually have a game design document for that already that I’m forgetting.

Mike: It’s like the one open question at the bottom of it.

Dan: Yeah, we’re still working on that one.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What do you think about players in a party benefiting multiple times from certain specific rewards compared to single players? For example, hopping into a party just for the last story mission of a timeline to get everyone a chance to reroll the timeline blessing…effectively farming blessing rerolls four times faster compared to a single player.

Dan: Yeah, so in that case, I mean, players would still have had to kind of farm up the stability themselves so it’s not that commonly an occurring case. Our core philosophy for multiplayer is to make sure players have fun playing together. We don’t really want to take extreme measures to punish playing together unless the exploit is really exceptional or extreme. The case that the question provides is not really an example of an extreme case that we’re too worried about because of the stability requirements on the individual player.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What happened to the ideas of a restricted trading that were referred to as the bazaar during the Kickstarter?

Judd: Yeah, the bazaar. We were very keen on this idea, enough to even actually speak about it publicly back in, I think, like 2019 or something. There was an extensive thread that I still think has more comments than any other thread that we’ve ever posted. In short, we found a number of flaws with the system that didn’t line up with our goal of not letting trade take over the gearing progression that we’ve solidified into the game. There were a lot of aspects of it that we were keen on but it just ultimately didn’t meet our expectations for what we want in a trade system.

Zizaran: Right, and you didn’t really have anything final to say about where trade is going, right?

Judd: Not yet. What I can say is that we don’t want a trade system in the game to be the best or most efficient way to always gain gear upgrades.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: With multiplayer coming in now and the potential for trading, have you guys talked about things like bind on equip, bind on pickup, bind on trade?

Dan: Oh yes, and I believe a couple of the conversations that we had to great length were when you mentioned them, but we’d also thought about them ourselves too. So yes, we have thought heavily about all of those things and we’re taking them under consideration. We’ve gone as far as to discuss even how RuneScape does its economy. We’ve looked all the way back. We even discussed the actual bazaar in EverQuest. We’ve gone through the history of economies and MMO’s and ARPG’s to try to figure out what about them we enjoy the most. So it’s been very in-depth. That’s why we don’t want to speak too much on it now as we’re still kind of bringing light to that whole process that we’ve been working on for so long.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are there going to be support skills that directly buff or augment another player? Not just passive auras but actively channeling a damage boost into them.

Mike: Yeah, and there already are really. Like we have Eterra’s Blessing on Primalist which actually can do that exact thing.

Zizaran: Can I do that already right now?

Mike: You should be able to…I think?

Dan: Technically.

Zizaran: Oh my God, it works.

Mike: Yeah, it’s the sort of thing we want to let people have if they want and like unlock and expand through the skill tree systems. We’re less focused on creating those as…how do I say this – we don’t want to have a big bunch of those skills as like ‘here play this build where that’s the only thing you do and really force that down people’s throats’ but we do like the idea of it being an option that people can do.

Dan: Yeah, we want to add more active and reactive support. We want to add more to the game but I think a lot of what we already have is kind of like speculative and theoretical. We added these things knowing we’d have multiplayer but now we get to actually observe how the game is played and make more exciting supportive buffing interaction.

Source: YouTube Link

[Zizaran wanted to know what a party members corpse looked like so Mike volunteers to die]

Judd: One thing to note while we’re looking for Mike’s corpse is something I’m pretty excited about coming to the game, which are general lighting improvements. Right now you’ll notice that seeing other players as we’re walking around, you know, they look a little bit hard to see – it’s a bit dark. We’re making it so that actors, including monsters, NPC’s, other players, and everything are more well illuminated. That’ll also do things to shadows in the game that make players stand off the background better. We’re doing things like – if you notice walking through Last Epoch right now a lot of the ground textures are very detailed which makes it hard to see some things pop off of the background so we’re going to be taking some of the background textures and making those less detailed so you’re able to see things better. So those are just some of the visual improvements that will be made – so you can see Mike’s corpse better.

Source: YouTube Link

[Zizaran asked about any possible recommendations for the Summon Storm Crows skill tree because he’s never played them]

Judd: Funny enough, I’ll tell you a little story here. I’ve generally played a lot of passive builds in games like Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Marvel Heroes, Diablo, etc. I actually played those games so much that I’ve given myself incredibly bad RSI in both of my wrists and so often times I’ll play totem builds or minion builds like that because it doesn’t require so much action. That’s one of the reasons that we’re prioritizing really fantastic controller support in the game, which we still have a lot of improvements to make. Though, if you guys see me playing a lot of minion builds and totem builds and stuff it’s because I haven’t taken enough Advil for my wrists that morning.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: So that is actually a great thing I want to ask you about. Obviously, this is something we’re familiar with from other ARPG’s, the click pressure. Are you guys doing anything in particular to approach that and to make sure that players don’t have to click a million times? So obviously there are some things that are auto-pickup in Last Epoch, are we going to see more things like affix shards being auto-pickup to alleviate player’s wrists?

Judd: Yeah, it’s a big, big topic of discussion, for sure, and we want to make sure that we’re implementing any conveniences there that we can. In regards to affix shards being auto-pickup there’s been a ton of debate in the community and internally on this. We do feel that there is a balancing act to do there between picking up loot and having it automated, breaking into your inventory.

Where we’ve landed right now with shard pickup is that we have a vacuuming effect so if you click once it’ll pick up all the shards in a radius. We’re apprehensive about making it so that shards just vacuum up as you walk near them, just automatically, because it’ll start to feel like the game is being played for you. So we’re pretty comfortable with where we have that at the moment. It would require substantial community feedback to a degree that we haven’t even seen yet to make us change something like that, but we’re always looking for ways to make it so that there are less clicks to do things.

Dan: Yeah, I think a nice way to frame it too is we’re already at this – we already think about it like this so we’re always trying to balance that convenience from day one. As we continue to go through the years, hopefully adding layers of more systems, that’s when we’ll be thinking about the stacking up of complexity, and number of clicks and all of that. So we can kind of think about it early rather than have to solve the problem later.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Right now players are talking about how balanced all the skills are and how much all of them are viable. Do you fear that with a larger more active community we’ll find out the ones that are actually a bit stronger than others and our perception will change and we’ll start talking about how few of them are viable?

Mike: I don’t think that’s frightening. I think it’s actually exciting to get more information, more data, more like I guess crowdsourcing of experimentation in there. I think we always try and bring up more things, maybe things that do fall behind, when that happens. We bring them up and make them more fun and I think a lot of it is about making them fun as well. It’s not always about pure power but keeping as many viable as possible is something we definitely keep a very close eye on and try and do.

Dan: Yeah, and sometimes it’s better to nerf an outlier than to buff a hundred other skills. We are mindful of where we need to make adjustments but on the whole we like to think about improving the variety of options rather than always having to punish.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are you going to strive for an actual balance where you’re always trying to keep skills within a certain margin of each other or are you going to just keep nerfing and buffing things to cycle out what ends up being popular? Like to keep things refreshed.

Dan: I think that’s a great question. There’s actually a concept of that called perfect imbalance. They talk about that actually even in games like League of Legends, other ARPG games like ours, and for us I think we really do believe in making constant adjustments and modifications. Seeing a meta build kind of settle up at the top for a very long time can kind of feel a little tiresome over a number of cycles and releases – when you feel really pressured to keep continuing to play that build.

With that said, we’re not really the type to make – we don’t really want to just yank that build out of the spotlight so if something is really powerful but isn’t an outlier we’re going to make slight adjustments to it over time until someone kind of bubbles up the arguments like ‘hey this is no longer the meta build, there’s other things that are just as good now’ rather than trying to take the most powerful build and just nerfing it down. We very much fundamentally believe in that perfect imbalance of constantly making adjustments.

Zizaran: That is a pretty good answer for me. I’m personally not a big fan of balance in ARPG’s. I personally just love radical change all the time so, like you said, that there isn’t one build being the strongest build for like six years.

Dan: Yeah, and we like to adjust those builds by not taking away from players who enjoy them but making it clear to people that we want to shift that meta as we need to.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will the loot filter add custom sounds?

Judd: It doesn’t have custom sounds. That’s something that we would like to implement in the future. We want to have sound packs – Mike, there’s always been the idea of the sounds that you’ve made during the dev streams, the little snippets that you say, being in there as a sound pack.

Mike: My one liner exclamations of me getting terrified in the middle of…

Judd: Ooh, spicy!

Dan: Yeah, “ooh, spicy” was the first recommendation.

Judd: I guess I should cover my bases there. When I say “sound packs” we don’t have any plans to create sound packs to sell at the moment or anything like that, just in case anybody’s wondering.

Mike: We also have to be careful about how we let players use that sound system so that it’s not just like spamming “ooh, spicy” every second that an item drops just over and over and over.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are skills getting re-balanced when multiplayer drops or will we have a patch of mayhem?

Dan: Great question. We are definitely undergoing a totally massive overhaul right now, internally. One thing we’re actually doing that we can talk about a bit is we’re changing how additive damage works so that melee weapons will have just melee or throwing damage on them which is going to massively increase build diversity. In that process we’ve had to go and readjust all of the skill trees and we’re essentially also using that as an opportunity to just rebalance for multiplayer. The time to continue to balance is right now.

We have internal testers playing the endgame, and we’re going to be listening and responding to a lot of that. We’re trying to do the best we can right now in our closed alpha before we go to open beta to adjust the design of the game but let’s be honest game design, game balance is very challenging. I would expect a little bit of mayhem when we open to open beta and there’s a lot more players finding all of the different ways to play the game.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will dungeons require a key from everyone?

Mike: No, only one person needs to open the dungeon, but it will reduce the number of dungeon keys that drop inside the dungeons themselves to avoid a party being able to sustain running that same dungeon forever.

Zizaran: Okay.

Mike: But yeah, right now the plan is one person opens it up. There’s some knock-on balance stuff that happens that we’re still working out exactly how it’s going to happen. For example, The Vault of Uncertain Fate within the Lightless Arbor dungeon we’re looking at when one person pays for it, how does that affect the loot that everyone gets and things like that so we’re still experimenting and lining up. However, we do want to make it friendly and having those barriers to play in a party be low.

Zizaran: Cool. It seems like you’re thinking very heavily about just people having fun and a good time more than anything.

Dan: I think if we do that well upfront and people come and play and they have a good time and they experience the parts of the game that we’re already super proud of making then that gives us the best basis we have to build more complexity, more systems, more features, more things to add in the future. So yeah, I think that’s what we’re really honing in on as we get to 1.0.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will Healing Hand finally get a skill tree or rework?

Dan: Uh, the answer to that is almost certain – as we’ve been looking at its performance as we’ve been testing online. Healing Hands is a great example of something I was mentioning before about how we speculated about multiplayer so we built a skill many years ago and now we’re seeing how it actually performs online. That’s definitely something we’re going to be addressing moving forward. We haven’t prioritized it at the moment because of other things but during our rebalancing process that I mentioned we’re certainly going to take a look at it.

Judd: Yeah, that’s generally why we saw skills like Eterra’s Blessing, Healing Hand, even things like our Paladin auras, and stuff get skill trees later is because we knew that they were going to have a very significant impact on multiplayer and so we wanted to wait and see how that was going to turn out before really investing a lot of energy into skill trees for those skills. Now that we have developed a couple of those, we are having to go back and rebalance them considering that we are now actually actively testing multiplayer with the entire team multiple times a week.

Source: YouTube Link

[Zizaran goes to the washroom so the dev’s answer the next five questions from chat]

Q: Judd, how sad are you that Marvel Heroes died?

Judd: Oh…my…goodness. I’m extremely sad. I think I had a combined like almost 2,000 levels and characters in that game. I absolutely loved that game. They had a very rocky start, there were some issues with licensing and stuff like that that ultimately led to it going under, but the updates that they had made to that game over time were fantastic. They had great account progression systems, they gave you reasons to level alts, all of the characters felt very unique. I loved that game a lot and I actually got the chance to meet up with David Brevik which was an absolute joy – just one of my biggest dreams as a kid is meeting David Brevik. I got to chat with him about Marvel Heroes quite extensively. So yes, very much miss that game.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I see some questions about auto-casting/auto-bombing.

Dan: So there, we tend to see the auto-bombing question about num-locking/automating your skills as a problem inherent to the skills design itself rather than your ability to do that. So any situations where we see something like the auto-bomber build – we definitely are aware of what’s being played right now currently and we want to make improvements to kind of still allow that build function to be viable but not enable it as like the default. We want to add more reactive options to builds like that so you feel that there’s more meaningful decisions to make. So again, to answer that directly for num-locking/auto-bombing it’s more that we view that as an inherent failure or problem of a skills core design rather than dealing with that specific issue itself.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I understand there are a few more endgame systems yet to come, where do these fall on the roadmap past multiplayer?

Dan: That is a great question and the answer for that is immediate. We need to finish the remaining mastery classes before 1.0. Though, kind of at the same time, we’re immediately planning for endgame additions. This is on the forefront of my mind, personally. It’s something that keeps me up at night right now as we’re trying to do everything else. Right now we’re kind of seeing if we can determine if there’s anything we can provide between now and 1.0. We have some good systems but we’re not really promising anything before 1.0. However, we do have a number of ideas that we do want to ship, so you should definitely expect us to have priority number one to be adding endgame content post launch. It’s on our minds and we’ve already started.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Dungeons were a very cool addition but could use some work and the same for monoliths. Are there any current plans or even thoughts that you are willing to share about how you want to improve these two systems?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of those things where there’s always going to be room for improvement and expansion in both of those and we’ve specifically designed both to be friendly for those expansions, improvements, and things like that. One of our main goals is, just in the development of Last Epoch, is increasing the variety that we have in our endgame experiences and that comes a lot from adding new dungeons but also from just improving the experience that exists in monolith as a whole and improving the experience in dungeons as well.

We’re planning on adding, anywhere we can, random events and things to interact with that sort of pop up that you don’t expect – things that change your gameplay objectives as you’re going so you’re not just like on autopilot doing the same thing over and over again, if you don’t want to be. So that might be like adding new echo types, new objectives in the echoes that can be things like random events that happen in those echoes – sometimes it might be things that like tell you to search. One example that I’ve heard recently that I liked was that maybe an echo says search this one because there’s a higher chance of something random happening. So maybe it gives you an incentive to explore that echo specifically.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Set items, by and large, seem underpowered and not exciting compared to unique’s and rare’s, especially in the mid and endgame. Are there plans to bring power and flexibility to set items more in line with unique items?

Mike: Yeah, so we definitely want set items to be part of your endgame gear consideration so you’re not just ignoring them at endgame, or like super endgame at least. We don’t have any concrete plans to add additional mechanics specific to set items. We’re open to suggestions and we’re still looking at it for the future. There’s a pretty big gap between good and perfect gear right now and there’s more room to balance sets in a way that makes them viable without taking over the game completely because that’s a big problem too, if it swings too far the other way.

Zizaran: Yeah, that’s why I’m very curious what you’re going to do because the biggest problem is that set items in every game I’ve played that have them it becomes like mandatory.

Dan: Yeah.

Mike: It’s locked into too many gear slots, right, where you’re just like ‘well I’m playing a Marksman Rogue and there’s the Marksman Rogue set so these four slots are just spoken for and it’s like I don’t have to consider them at all when doing gearing’. That’s something we want to avoid but we do want them to be viable and fun to play with. In the short-term, all we can really expect immediately is some individual buffs to specific set items that are more endgame focused but aren’t performing like they are.

Dan: Yeah, I think it’s similar to some of the other questions where people were asking what our vision was on a thing, and in this case for sets it’s more like how does the game play and what do we want from it is how we’re going to act. We’re not going to, say, go and make every set hyper viable. We’ll try to adjust sets on a piece by piece basis to ideally get them in a nice state. However, if the problem we end up in is that there’s always a back and forth of whether or not sets are ever useful then we’d prefer that over sets feeling completely mandatory all the time. That’s really important to us.

Source: YouTube Link

AndrewTilley · September 23, 2022, 1:58pm

Dev Q&A Continued…

Q: What are your thoughts on the current velocity of development given the rapid pace of new content releases by some of your competitors in the ARPG space? Do you believe Last Epoch will be able to keep up?

Dan: That’s a, you know, I could go a lot of ways with that question. That’s a really great question. We did manage to get this far by putting one fundamental concept in game that serves over everything else and that’s iterate fast. We knew that in this genre there was a certain expectation set about content, changes, interesting ways to play, etc. We would have to be able to create, add, and fix content very quickly. Over our lifespan on Steam we’ve already released 17 major three month patches and over 90 smaller patches of hot fixes, bugs, and changes. I think that has really helped us get this far. People tend to come back to check us out, they want to see the changes and additions.

As we’ve built multiplayer we’ve also made sure that’s kind of the heart of the philosophy is that when we go online we need to be able to hotfix quickly, we’re going to have to be able to make balance changes fast, and we’re going to have to be able to add new content as quickly as we did in the past. We’ve been making a ton of stuff since the beginning. Even right now, with all the stuff we’re working with online, we have over 300 unique items planned in our production processes right now to be delivering through and after the release of the game.

It can be challenging to kind of compare ourselves to some of the competitors in this space. They have very large teams of hundreds and hundreds of people and that’s not something we’re kind of aiming for ourselves. Even Chris Wilson, who is super friendly, he’s even said don’t worry about what they’re doing, worry about how we’re going to make the game for our team size. We’ve always been able to make content quickly and we’re always going to be able to make content quickly for our team size – we’re very passionate about it.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: As a follow-up to that, are you going to plan your releases according to other games? For example, I’m guessing you’ll care somewhat about not having the same cycle or league start as Diablo and Path of Exile.

Dan: I’m sure Judd has more thoughts on this too, but I think if you’ve followed our development process up to this point we’ve been, for the most part, really mindful of other game releases. We have a lot of control over our own game process and when it can come out. So the answer would be we’re going to continue to be observant of when the other games are releasing major content.

Judd: Yeah, we have a very good relationship with Grinding Gear Games and Chris. We have a lot of people on the team that very much do enjoy playing Path of Exile leagues. It wouldn’t be advantageous for us to release at the same timeframe as a game like that because as ARPG players we like to play those games as well. We understand that the community that plays these types of games likes to bounce around. We’ll definitely be mindful of that. I don’t know if we can always say that their valley will be our peak or anything like that, but we’ll definitely be very mindful of it.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Is there any plans for making skills more unique and customizable? With unique, for example, having cross trees like a skill can be modified in another skill’s tree for them to interact together.

Mike: Yeah, I think we have a lot of this already actually. It’s something that we try and build into, especially newer skill trees that we try and build into as much as we can, where you are getting interactions between skill trees and things that are specific. We also do try and build specific abilities that are not linked directly to one skill necessarily. For example: Mage has Fire Aura, Rogue has their shadows, Void Knight has some echo stuff that goes across multiple skills. Getting those interactions and abilities that are not linked to specific active skills lets us do that really nicely and cleanly. Also, through items there’s a lot of interactions there that I think line up really nicely with this type of request and it’s definitely something we want to continue doing. I think it adds a lot of depth really easily with something that’s fairly intuitive.

Zizaran: Yeah, I mean, like you said you already have a lot of this. Like I already mentioned with the wolves and then you have unique items like Herald of the Scurry.

Dan: It’s actually a really – it seems easier than it is to make those and over the years we’ve learned as we get better at developing skills we learn how to kind of put those synergies in places. What we love about the synergies is making sure that it’s not just about raw numbers, it’s about like giving you something that you can kind of create your own theories with and how it interacts with other builds. We’re getting better and better at that every day.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What about bigger character skill trees? How is that in relation to the size of what we’re currently seeing.

Mike: Just to clear, is this about passive trees or skills?

Zizaran: Both for an individual skill as well as things like the Primalist, Beastmaster, Shaman, Druid passive trees.

Mike: Yeah, as far as the individual skill trees, we’re pretty happy with where they are. We’ve experimented a few times with bigger skill tree’s. It did not go well and I think we’ve kind of honed in on that sweet spot for skill tree size. There’s definitely room in a lot of them for expansion. There’s some older skill trees that are really small. Looking at the newer skill trees gives a really good example on appropriate size for trees and then there’s also a range that we try to keep all of them in. We have metrics for like the number of nodes, the number of connections, all those things – we try and keep them in a few ranges.

As far as the passive trees, we’re also not really looking to expand them too much in size. There’s a little bit of room in the UI to add an extra row if we really need it, but it’s not something we’re overly interested in. I think that a lot of the – there’s a lot of extra nodes that are missing off of three of the classes right now with Warlock, Runemaster, and Falconer missing still so the lower sections of all those trees that are not available to Marksman, Bladedancer, and all the other classes that are still missing their third mastery. There’s going to be more added naturally that way, but having significantly larger trees is not something we’re looking at yet. We’re pretty happy with the size they’re sitting at. I think improving the nodes that are there, and replacing and updating.

Also, we’ve recently started adding in threshold nodes which you actually have a lot of on your Druid tree. That’s something we’re looking at adding in more of that we think is a really good way of increasing the size of the tree without actually adding more nodes.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: It’s interesting, you haven’t gone with anything like mana potions…it’s just healing potions. Are there going to be other ways of regenerating mana or is it going to be very similar to what we already have?

Judd: It’ll continue to be similar to what we have. We intentionally want to make mana a resource that is not extremely easily solvable so it’s something that you actually do want to gear and build around and you can continue to progress in that axis. You do have some skills, like in the Mage you have the Focus skill that’ll let you regen mana. There is the opportunity to gear some slots with mana regeneration. We have mana efficiency in skill trees and passives. So you have to work towards it a little bit more but we think that’s a design that we want to stick with.

Zizaran: Right. Yeah, that’ll be interesting to see how that will change. I can’t remember exactly what build I had but it was struggling so much on mana. I had mana regeneration on every piece of gear, including on a legacy pair of gloves which can’t even get it anymore, and I was still out of mana constantly.

Judd: Yeah, it depends on the skills mana cost that you’re using and how you’re playing with it. It’s something that we do want players to continue to solve, but if we see that players are going extremely hard into trying to build mana regeneration and it’s still not getting to a point that is sensible then we can look at balancing it.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are you ever going to have any different type of potions other than healing potions? Like for utility.

Mike: We like to put the extra effects and utility that potions get onto your belt slot. So chances are the potion that you see in your UI and your inventory will likely just stay the way it is. We’re not really planning on having an item that you pick up that augments the potion directly as just like a potion item, or a flask item, or something like that. We’d rather the signature of the belt be that it affects your potions. So there’s lots of mods that go onto your belt slot already and we’re looking at expanding those too – to have more things and more varied options that you can augment what your potion is doing. In some cases that does remove the ability to heal from your potions…it makes your potions not heal. So there are other effects that come with potions through your belt slot.

Dan: Yeah, going back to when we were talking about button spam, the number of buttons pressed, I think that’s one key area we’re very happy to try to avoid in that space. I’ll say that I’m playing the current PoE league and it’s the first time I’ve gotten to play since automating my flasks and I’m having the time of my life – just not having to press my flasks anymore.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will there be online anti-cheat from the start to make arena ranking as cheat free as possible?

Dan: Yep. So for anti-cheat, I’ll be very clear upfront, we will not be placing any kind of invasive anti-cheat technology in the game. So you will not have any kind of second or third-party software installed over the game to protect the cheating. The whole purpose of us doing this long-term server authoritative multiplayer is so that we can catch gameplay exploits ourselves. We can catch them through observation. All player calculations are performed on the server.

It can no longer be impacted in ways that they currently can with the offline game so anti-cheat is through the actual design process of creating a fully server authoritative game. We’ll have data to find those kind of behaviours. We’ll have different various methods that it’s better we don’t get into to discuss that we’ll be exploring how to prevent them, but to be very clear again we will not be doing any kind of additional anti-cheat software. We will be managing all of that through the way we’ve designed multiplayer.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are you very worried about the economy being ruined by things like cheats and stuff in the standard realm?

Dan: Not particularly. I think some of the decisions we’ve made of how we’re going to launch an economy upfront are going to help us control that a lot better. I think with other really good complex economies there’s a lot of stress and a lot of additional work for developers that go into protecting those economies and we’re kind of avoiding that with some of the options we’re exploring at the moment.

With that said, as we continue to add more complex options for interacting with each other we’ll try to build things on in a sensible way that’ll let us actually be able to manage them. So for the time being we’re not as worried about those things ruining anything because we’re probably not going to release an environment as robust as say the auction house we were previously pitching.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What about something like a damage meter for parties, have you thought about that?

Judd: Yeah, damage meters. It’s a good conversation. We know that a lot of people do want to understand how much damage they’re doing and we have the damage training dummies at the arena grounds that people can beat up on to understand that a bit more. We don’t want to make it so that people focus on their damage as much as maybe a damage meter that follows you around would make the case.

So when we’ve brought this up in the past we’ve tended to lean towards no, we don’t want to have that as a persistent element that can follow you around and tell you your DPS – especially in parties. However, we do like to give you ways to understand how much damage you’re doing and whenever we start to implement more in-game bosses that don’t have the amount of scaling to them as they do right now it should be a good benchmark for how your character is doing because some of those bosses will likely be DPS checks and things like that.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: When will the gambling delay be removed?

Judd: It’s a common request, isn’t it?

Mike: Gambling is not a huge part of gear acquisition and it’s not designed to be either. It’s more of a mid-game – like get you through leveling a little bit faster. We’re hoping that players are not sitting in town just gambling. That’s not a game loop that we’re really encouraging right now.

Zizaran: Oh, my bad.

Judd: I think whenever we expand upon the gambling system – we do have conversations about how we can make the gambling system more intriguing than it is right now. We’ve had some some nerfs to it. Whenever we go back and take a good look at that system we do understand that people would like to not have the gambler be delayed in the item pooling as much as it is so we would probably take a look at it then.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What’s your position on pure support classes? Is there ever going to be a pure support class?

Dan: Yeah, I love that question. It does kind of go back again to these things – I think a lot of these questions are like what’s your…how do you want to drive this thing. For us here, we love that you can support people. We think it’s totally okay that you sacrifice your own personal power to try to actually empower other people, but we’re not specifically trying to design builds like this. Instead, we’re adding layers to skills, unique’s, passives, idols, and everything in the game to kind of allow players to make their own decisions as to what constitutes a support build for themselves.

I think it’s more fun to be able to build a hybrid damage build with some support layers than to be forced into specifically a support build that works the best. We’ll take a look if any support build or meta becomes really like degenerate. An aurabot in PoE is a lot less concerning than say some of the three support and one damage groups in Diablo 3. We want players to have lots of tools and make support builds, but our goal is never going to be to just make a support class or support archetype.

Zizaran: Yep, that makes sense.

Mike: I think you can make support characters with things that are unlikely. There’s a surprising number of tools in Rogue to make a support Rogue, even right now.

Dan: Yeah, Rogue was actually the first one we had to look at because there’s a crit vulnerability build that’s actually amazing on the Rogue playing in a group and we did not expect the Rogue to be the first thought for a support build.

Zizaran: That’s very interesting.

Judd: But again, we know that people like to play support archetypes and so we’ll continue to add options like that. It’s not out of the question to see – like we’re going to go back and revisit skill trees constantly. We’re always going to be upgrading passives and skill trees and things like that. You might see things like Disintegrate on the Mage turn into like a Mercy from Overwatch – like damage boost, shoot at another character or something like that. So we can be very transformative in the skills that we actually do have existing at the moment and provide those types of playstyles.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: How often does somebody build something or makes a build that just blows you away?

Mike: Definitely.

Dan: The soft answer is yes, that happens a lot and we’re often really inspired by our players. Like right now we’re kind of looking at some of the auto-bombing builds that have come in with Void Knight and we want to think of more creative ways to enable that kind of archetype without it being a num-locked build. So things that people blow us away with we often are inspired by and go and try to – rather than just say nerf or remove them, we’ll try to make them available via other means or adjust the playstyle. So yeah, it definitely happens all the time. There’s more players than us, our players are smarter than us, and we do our best to just try to make tools that people can have a lot of fun with and when we see things we really enjoy from it too we kind of take those in ourselves.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: I’ve been curious about multiplayer, how it’ll work when another player dies during say any monolith or dungeon? Normally that’s the end of the run but are players able to be brought back to life or do they stay dead and if they can be brought back to life how do they plan on balancing solo play?

Dan: It’s a great question. It often creates a very confusing and complicated game design meeting out of trying to answer all the questions around dying. [laughter amongst the dev’s]

Judd: It does, it does.

Dan: Yeah, just laughing because we’ve all been in those meetings together. For this, it’s still being iterated on. We are always going to be prioritizing facilitating playing together and try to knock off major exploit cases. A specific example, in regular echoes only players who complete the echo without dying or leaving before the objective is complete will receive the echo reward and if the owner leaves without completing the objective and starts another instance then that instance no longer has the reward. So we are trying to address all of the major exploit cases, but again, we’re going to prioritize people playing together easily. Just that example is like we’re going to try to deal with it where possible.

Zizaran: Cool. Well, it’s a good that you’ve already thought about it.

Dan: Oh yes, to great extent.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What lessons are they learning from other ARPG’s, both positive and negative?

Judd: Yeah, it’s a good question. There are many games in the genre that have gone through many lessons that we’re learning from, and there’s a ton of them. We follow all of the other games in the genre very closely. I’ll even give some context there – we even have it so that we actually run the company’s communications through Discord and we have a section on Discord with channels that are named “other games in the genre” and we have a channel for each of them and we constantly get their announcements and we have conversations about every single thing that happens with all of them.

If there is a lesson to be learned from other games in the genre, especially ones that the community picks up, it is overwhelmingly likely that we are very well in tune with it and discussing it actively and approaching anything that we implement into the game or how we approach things with that knowledge in hand.

Source: YouTube Link

[Zizaran talks about how fun it is to play multiplayer with the dev’s]

Judd: Oh yeah, every ARPG that I’ve played I’ve actually played with my cousin. I’ve almost never played solo and it’s always just been an excuse to chill and hang out and talk and have a good time collecting loot. So getting to the point to where we’re actually able to do this in Last Epoch is just an absolute dream come true and it’s always how we’ve intended the game to be played.

Zizaran: That’s awesome.

Dan: It’s so exciting to be doing this after so much work and so much effort that goes into doing this while we’ve also releasing an offline game still. So this…I’m still not used to doing it. It still feels incredible.

Judd: Turns out there’s a reason that not many studios try to approach the server authoritative model in the way that some of these games do. It’s very complex.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: What plans do you have for a customizable endgame with being able to increase the risk to get more rewards? For example, PoE juicing.

Dan: For sure. Right now, obviously our primary mechanic here is the corruption system of the monolith – where building higher corruption increases the power of enemies and negative modifiers from our echoes in our endgame. This also improves item rarity and the specific rewards. I’m just kind of running that through for anyone who hasn’t gotten to our endgame. It has pros and cons compared to juicing individual maps. It does require less busy work from the player, in terms of like a per echo basis, so you’re not putting as much effort into constantly juice your next five minutes/15 minutes of play, but it does lead to a bit of a flatter experience.

Though, as stated before, there’s more opportunity that we need to kind of fill out the depth there of how we provide those, like the juicing options there. So, I mean, when we expand endgame in the future we definitely want to create more moments that kind of build up risk and reward – that’s the key area that, going back to endgame thoughts, is very much presently on our minds.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: So what about pack size, in general, as well as being able to change it…some people feel like, especially at some points during leveling and within some monoliths, the pack size can be very scarce and more importantly than it being very scarce it can sometimes just be very dramatically different. For example, some zones like in Chapter 8 feel like they have a very large number of enemies and then there are other zones where there’s far fewer enemies.

Judd: Yeah, it’s something that we’re definitely aware of and oftentimes the pack sizes that we’re putting into the game has been limited due to the performance concerns that have existed in the game for a long time. We’ve now made tremendous strides in terms of performance. I’m very excited to get the performance enhancements to you guys in the next patch here. That’s going to allow us to loosen the reins on how much we’re putting on to the screen at a given time. As we continue to improve performance we can continue to increase pack size as we see fit.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Will you allow us to fight dungeon bosses after our death with no reward to make it easier to learn the fights?

Dan: So for that, we kind of need to adjust how clear and how punishing certain dungeon boss mechanics are. We don’t want to create a failed victory state where you beat the boss but don’t get the rewards. So we do want to avoid bad states like that when possible.

Judd: We’re talking about potential ways to give players more chances by doing things inside of the dungeon before they get to the boss because we understand that, you know, we don’t want it so that you’re having to learn the fight and you don’t succeed, especially on hardcore. So we’re looking at that for sure.

Zizaran: Yeah, I mean, that’s always going to be a hard thing on hardcore because if you’re always going to succeed on the first try then it might not be hard enough. I like what you’ve done with the dungeon bosses with the four different tiers, where at the second one you’re already feeling like you can actually die here and then the third one is very dangerous.

Dan: That one’s a great example where T4 dungeons are really like pinnacle content – you’ll clear them eventually but if you’re going to clear that on your first try you better have put in an incredible amount of planning and optimization. We think that overcoming those bosses should feel really rewarding, so avoiding those kind of failed victory states that’s particularly – like those are the most important places where we want to make sure that you get that feeling of satisfaction defeating the boss rather than being able to just jank yourself in the fight dozens of times until you can pull yourself through. That doesn’t feel as great.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: How is the game going to run on a Steam Deck or a controller? For example, Blizzard puts a lot of effort into making the controller experience just as good as the mouse and keyboard experience.

Judd: Yeah, so there is a bit of UI work that would need to happen before we’re happy with how the game is supported on Steam Deck. There’s a lot of UI in these games and so it would be a significant amount of work. However, there are things that we are intending to do in the long-term, either way. Things like UI scaling is a common request that we are actively looking at. We’re going to continue to make controller support better as time goes on. So with these initiatives that we already have in the pipeline we’ll get to the point where Steam Deck will be naturally supported through those efforts.

Zizaran: Very nice.

Mike: Just to be clear, Steam Deck is an entirely different platform for us. It’s something that we are sort of incidentally supporting but we’re not really prepared to commit to directly supporting it yet. It’s something we’re really interested in. It’s just so new, it’s an extra platform, and we have to really focus on getting our core system and core platforms out the door first.

Dan: It is optimistic there. I actually do the overview because Valve does a QA process themselves and without going into details we’re like only a couple steps from being viable on the Steam Deck…from their point of view. We’ll have a lot we want to do for our controller experience on it, but Steam Deck is certainly in our uncertain future because it’s already pretty close.

Mike: There are people that do use it already. I’ve seen people saying that they’ve got it working but it’s not consistent and it’s not just out of the box ready.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Is Last Epoch ever going to be available on console?

Judd: Definitely interested in console in the future. Again, with the things that we are advancing in the game for PC, it naturally lends itself to console fairly well. We need to make sure that the initial platforms that we’re supporting are in very good standing and then if we are to shift any development power we need to make sure that the game is on very solid footing in all regards before we would consider consoles. If we do console it’s not going to be at release, certainly, and it probably wouldn’t be for at least a while afterwards.

Dan: We’ve got a lot of good advice there from GGG, and a lot of the pain that goes into that process. It’s something we’ll look at when we’re – like Judd said, when we have a lot more availability. We don’t want to take away any focus from a successful PC release.

Judd: I guess something that I can say is that we are focusing on expanding the playerbase that we can reach with the PC version of the game. We are actively working towards localizing the game now, which is something that we haven’t stated before.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are there any thoughts on being able to respec masteries? For example, if I pick a Necromancer but want to move into Warlock then I have to make a new character.

Judd: Yeah, yeah…so currently there’s a lot of flexibility when it comes to respec’ing characters in the game, as we’ve mentioned a couple of times throughout the stream. However, when creating an entirely new build a lot of times we prefer that the player create a character from scratch and experience the full journey of progressing that build from level one. We do believe that a lot of the fun and your tie to the character is actually from advancing that character and going through the trials of the campaign. We don’t necessarily want to remove that.

We don’t want to make it so that these decisions create too much anxiety or players are too worried about making mistakes, which is why in general we enable fairly comprehensive respec’ing without extensive resource requirements. There’s not a lot of items – you have to use gold to respec most of the time. There’s a balance to maintain there with how easy we make changing your character. We’re fairly happy with our current standing of the selections that you lock in being your base class and then the mastery class that you select afterwards. So no plans to change that currently.

Source: YouTube Link

Q: Are you going to stick to deterministic crafting?

Mike: Yeah, so I think the – we do have fairly deterministic crafting, maybe directed crafting is a better word for it. It’s not fully deterministic, there’s still some things that are randomized there. We do really like the things that it brings.

Dan: For us, I mean, we have no plans of reducing like any of the predictability or reliability that we’ve already given to you for crafting. At its core, for us, the crafting is an item progression where you improve the items you find in your direction and then there’s a level of randomization so the end result is not certain, but we love the way directed crafting is right now.

In the future we’re going to keep doing even more things like this to provide exciting moments, in terms of loot drops and RNG, but one thing we’ve always done is mix our directed crafting with random exciting moments in the game itself. We will continue to do that in the future. The legendary system, as an example, players really liked our legendary system which added a layer of achievable power through both randomness and a kind of predictable path to achieving that power. I think that’s something we really love and are passionate about in our crafting system.

Source: YouTube Link

[End of Q&A]

vapourfire · September 23, 2022, 2:09pm

would you believe i managed to watch this stream…unlike previously … lol…

but still very much appreciate the transcriptions to look up “what did judd say in the stream again”

Bobi · September 23, 2022, 3:07pm

I have been watching both Dev streams via VoDs yet I appreciate good work. So much great information about the game future.

system · September 23, 2023, 3:07pm

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.