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: What happens if I drop loot?
Judd: You will still be the only one to see that loot.
Zizaran: Is that a temporary thing or something that’s staying?
Judd: There’s going to be a lot of questions around trading today and we’re probably not going to dive too deep into our trading system and how loot will be exchanged between players because we want to make sure that we take a step back and put all that in writing and make sure that you guys have all the reasoning and understanding. We’re also still testing these things. So we’re actually going to be implementing our first trade system inside of our CT test here in the very near future to get feedback on.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: With Diablo 3 being a 10 and Grim Dawn being a 1 in terms of pace, what pace do you want Last Epoch to be in terms of gameplay?
Judd: Yeah, that’s a great question. We definitely want some enemies that you encounter in the world to be worth your effort, take a moment, pose risk and challenges to you and not just have it so that your character ignores all enemy mods and blitzing through every screen. If I had to give a number here I’d probably pin it somewhere right at 5 or somewhere close to the middle.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: For XP, are we all leveling at the exact same time?
Mike: If we’re roughly 2 or 3 screens away or so it should be pretty similar.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: What is going to happen in terms of enemies getting stronger in multiplayer?
Judd: What we’re planning on doing here is having it so that enemies scale health and not damage because we don’t want it so that whenever you’re getting into a party and you’re a squishy Mage in the back line that anything just obliterates you immediately if you pair up with a party. We don’t want that to be punishing. However, we do want it so that enemies scale health so that it does take an appropriate amount of time to get through zones.
Source: YouTube Link
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: How many people can be in one party?
Judd: Four players.
Zizaran: Is that what you’re going with or is that a temporary thing?
Judd: That is currently what we’re proceeding with, yes.
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.
Q: For the server right now, am I hosting it or is this a server hosting? Like in Europe somewhere.
Dan: This is fully server authoritative so this is hosted in a data center. You are not the host so you can’t have any kind of control or power over the server.
Zizaran: Okay cool, so I can’t like cheat in a Herald of the Scurry?
Judd: That’s correct, yep.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: What about server locations? Where are you currently providing servers?
Dan: We have a large list of that, just a sec. Right now we’re in Australia Southeast and Australia West, Asia Southeast and Asia Northeast, all US locations, all Canadian locations, EU West, EU East, and potentially South Africa.
Source: YouTube Link
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: What happens if you talk to a quest in the next area? Will that still be there for me or can I end up getting soft locked out?
Mike: We treat the zone as a whole quest state and as you enter – if you enter a zone that’s already had quests advanced in that zone then it sort of automatically brings you up to speed with it. Also, there’s less lock-outs for quest requirements so you can kind of hop in and hop out of the quest chains pretty freely. So you almost never get locked out of things. There’s a few bugs still that don’t flow as smooth as we’d like to yet, but we really try to make it not something you need to worry about – it just kind of works. It’s pretty friendly.
Source: YouTube Link
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: So your team has grown quite a lot with 80 people now. Are you still actively hiring people?
Judd: Constantly. Absolutely, we’re still hiring people. If you go to our website we have positions listed there. We actually need to update that because there’s a number of positions that we’re hiring that aren’t listed there quite yet. 80 sounds like a large number but that’s mainly because we have a lot of departments that a lot of studios would typically outsource – we keep them internal. So all of our art pipeline is internal, all of the music and sound production is internal, so a lot of those things that people have dozens or hundreds of other people in other studios working on for them, we’re just keeping in-house.
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: So how is this going to work with things like boosting and XP penalties? Like, for example, say my friend Steelmage is level 95 and I come in with a level 15 character will I be getting insane XP and he can boost me up to level 60 real quick?
Mike: We’re going to stick with the same experience “penalty” that we have in single player right now. So you’ll gain experience as though you were in a level 20 zone. You can go to further zones by just portalling to him and he’ll carry you through hard stuff and you’ll level really fast but it won’t be light speed.
Zizaran: Okay, so boosting will be possible then?
Dan: Yes, but it’ll be a scaled boost so it won’t be quite like the 30 second leveling process of Diablo 3, for example.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: When can we expect the missing masteries to be finished?
Dan: We’re planning on adding all three new masteries by the release of 1.0. Right now we’re trying to kind of prioritize working on those with all of these complicated technical things that we still have to polish and improve. So we’re currently juggling the balance and design of those up until release. So between the open beta and release you should see us starting to implement the remaining masteries. We’ve actually already have a pretty clear vision of what we’re going to do for the Runemaster. We definitely have kind of come together to talk about the Runemaster and figured out what we want to do. We’re going to be putting that together as we approach open beta and up to 1.0.
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
Q: Most important question here that I want you guys to commit to, ideally just say yes to this. Can we name the falcon?
Mike: I’m just trying to think if it’s functional to do it or not.
Dan: No.
Judd: I’m sure Michael [might be another EHG employee, but that’s what it sounded like] already has the list of randomly generated falcon names that he would die if we said that we were just going to allow them to name them. I’m not going to commit to that one yet. Note taken though.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: Will the wolf AI be applied to all pets soon or is there something better on the way?
Dan: So that was actually the case where we’ve applied that minion AI improvement to almost every minion in the game now already. So it’s already done. That’s a pretty easy answer. We have even more that we’re doing there. We have some experimental changes we have in mind such as; we’re currently trying to experiment with ways to make pets match player speed in reasonable ways, and just ways that AI will interact with the player depending on what kind of pet they are and what the player’s doing. So while we’ve added a lot of those improvements, we’re looking at adding even more and we’re experimenting for the time being.
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: Oh, so is there never going to be content that will require two or more people?
Judd: We are not planning to add content like that right now.
Zizaran: Okay.
Judd: All content you can experience with multiple players but nothing required.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: When can we start to expect microtransactions? I want to look pretty.
Judd: Fair question, so we’re aiming for a minimum viable version of the MTX store for the open beta or the next patch, being 0.9. It’s important for us to release this so we can start to figure out what the community will enjoy and what you guys would like to see to support us. It will be important that we are selling these microtransactions because, you know, keeping games like this running is expensive. We’re going to release a version of this in 0.9 to make sure that it is watertight and we get all the bugs out so that when we get to 1.0 that system is solid. So fairly soon.
Source: YouTube Link
Q: And will there ever be any microtransactions that affect gameplay in Last Epoch?
Judd: There will not, only cosmetical.
Zizaran: Nice! Cosmetic only.
Mike: Very hard stance.
Judd: Very hard stance.
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.
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