I don’t really get people getting annoyed about the delay. Sure, you want to play your game more and need it improved to justify doing that. So… what difference is there when that happens? It’s not a subscription game. If you don’t want to play now and do want to play when changes are in, then are you gonna be happier getting a handful of those changes soon even if a lot of the frustrations with the game are still in place or are you going to be happier if you come back when it’s all solid?
Personally, I prefer the latter. The game is inherently repetitive. I get tired of it after playing for so long. If I came back for 2 seasons for partial updates that should/could have been one, I think I’ll just burn out faster.
Hopefully these changes actually bring the game to a good state. There’s so much to like about LE, it just feels incomplete in a way that makes it hard to keep having fun with it. I’m most curious about the crafting and monolith changes. Those are definitely some of the bigger barriers to keeping the game fresh and motivating.
I’m disappointed by seeing we won’t get the continuation of the campaign. In the previous roadmap, the “Ancient Era Story Chapter” was supposed to be released with update 1.2. Now 1.2 has been merged with 1.3 and postponed, but even then we won’t get more of the campaign.
The “new” roadmap is rather different from the original one. I wonder how much it, too, will change in the nearby future.
All seems fine, but yes, April is far away, and probably this season 2 will come the same time of the season 8 of D4, considering that season 7 comes out the 21th January, and will last until around 21 April being the usual 3 months length, even march could have been a far better time to drop the season 2, this mean that the work to deploy the season is still far to be completed, and so also the expectation are going to be incredible big, let’s wait
April is a big fail and just makes it harder to trust they will ever meet the estimated 3-4 month seasons. I’m still looking forward to Season 2 but it won’t be a priority. And now LE will be buried by both D4 and POE2 news and updates.
In the past Judd has stated, I believe on reddit, that the team works very fast. But the impression people get from the outside is that they are very, very slow.
I do find unfortunate that the Campaign continuation has been pushed back to future updates, though. I am still curious to know what happens after chapter 9.
I’m really excited to see what the team has come up with. A lot of good ideas are in this game. Stability and rigidity are important in your implementations. Gald you are focusing on that.
I really really hope you fix the tri-beam boss out-of-sync issue or reworked that boss. It’s the one thing I experienced in the current season that I just was like, this sucks.
Also, I hope you have better directions for questing for the endgame stuff. I didn’t even attempt the new faction because I have no idea where I need to go to kill the w/e is required in the quest and just kind of gave up.
Just fyi for the next time or if you wanna have a go at it again:
The tldr version is: just push corruption to 300 and play every mono. The harbingers will spawn and killing them in every timeline will automatically advance the faction.
The longer version: You need certain corruption levels the next Harbinger to spawn. The first spawns after killing the timeline boss of the 90er Monos. The next one on Corruption 100 after killing a timeline boss. Then every 25 Corruption the next Harbinger can spawn. Every timeline has it’s own Harbinger (10 in total I think). You need to kill the Harbinger of every timeline to advance the faction.
You can always check what level of corruption you need and what Harbinger you already killed/still need to kill. For that you need to go to your Harbinger faction UI. There you will have an additional tab called “Harbingers”. You get an overview there.
First off, Diablo 2 started the whole seasons concept, so your claim is factually incorrect. Secondly, Grim Dawn—a fantastic game—runs an unofficial (yet heavily endorsed) seasonal rotation: Grim Dawn Community League. Even with these community-hosted events, Grim Dawn averages 2,388 monthly players, just slightly above Last Epoch’s 2,180 players. This isn’t a knock on Grim Dawn; it’s proof that even a great game with seasonal attempts needs consistent, developer-backed support to sustain long-term engagement.
Now let’s look at the Steam player counts for seasonal games:
Path of Exile: 14,064 average players on Steam alone—not counting its standalone launcher.
Path of Exile 2: 359,701 average players just one week into Early Access.
Diablo 4: 8,922 average players on Steam, not factoring in the majority on Battle.net.
By comparison, games without consistent seasonal updates—Grim Dawn, Titan Quest, Torchlight 1 and 2, Chronicon—struggle to maintain a combined 3,601 average players. That’s a 10,613% difference. Pretending this is a 50/50 split based purely on the number of games is absurd and disingenuous. By playerbase, seasonal games dominate completely.
It’s not just about the age of the games either. Path of Exile is nearly 3 years older than Grim Dawn yet has 588% more players because it delivers a constant flow of new and exciting content. Grim Dawn doesn’t, and while its expansions are phenomenal, they don’t provide the same sustained engagement as seasons. Expansions generate temporary spikes in interest, but they don’t give players a reason to return regularly.
EHG is doing their best, but the market isn’t going to sit around and wait for them. If they want the success I think they deserve, I firmly believe they need a more consistent update schedule.
The last thing I want is for LE to turn into another Wolcen.
Ladder 1 launched October '03, no ladder only content.
Ladder 2 launched July '04 with ladder only Runewords and a contest to be first to 99.
Ladder 3 launched August '05 with no ladder only content.
Season* 4 launched July '07 with "not much changed between season 3 and 4. (this is the first time a reset was called a season.)
Season 5 launched June '08 with Lords of Destruction.
Season 6 was March '10 w/ major changes (including stash space)
Season 7-27 started the ~6-7 month trend of resets, but list no seasonal changes.
Basically, Diablo 2’ s Season are nothing like the seasons from D3 or PoE and were effectively just character wipes with maybe something new added if it coincided with a major patch.
It’s still unofficial, Grim Dawn is not a seasonal game. Even if the community league is heavily endorsed you may as well claim that Grim Dawn’s Barbarian/Amazon class is the best combination because Reign of Terror is an endorsed mod despite being a mod.
People really need to stop focusing solely on player count. As has been pointed out, PoE is immensely popular and drew a lot of people into the ARPG scene that were lost by D3’s antics. Games like Titan Quest and Grim Dawn are both amazing games but they’re 18 and 8 years old respectively. Titan Quest is old enough to vote and fight in wars in the USA. Path of Exile is 3 years older than Grim Dawn, but didn’t hit mainstream success on launch iirc (someone correct me if I’m wrong) and even PoE started as a campaign based game with multiple difficulties and a handful of acts before flipping to the “games as a service” concept.
Ultimately, my original reply was to point out that saying “the average ARPG has a season lasting 3-4 months” when only half of the major ARPG’s even have seasons (and the first one, D2, didn’t even have seasonal content just 6 month resets) is disingenuous as well. “seasonal ARPG’s are typically 3-4 month cycles” would be more technically correct (the best kind of correct). It has nothing to do with “how successful is the seasonal model” because that doesn’t even need to be brought up, again look at PoE, though I suppose the idea of “is PoE successful because it’s seasonal, or is it successful despite being seasonal.” should be asked, as most “games as a service” models either don’t hold the player retention like WoW, FFXIV, or PoE did or never take off in the first place.
Edit: I’d also like to point out that PoE having “sustained engagement” doesn’t really mean anything. Firstly, you can track that PoE gets surges of players on resets for maybe a month or two before it dwindles back down, while Grim Dawn has a steady flow of players. In analogy form, Grim Dawn is a garden hose with the water flow being turned on and left on while PoE is a Fire Hose being turned on for 2 seconds off for 4 seconds. The water in the hose never runs out but the flow is in bursts
It’s also disingenuous to lump niche ARPGs with the most popular ones. Namely D2, POE, D3 and D4 (and now POE2). They constitute like 90-95% of the market over the years?
Grim Dawn has definitely done well, but you can’t really see how much more Torchlight Infinite, Undecember have outside of steam on their mobile clients. Both of which have seasons. Warhammer 40k:Inquisitor Martyr is season based but is now in maintenance mode. I’d say all of the games mentioned in this paragraph are in the same tier.
Grim Dawn is very much the outlier in terms of being able to maintain a steady concurrent population in the thousands without supported seasons.
Agree. Concurrent player count is not the best metric for LE to be measured by … Personally, I think box sales are a much more accurate measure of success for LE than “pLaYeR cOuNt”
It’s a mostly single-player, non-subscription game after all …
But he didn’t specify “most popular ARPGs”, he said “The average ARPG has a 3-4 month cyclical season rotation”, and by saying “average ARPG” you must include all ARPGs, I didn’t feel like listing the hundreds of options that fall within the vague guidelines of what constitutes being part of this genre, like, are we only talking Isometric dungeon crawlers with real-time combat? If that’s the case, then even including D2 in with the “has seasons” group would make them the vast minority of ARPGs so I was being generous with my list.
If we’re only including “popular” ARPGs, then we still need to include Titan Quest and Grim Dawn as while they’ve never had the playercount that the Diablo Franchise or PoE had they still indeed have a not insignificant number of players still playing those games. Same with the Torchlight Series (not counting Torchlight 3 as that was basically just a mobile game ported to PC).
I admitted to my bias against seasonal content. I find it to rarely make the game better and often times makes the game worse, I’m glad TQ2 is not going down the “game as a service” route and I wish LE didn’t go down that route either. I honestly believe it’s what killed Wolcen (alongside the fact that they got into development hell and didn’t really know what kind of game they wanted to make).
