Disclaimer: This post reflects me and a few friends’ experience with Last Epoch. Maybe other people are having a smooth ride - in fact, I sincerely hope they do and that we are just in an unfortunate minority, not reflective of how the game is doing as a whole. However I feel that my experience with the game is valuable feedback, as it reflects the opinions of several people who were looking forward to the experience and came into it with proper expectations of a troubled launch - so we were ready to deal with issues and be patient. No amount of patience, however, could fix Last Epoch in its current state.
I was hyped for this multiplayer release. I had been following the game since launch but me and some friends had been holding out on getting it so we could all play it together when multiplayer launched. We were expecting issues, bugs, queue times, and lag.
What we did not expect, however, was to try for hours and with stoic patience to play the game despite these issues, only to finally give up and accept that the game is fundamentally broken at the most basic level. To call this a multiplayer game implies that ‘multiplayer’ just means that it is technically possible for players to connect to the same game. Because it is not actually possible - in our experience - to actually play with other people.
For more specifics, here is the review I left on Steam:
Attempting to play this with friends over three days in this “multiplayer patch” has been the most horrid experience I’ve had with a game in… well, I think ever. Nothing - and I do mean nothing - works. At a base level, you have things like loading between areas taking FOREVER even on my high end machine. On more critical levels are constant stuttering, characters suddenly appearing naked and having their name changed to… a teddy bear ASCII emoji? What the hell. Common issues also involved quest givers not responding or looping, quests becoming uncompletable if any player interacted with them before another party member entered the zone, and skills not working properly. Other fun things like maps being half-explored when you enter a zone, the game loading the wrong map or being unable to invite your friends to a party because the game thinks they’re playing offline when they’re not also happens.
Bear in mind that all of the above are not unique experiences we encountered once (well, except the teddy bear emoji thing, that one was downright baffling), they were frequent, returning bugs. I encountered them all multiple times in the 6 hours we played. 6 hours and that amount of bugs? That is insanity.
Basically, the game has been downright unplayable.
I respect that Early Access titles are supposed to be wonky and fraught with issues. I don’t mind that at all. But Last Epoch isn’t just an EA title with issues, at least not in multiplayer. Basically, the game is multiplayer in description only. For all intends and purposes, our experience was that we literally could not play this game together, as it broke on multiple fundamental levels.
Maybe I’ll change this review some day because what I saw of the mechanics was promising. But my group has been waiting forever for the multiplayer release - and experiencing this mess is extremely off-putting and bodes ill for the product’s future.