I’m quite looking forward to buying Last Epoch, I’m mildly tentative about the purchase based on negative reviews and criticism in the Steam discussion pages, my main three concerns are as follows.
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Hotbar/active ability limitations:
What’s keeping me from buying the game is I’ve heard there’s a 3/5 ability hotbar and no way to map more? I feel developers could start just giving us XML files for UIs, and letting us map our own number of hotbars, and keys for the hotbars. I’m okay with having 4-14 hotbars, shift+1-10 changing primary hotbar, and 1-10, ctrl+1-10, alt+1-10, and maybe f1-f10 all being assignable as abilities. Yes I have played games (older mmorpgs like Everquest) where I had 40 to 100 mapped abilities that all had individual cooldowns, so monitoring them simultaneously meant I needed 40 visible hotbar slots to enjoyably play the game, but I needed to mod the xml so that that number of hotbar slots didn’t take up too much screen real-estate. It’s the one thing I don’t like about outriders right now, only 3 abilities, and it feels like developers do this these days to appease controller players, instead of thinking “Hey lets team up with logitech, sony, and microsoft and create a controller with a numpad on the inside of the right wing, like a good gaming mouse has on the thumb side, so controller users can have 12 more keys that take no extra effort”. Hell, thumbnumbpad on mouse is easier to use and play with than reaching for the number keys, middle-finger numpad on the back of a controller that’s the same size would similarly be great for abilities with cooldowns that you don’t need to be twitch-spamming. So in a game that might have pet classes and/or transformation classes like Last Epoch, I would definitely want to have more than just 5 abilities. As a systems analyst/combat encounter designer, I understand the possible balance issues of allowing players access to more skills, but that’s where cooldowns and shared cooldowns come in, which I’ve heard are already in place. Also in an ARPG, no further steps really need to be taken, Diablo 3 finally stopped caring about balance and became a thousand times more fun to play when they just started throwing ridiculously high multipliers on sets, and more and more stacking bonuses were made available to players. The active skill limit however is one of the reasons I don’t go back to the game anymore. There’s only so many combinations of active skills with such a small pool, that are viable and fun. -
Negative feedback about lack of multiplayer
I understand that it’s on the roadmap, I’ve heard other people’s concerns in the negative reviews and steam forum, and rebuttals to those reviews. The only part of the debate that interested me was balance. To me, balance should be based on difficulty sliders that are independent of one another, that are configurable by a host/leader in a game. Some games give you a single difficulty slider, ala Torment, or World Level, in Diablo 3 or Outriders for example. If the game were to be four player coop for example, I propose 4 sliders:
Population, 1 to 4 times as many monsters in spawn clusters,
Health, mobs have 1 to 4 times as much health,
Elite Representation, elites/minibosses/bosses have 1 to 16 times as much chance to be in any given spawn location,
Enemy Damage, enemies do 1 to 4 times as much damage.
Each slider should be impactful to things like resources earned, xp earned, magicfind/rare drop rate. That way even a solo player can crank everything up to 4 times difficulty beyond whatever the settings are for whatever difficulty level or playthrough they are on. (Good old /players 8 from Diablo 2).
- Loot abundance/rendering lag reduction.
I’ve heard great things about the in game filter, I think one more QoL step is to add a toggle that either prevents the loot below the rarity from dropping, or converts that loot instantly to whatever resource(s) are present in the game, such as currency, or materials that could be gained from breaking down the loot if there is a dismantling system.
