Hello Travelers,
As we approach the end of the year, I’d like to share with you what our plans and progress are for multiplayer in Last Epoch. Eleventh Hour Games has been hard at work in developing server-authoritative multiplayer that will bring you, your friends, and other Travelers together in your adventures through Eterra. While we are still months away from having this available to the public, we are making great progress and are excited about the mix of social systems we have planned.
Overview
Our core goal for multiplayer is to ensure that the world of Eterra feels alive. You will encounter other players from your server in hub zones like the End of Time, Heoborea, and the Bazaar. You will be able to form parties, check out gear, show off your loot, chat and make new friends.
You will be able to form parties of up to 4 players which will scale the difficulty of your team’s enemies. A cooperative party will be more formidable, but a disorganized party may struggle more than a solo player. Teaming up will also provide more build options if you want to play a supporting character. You can create builds that aid your allies with buffs and healing spells, taunt and stun enemies on the front lines, or create builds that devastate the opposition with high damage abilities while your team protects you. While having a supporting role character is not necessary, we know it’s an enjoyable experience for some players. Teaming up with other players will not be required to overcome any challenges in Eterra, but we aim to make co-op a fun and attractive experience.
When entering Eterra, you will be able to choose from many different server regions that are separate from one another. In addition to multiple locations in both America and Europe, we will have servers in other locations, such as Singapore.
Progress
Most pieces are in place and we are diligently combing through a massive amount of skills and systems to prepare them for testing. We have made a great deal of progress, but there are still many steps left to take.
Video of multiplayer in its current state:
Please note that multiplayer is still under active development and the team is working to make it a more polished experience.
To ensure that multiplayer feels good when it makes it into your hands, there are a few key things we’re tackling:
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Improving performance
We are still aggressively working on performance in Last Epoch. We have even more improvements coming soon, and we recognize that good performance is important for an enjoyable multiplayer experience. -
Preparing for Scale
Launching server-authoritative multiplayer is challenging and we’ve seen teams with greater resources struggle to keep login and gameplay servers operating well when met with demand. We will be scale testing often before releasing multiplayer to the public. -
Testing, Testing, Testing
There are bugs and party synergies that need to be found and addressed. While we’re sure that some players will find more when we launch, there is a lot that can be addressed before it’s in your hands.
While multiplayer is a system that is “ready when it’s ready” we’re very excited to expand testing to our community tester team in the near future and to be more vocal about our progress, plans, and timeline.
We want to thank you all again for being an amazing community that we could not be more happy to develop this game for. From all of us at Eleventh Hour Games, we wish you happy holidays and an amazing new year!
See you in Eterra,
Judd Cobler
EHG is on Fire!
