Multiplayer Dev Q&A with Zizaran - Transcribed

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

Multiplayer Dev Q&A with Zizaran - Transcribed

Dev Q&A Continued…

[End of Q&A]