Honestly, Last Epoch should continue doing what they’re doing. I believe the multiplayer release will be a very important moment for Last Epoch so should be done as best and as polished as possible so as to not deter new players or send existing players running back to PoE or other games. They need to get it right and make it work reasonably well. The whole “this is early access/beta” doesn’t really matter for most people, it needs to work for the most part and have no gameplay blocking issues.
Rushing the release will cause more problems, especially in the longer term. I do understand it’s preferable they release the patch this year, maybe before PoE 3.20 (December) as it’ll have a much wider range of players interested in it, including many new ones who’re very iffy about continuing to play PoE due to what has been happening. But if it’s released in a poor state with major issues, it’ll just burn people and make it harder to bring them back later.
The D4 end game beta is live, & the overwhelming feedback is positive. Lots of stuff to do, & you get to explored the vast open world. Visually & animation wise, it blows every competition out of the water, which is to be expected. But from psoitive feedback (of Beta) & the fact it will be a live service with army of people supporting for years to come (their words), means its impact will be felt not just on launch, but well after.
Also the game will not have Pay2Win. They literally shout from the rooftop with a megaphone. Thy could lie for sure, but if they intend to have P2W, isn’t it better to keep mom, & be dodgy like a seasonal politican.
The best chance for Last epoch is to release just before D4 (like 2 months) so it is the arpg to play while waiting for D4. Hopefully many of these player stay 6 come back a few weeks in new season & buy a few MTXs.
& D4 (Obiously) & PoE2 are not the only completition. Undecember come out of noway & loved by many, who kmows what surprise will come next year, while Last epoch look aged every day.
The launch window is more important than people think. Look at Horizon zero dawn 2. Completely overshadowed by Elden ring.
EH need to make MP good & advertise as such, its the one point that LE can one up PoE which has weak MP experience. Also advertise it has th depth minus teh complexity of poE
You can’t really expect indie studios to chase AAA launch targets. D4 is going to be big regardless of what anyone else does but smaller games can still make it.
People keep talking about this as if they’ve got one shot to get it perfect or the game is doomed to a slow lingering failure and playerbase death. Did none of you play PoE when it was the same age as Last Epoch?
PoE was always-online from the start and it was terrible. The netcode was so dysfunctional that people routinely needed carrying through certain bosses that were just plain unbeatable unless you happened to win the connection lottery. There was also an order of magnitude less content in the game than there is currently, the entire game was from the beach up to fighting Dominus on the tower and then that was it. It just repeated twice more with higher difficulties, and then you had random procedurally generated maps with generic names based on the tileset.
That was it. That was the entirety of PoE. And today it’s a juggernaut. One that’s been so complacent and hostile towards its own playerbase for so long that any challenger basically has to TRY to fail. If you’re not forcing people to pick up shards of shards and locking people into un-fun gameplay loops and mandatory builds you’re probably doing fine.
The one thing LE really needs to work on is emergent gameplay. That’s where PoE eats everyone else’s lunch and their lunchboxes too. Right now in LE all cross-skill and eventually cross-player interactions are hardcoded. Lunge specifically and only triggers smite. Void Cleave specifically and only grants crits to the next erasing strike. Even where it’s not named skills it’s still heavily railroaded like the time rot->erasing strike setup.
If EH figure out a viable and original enough way to open that whole system up then they’ll be ready for multiplayer, because then you’ll be able to have people setting each other up for combos and a lot more solo build diversity as well.
it’s really not. companies are very (very) rarely punished for lying. It’s best for them to lie, maximize the game purchase for the first couple of years, and then as sales start to flatten, start the PtW.
“the shareholders” will demand it.
when everyone says, “hey, you said you wouldn’t do PtW!”, they’ll just shrug their shoulders all the way to the bank.
edit: i’m not saying they’ll do that, just saying that it’s a completely viable strategy.
Torchlight Infinite came out of nowhere for me, ive played 180 hours and its a really good game. I have a 2x lvl 94 and im up to the near end-end game, ive beaten Traveller T7 and pretty much went in with zero expectations and was pleasant surprised
Its basically PoE lite, has all the good features (6Llinks, link interactions, many base classes and then skill tree combos, maps with infinite sustain*, league mechanic, sextants, Cast on crit, trade house) but it does them in a more casual friendly way. IE Links arent based off your actual piece of gear but your ‘energy’ level, theres no colouring of links
Monetization is decent - ive spent 0$, if they improve their shitty UI for PC, add controller support this game is going to pop off, game currently gets around 10-20k players
Dominus was added in 0.1 but act 4 wasn’t added until 2.0 so I’m not sure where 1.0 finished (presumably Dominus still, even if my phone wants to autocorrect him to Domino’s).
I’m pretty sure most people interested in LE already bought it at this point. I think D4 will be wildly popular, but this game does have some advantages: its ambience and atmosphere are far more varied, while D4 focuses solely on horror. I actually think D4 will market cap faster than 2 or 3 because they’re going for a completely different feel. As a somewhat older gamer, it’s kind of boring to have corpses literally everywhere and kind of annoying if you have smaller children. I don’t want them to see that. The devs have created so many environments, they can make the world feel far more varied.
It will definitely pose a marketing challenge if D4 launches before MP, but I don’t think it’s impassable (free to play weeks that are targeted at the right time on steam can probably help_. Also the build systems are different enough that if ARPG fans are ever bored, there’s still something here.
My biggest pieces of advice to the devs would be
Identify what people like that sets you apart, never skimp on that
adapt any systems that make sense that don’t water down #1
In a crowded market space it’s just as important to be different as it is to sell a good product, and there’s a balance that has to be struck between keeping yourself unique as well as copying the parts of the competition that make sense. If they just copy Diablo 4, they’ll end up with a sub-par copy and no one will play it because of that.
Imagine beliveing anything Blizzard is promising. How can someone be so naive ?
I have no worries with Diablo4 realease, because that company turned to shit. This is coming from someone who always loved their games, Im oldschool player of Warcraft, Diablo I & II, Starcraft I (this game was fantastic in its days). But as someone who has tried lot of ARPGs recently, Last Epoch have everything to be huge, it just need more propagation. It has most of the great things Grim Dawn offer, and they are developing it to suit multiplayer and group friendly, to be even better.
The Diablo Immortal release this year is the perfect example. Many people so hyped about it, and it turned out to be a huge disappointment. I tried it a couple of weeks before gaving up. Cash-grab, heavily flooed with microtransactions. I read one review that summarize it perfectly: " “This isn’t even a soulless cash-grab – the cash-grab is its very soul.” The microtransaction are the core of the game.
I loved playing Grim Dawn couple of years ago, and retired a little from games. So I came back last year and this year trying Lost Ark (you have to live for the game, not my cup of tea), Diablo Immortal, Guild Wars, and some others, none of them could deliver something special, something more than just kill time.
Last Epoch is the best experience I had in games from a long time, and there is a huge personal factor to me that helps to like it even more , is that you can be as much casual player as you want but you still can have fun playing it.
If I could suggest anything to devs is to sell skins & personalization to help get money, I would not mind at all to support it.
We don’t really have to look very far to see how Blizzard are going to lie about it. They said before release that you wouldn’t be able to buy “gear” with money in Diablo Immortal. Diablo Immortal releases and you can buy legendary gems, because legendary gems are not “gear”.
So they say there won’t be Pay2Win in Diablo 4 and they might sell stuff like increased inventory space or stash tabs because that’s technically not Pay2Win.
Diablo 4 is probably going to follow the same fate as Overwatch 2. From what I’ve heard, it’s a fun game to play but the season pass and skin monetisation haven’t been implemented as something player friendly.
You got to be this and you got to be that, and so on.
I come to the point of… just release Last Epoch just when it is ready for release. Just go all-in for when it is actually just ready for it, and don´t even bother about Diablo this and Diablo that.
Personally, when it comes to Diablo, I will no matter what, go for playing it. Last Epoch is actually a game I want to bother with. I may not have a gigantic amount of playhrs in Last Epoch, but if I do have Diablo and Last Epoch side by side, I go into Last Epoch and play that rather then Diablo.
I may just go Last Epoch for 5hrs, but that is 5 hrs more, then I will ever be spending and bothering with Diablo 4.
