This argument I hear a lot, but I don’t find it very valid. It’s under the assumption that everybody just works at 100% efficiency all of the time, and that every dev should spend 100% uptime on the game. Maybe he spent this time when he was waiting for a build to complete. Maybe he spent this time while waiting for some QA. There’s always some downtime, in any job, where you could just spend the time on writing a small piece about content you’re extremely familiar with. Meaning it doesn’t cost that much time either. At least you don’t have to think about the content. Just about how to phrase it.
I’m sure nothing was ever delayed simply because a dev posted a message. That’s not how the world works. There are so many factors that go into development, that just spending a bit of time on something that’s not development will not be the cause for any significant delays.
On the plus side, they usually maintain an open conversation with the community, which is very, very valuable. It makes us understand the company and their motives a lot better, generally speaking. And then if they do get to delay, simply because things take more time than expected, or maybe they had technical setbacks, or one of 10 other reasons you tend to encounter in development, we are much more appreciative of that decision, because we have a good understanding of what’s going on.
I think the dev blogs provide value and make a lot of sense from a company perspective.
What you (@EHG_Mike) wrote about the multiplayer sounds great to me. I prefer solo play, and with a select group of friends that have a (semi) compatible attitude to how fast to go and how much time to spend ‘chimping’ over the collected loot in town. I dislike public parties, I never had a positive experience with those in any game. 5 party members is already a lot, considering that you want to move together as a group and there is little room to manouver.
PvP being separate and having a ‘gladiator’ kind of fights sounds good too. I’m thinking of Exanima (the game), and their arena system (though it’s not pvp), where you play against opponents, unlock gear and can place bets and so on, that might be interesting for PvP instead of people bringing in their gear collected during solo/party play, but maybe as an option (it would put more emphasis on skill rather than luck/duration of play, so it would be easier for new players to step into the pvp arana to play). It would be nice to have a ‘spectator’ mode, and to be able to bet on your favorite player, or maybe even ‘sponsor’ fights by making an item you found a prize that a contestant can win. This would envolve people that don’t like to PvP but like to watch others slaughter each other
As for loot: it depends on the situation, I like when in a group anyone can pick up an item, sometimes an item drops and I don’t have room in my inventory, so a team player can pick it up, or one persons picks up one item type etc. It’s coop play after all. But that might not work in ‘public’ games of course.
Offline for solo sounds great, though if you ever want to play with others, you are forced to play online always, even if you want to trade items once a months or playe with someone occasionally, so it’s a kind of harsh separation, like HC and SC are separated forever. But I’m very happy you offer the offline possibility, I will definitely play that too.
I don’t know what their resource constraints are, I don’t even know what they do per se (since I’m an accountant not a developer), but broadly speaking, time spent doing task A means you’re not doing task B.
Yeah, maybe Mox/Mike/Sarno/etc have tasks that take a while to run that they can then shift on to something else. I don’t know about them, but I’m not sure I do my best writing/work (such as it is) while waiting for something else to run/compile/whatever. Plus at some point you’d probably want to sit down and focus on writing a blog post.
I also agree that any comments/posts/blogs from the devs are interesting and give us insight into the game.
I’d just disagree if someone said that that kind of thing didn’t have any downside in terms of time taken away from doing something else, or that they were just knocked out in a few mins.
You’re making things much more complicated than they really are. I did not ask for a new dev blog or some other “polished” stuff they have to work out first.
Some teasers, nothing special. Would take about 10 minutes of dev time. EHG takes time to answer a lot of more complicated questions on discord as well as things that get asked over and over again.
If they don’t answer it’s ok, too. I can handle that.
Correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t multiplayer phase 3? I know we have chapter 8 from phase 3 but I don’t think we’ve actually gotten into phase 3 yet. So I’m not sure how they’ve delayed it.
Heck over on one of the thread about the upcoming patch, Mike mentioned something about people wanting a loot filter might be in for a small bit of happiness. This set of a hype storm and he had to come back in and say, 'no it’s not the loot filter, we don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up about that." Then everyone was all disappointed.
I think a ‘tease’ is really only good when they know they’re going to release it. Because, A) they know WHAT and WHEN they’re delivering it. B) They know that the ‘tease to time’ ratio will manageable.
Personally if something is a one-sentence remark about something in the game that a dev may say I put no thought into that, just file it away. Now patch notes and previews, that is where I try to pull my info from.
Maybe you people are a bit overacting on that topic.
Look, I just asked about small infos about the current state of multiplayer and stated that I can’t see a reason they are that silent about it. Nothing more. This was in no way a demand of anything.
I don’t want to create unjustified hype
I don’t want the devs to quit their work to please the desires of a little LE addict (me)
I did not want to start the discussion that arose now, either
It’s all fine. Don’t waste your time explaining to me why it’s better to not talk about a topic they made a blog post 2 years ago. You can’t convince me that there’s nothing to talk about.
But that’s ok. I can live with that. Barely, but still…
While the actual work on the netcodes and getting servers robust for MP will have very little useful things to update and communicate with the community on, I do think there are some valuable game designs conversations the dev could start to share with us even as they tell us from time to time that MP is progressing.
For example, what is the vision for MP in Last Epoch? How would enemies scale with larger parties? What are the type of MP content that devs think would be available for players? Are pick up parties meant to viable? How would we find players to play with? Would there be guild support structure? How similar/dissimilar would MP be compared to POE or D3?
These are questions I wish we could engage the devs on and help to shape the nature of MP in Last Epoch even as the devs are working to get the basics and netcode ready.
Lots of great questions in there. I think that we have probably been a little too tight lipped about it as of late. I think we can open up the dialogue a little more. Unfortunately we are going to put a slight delay on that just until we’re over the patch hump. Once we’re through that, we will take some time to get the community communication regarding multiplayer going better.
There was a little bit of talk kinda regarding it in the interview Boardman just put up.
Good, that’s what I thought. Writing a post about a thing (like their plans for MP) would totally not take away their time from doing something else (like releasing a big arse patch). Gotcha.
