lmao…
So you're advertising your game as finished 21st February but 3 chapters of story missing on release
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It literally ends on a cliffhanger…but I’m nonsensical eh?
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Don’t buy games in early access. Wait for them to be released and for some reviews. If you are looking for story, don’t play ARPG in general.
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Truth be told 99% of players are gonna be fine with it because 99% of players are casuals and will eifher quit at husk of panillion in act 2 or just stay until their fav creator grows bored a month later and quit, aka they aint getting to act 8, more less beating lagon.
Those who beat it are hardcore arpg players and most of us are chill so dont care as we having fun. In my eyes, this js a none issue
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Can you define “unfinished story” ?
What is so unfinished in a narrative sense about LE story ?
Is it only because we don’t kill Apophis at the end of act 9 ?
Or is there some unresolved emotional tension that I’m unaware of ?
What would be, storywise, the needed conclusion for you to say “Okay, not the game is not in Beta anymore” ?
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To try and answer your question, my thread from a long time ago…
Edit: to summarise, “unfinished story” means no end boss, and opening questions that don’t get answered.
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So what happens to Neyrelle (sp?) and Mephisto at the “end” of Diablo 4? Is that not an open question that’s not answered? I thought that was finished though according to you. Weird.
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Your opinions are laughable and your facts are questionable at best. No story in a continuing online game is done until they say it’s done. In the AARPG genre, Diablo 2 vanilla got it most right when it comes to story completion but pretty much everything since has left it’s story open ended because they know updates/expansions are coming. Most games enter full release when the dev’s consider it feature complete. Stories are almost NEVER complete. You think LE is bad with a launch because the story is incomplete…what about D4, POE, Grim Dawn. Those 3 are the closest and most recent major release competitors. All of them didn’t exactly complete their story at launch, in fact 2 of them were much further from true endings at launch than LE is. And that’s a GOOD thing if you knew anything about online gaming in aargp’s or mmorpg’s.
FYI if you’ve played LE long enough to know the story isn’t complete you aren’t getting a refund from Steam. So all this whining about refunding the game is not only a waste of your time, it’s wholly ignorant of Steam’s refund policy. I have a feeling this genre at the very least, or maybe online gaming as a whole, isn’t for you.
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I might have not looked very thorough, but does the steam store page advertise the game as having a twelve-chapter story? 15 mastery classes, 120+ skill trees — that is stuff that is advertised on the store page. Instead, I found a passage “ongoing development” (translated from German store page: fortlaufende Entwicklung).
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Love muffins!
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Ah, I see the confusion now. It does make sense, thanks for clarifying and apologies for my nonsense comment.
You consider a story incomplete until either everybody is dead, or we can clearly say “and they lived happily ever after”. This is a valid point of view. But that means pretty much no book or movie produced in the last 50 years is truly finished.
I explain it better in the long thread I linked, but in a nutshell, what is generally considered a complete story from a narrative point of view is closing the urgent plotlines opened during the story. Keeping some doors open for the future is fine.
In the Diablo 4 example, the questions about Lilith are solved. Sanctuary is not in immediate danger anymore. The story is rounded up. Not the entire story of the world, forever, but the plot we were talking about (Lilith).
To bring it back to Last Epoch, we don’t need to completely eradicate the void or destroy Orobyss forever for the story to feel “complete”. If anything, it is better to keep it open to justify the timelines grind. But we do need to know who the Immortal Emperor is, how Apophis became the Oracle, how Yulia and Zerrick and Harton became what they are, how the void spread throughout the world, because those are immediate plotlines opened during the storytelling and not closed.
And we do need some kind of big baddie at the end, a big firework conclusion. Majasa just doesn’t fit as an end boss (not because she isn’t strong enough, just because she is not important enough in the story).
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My bet is on Grael.
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There is, you have to go into the other person’s profile & select ignore. It’s there if you look for it, not sure if that’s ironic or appropriate.
Isn’t that normally the case for “live service games”?
I get where you are coming from & I both agree & disagree, this isn’t the 80s/90s anymore.
Was D2’s story complete with the original release or LoD?
Personally I think they should put certain info on the store page, that they’re going to be adding more chapters & various other features that they consider core in the near(ish) future. And while I do think it’s reasonable for a consumer to do some research, I think the amount of time we have spent on here wouldn’t be reasonable. So I don’t think EHG are hiding anything, they could make it easier for potential customers to find.
Nah, PoE are doing it (continuing the story, kinda, in the lore of the leagues & big updates they do). IMO.
TBF, it was significantly better than the crap they put out in D3.
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I hoped it was Morditas (but Mike said on stream once it wasn’t) so now I’m rooting for Keeper Leena.
Why? Because she is the last known owner of the 3rd shard in the Divine Era (Grael gave it back to her) and that Shard we find on the Emperor’s Husk. Grael also learns about the Spear from going with you and I can’t see a reason the Emperor would not shield himself against a Traveler that he last saw wielding it. Lastly, we fight the Husk in Eterra’s Temple and the ‘living’ Emperor in Rahyeh’s Throne Room, which are both significant to Leena, while I expect Grael to stay in the North as Emperor.
Or maybe it’s secretly Minnimus
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If LE says “This is 1.0 the release version of our game!” then it’s 1.0 and the release version of the game. There is nothing to argue and nothing is missing. There is (was) more content planed that may or may not be added in the future. EHG is telling us what the complete release version is by stamping it 1.0.
If this is good or bad only the future will tell. If this a reason to throw a tantrum? Nah. Is this a reason to act… “funny” in a thread of someone? Nah! A lot of know that even Wolcen finished their storypart so I’m pretty sure EHG will as well.
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In the Diablo 4 example, the questions about Lilith are solved. Sanctuary is not in immediate danger anymore. The story is rounded up. Not the entire story of the world, forever, but the plot we were talking about (Lilith).
I would argue that the story arc of the Epoch itself is what is being launched. The Traveler discovers it, gets sucked into the future, learns about the Epoch and then it gets taken from them by an agent of Orobyss as a cliffhanger. I could also argue that in D4, Mephisto has been manipulating you from the start and Lilith’s arc is as insignificant as Majasa’s. The fight between Lilith & Inarius is like that of the Divine Era Gods, it ultimately is a tool that the true enemy is using (resp. Mephisto & Orobyss)
Not to mention games like Grim Dawn or PoE didn’t launch with a complete story either. PoE originally ran the typical “New Game+” difficulty increase, like Diablo 2 did, then added Act 4 later on until finally moving to a single difficulty 10-chapter arc in 3.0. Even if you consider Act 4 as a ‘complete’ story, it was not there at the start and the initial release plot wasn’t close to being a decent story, imho.
As for the other points:
- The identiy of the Immortal Emperor is in-game also a mystery. It actually resembles the Diablo 2 narration, where Marius tells ‘your’ story to Tyreal, except it’s only revealed in the end credits that it’s actually Baal in disguise.
- Apophis becoming the Oracle is probably Chapter 11-12 stuff. Like not knowing where the angels went to in base-game D3 (and still have one missing in RoS, because Blizzard decided to not make the 2nd expansion) was part of the drive in the story to push you forwards.
- Yulia / Zerrick / Horton are more winks to their other era versions and narratively only Yulia matters (at the moment). Don’t forget that we first encounter them as villains / neutral characters before learning more about them, so back when the story didn’t have a Chapter 9 yet, Zerrick was known as the annoying worm boss, not the OP Rogue following you around.
- As for the ‘big firework conclusion’; the Epoch got broken by Apophis, Orobyss won (for now) and all the time spent working towards the Emperor’s demise didn’t even come close to prepare us for the power a mere agent of Orobyss could wield against us. You got smacked face first in the dirt. Time to “git gud”, Traveler!
I want to point out that not every story needs to end with defeating a villain and then the world is right again. The story pushes you towards the Monolith, where (the Shade of) Orobyss is not just a one-and-done enemy, but a constant presence, as we learn he has been present in all the Eras as well. The fight against corruption is constant and of all times, which is a more realistic story than stabbing Hitler in the face and suddenly rainbows!
From a development PoV, it also provides a better stepping stone towards future side-arcs or Cycle stories (e.g. new Timelines) and integrates end-game mechanics into the story rather than the “oh look, a hidden cave you missed the first 100 times you passed here, with yet another magical power that we forget about in 3 months!” kind of thing.
PS: Sometimes, mystery can add to the story and characters don’t need a completely explained backstory to be relevant. If you’ve ever read the Wheel of Time series, you’ld know that there is several books worth of story still left unwritten, but it doesn’t detract from the story of Rand. (Except a few details that Jordan never got to explain to Sanderson)
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I am feeling trolled here because these aren’t gluten free muffins.
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Boy, that is interesting. 
This is going to be a long debate!
And it is this story, about Lilith and Inarius, that Diablo 4 is telling us. With a beginning, a plot, an ending.
That this story is just a part of a deeper, eternal struggle doesn’t make it less of a story on its own.
Moriarty is lurking somewhere, behind every problem Sherlock Holmes encounters, yet each case gets solved at the end of a story, the book doesn’t stop half way through. Even if we know the grand scheme of things is still ongoing, the story is coherent.
The story was too short and needed a new game+. But as I mentioned before, the story was coherent and had an ending. Not a good or deep story, but it didn’t feel particularly unfinished.
GGG had the decency to wait until they had 7 chapters ready, to avoid at any point cutting off at the wrong place and looking incomplete. It took years, then they jumped from directly from 3 to 10 chapters, just to reach a reasonably coherent ending.
The world is right again? Of course we don’t need it.
Defeating a villain is a bit more important in a game, because it is all about fighting. It is nice to have a fight at the end that feels more special than the gazillion other fights we’ve had on the way.
I entirely agree, and I think defeating Orobyss would be a bad idea, for all the reasons you mentioned (I said the same in my previous post). Orobyss is introduced from the start as an eternal, constant underlying influence, it is perfectly logical for the story NOT to defeat him.
The way I see it, Orobyss and the void is the universe, a setting within which an infinite number of stories can be told.
The Immortal Emperor and his followers, and their links to the past, is the specific story within this setting Last Epoch started telling us. And didn’t finish.
Absolutely.
A story has a plot, whatever that is. You need to explain enough for people to understand this plot, and for it to reach a reasonable conclusion. Keeping areas of mystery is great, it allows for sequels, expansions, for players to use their own imagination. As long as these mystery-areas are outside the main plot.
And Game of Throne, or Name of the Wind, are absolutely brilliant books, that end up feeling extremely frustrating because the story was never finished.
I think it all depends how you write your story: keeping some answers hidden outside the main story voluntarily is great; building the story with a clear direction but abruptly stopping in the middle for no apparent reason, at a random point, FEELS bad (emphasis on the word “feels”).
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No, with 2.0 in 2015, “Awakening” added a fourth act. Act 5 onwards wasn’t introduced until 3.0 in 2017.
Beginning: The Traveler combines the Epoch shards and uses it to find the source of the Void
Plot: The mysterious Emperor is a likely source and needs to be stopped. You need the Lance and the blessings of the old Gods to defeat them and stop the spreading corruption.
Ending: The Emperor isn’t the source, it’s Orobyss. The Empire doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. You’re not equipped to protect the Epoch from Apophis’ doings.
The Emperor no longer matters in our goal to stop the Void, because they’re not the source. We assumed wrongly and now have a Beginning to the real story; that against Orobyss. End of Emperor arc. Yeah, the big fireworks turned out to be rained out, but it still ends properly, imho. I will concede on not ‘completing’ the fight, but rather being pushed away from it, but does it really matter? It’s a game with Time Travel, we can always come back more experienced to this exact moment and continue where we left off, we just got bigger things to worry about now.
Will we still end up killing the Emperor? No idea, their corpse survived until the Ruined Era, so either they got imprisoned or we just never actually defeat them. Yulra presumably dies after we escape, so there nobody left to record what happened for those in the Ruined era. The only reason to go back is to keep our word to Yulra (and also Grael, with Rahyeh) and banish the evils of their time. But none of that is currently core to defeating Orobyss, atleast so far we understand.
Except they didn’t. The initial story was 3 Acts, but the end of the Wraeclast arc (PoEstralia) was only in Act 4, released 20 months after the 1.0 release! (So you have until October 2025, EHG!)
I’m also skeptical of your use of the word “coherent” 
I disagree, the Shades make a great alternative to a single fixed fight script. I always found in other games that this big end boss becomes either a hurdle, a benchmark or it becomes the single end challenge. To go back to D4: Lilith is the campaign end and is required for endgame content, so it blocks anyone not playing a ‘correct’ build from accessing half the game, because your character build doesn’t tick the right boxes. The only block LE has is that you have to pick a Mastery and I think you can even do Monos without it nowadays. Then you also have Uber Lilith, who is the endgame benchmark. At which point, your build is ‘complete’ and further Nightmare Dungeon runs only help you on Leaderboards, but provide no increase in power. There is no cap on Corruption and the challenge or reward it gives you, plus each Timeline has different sets of enemies, so there isn’t a single way to rank. Arena Leaderboards exist, but even those don’t have a fixed set of enemies, so there is always variance. Uber boss fights inherently don’t have that.
A big villain fight means an end to something. And I don’t like a game like this to have such an ending. It was how games used to be, back when they were complete out of the box, but LE isn’t a game like that. A game like that would be Baldur’s Gate 3. Complete story on day 1, no additions afterwards. There is virtually no feedback I could give Larian today that could change the game, because it’s already done. This isn’t true for LE / EHG.
I’m gonna condense the story part to this. Game of Thrones didn’t finish its story in a single book either, and it’s not finished being written. The show ran ahead to finish the overall story, but I’ve been told that the last season was terrible, because it was written by Netflix, not Martin. Yes, EHG is “releasing the show” now, but only ~6 seasons, (or rather 9 chapters) because the rest still needs writing. If that would’ve been better than the ending GoT was given, I leave up to the people that actually watched it. Or compare it to the first half of the Season being released, with more episodes later on, rather than a full binge-fest (again, see BG3)
The Wheel of Time also didn’t end each book with the killing of a Forsaken, sometimes it was just a big change in the world that would cause a lot of uncertainty. The mystery and speculation of things to come has given me as much joy as “stabbed a villian, had a party” endings. It also needed a prequel at some point to clarify things, so perhaps what you are looking for will be in there, more than in Chapters 10-12.
Is it cool to end a story with an epic battle? Sure, when appropriate. But that would also break the endgame loop from the story imho. If we had some big fight at the end of Ch.9, how would you connect the Monolith to the rest of the story? You could have an Apophis fight, but we sorta already had it (not the adds, but her corrupting Majasa) and doing 2 boss fights in a row wouldn’t work in game flow. Her somehow killing Majasa and then us fighting her for the blessing? Won’t work either, because the rest of the story requires her to escape.
To me, the Campaign right now isn’t a complete and finished story, because it’s not supposed to be. We learned about the Epoch, traveled through Eras, discovered our true enemy. Now it’s our “Rocky running up the stairs” moment of doing the Monolith and becoming stronger before finishing the fight with Orobyss. The campaign is just our “Beginning” and that doesn’t need a big fight to end, it needs a motivator. Losing the power of the Epoch is exactly that.
And that Monolith is one of the cores of the gameplay loop, and with all 15 Masteries finished, that loop is now ready to be released. I think for a lot of people, that is the full game. Sure, Chapter 12 isn’t the last released Chapter, but there is a decent expectation that it will (while we delve the rest of the lore) and I certainly hope that in the future, it won’t be the last Chapter again.
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