Multiplayer Dev Q&A with Zizaran - Transcribed

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