[Unofficial] Roadmap to 1.0 and Beyond

AndrewTilley · July 24, 2023, 6:17pm

Miscellaneous

Dodge-roll Mechanic

A dodge-roll mechanic is something they’ve experimented with in the past, but won’t be included with 1.0. It may or may not be something they revisit after launch.

August 11, 2023
Q: I saw Judd hinting that a dodge-roll might be something you guys are considering. Is this true or was Judd just throwing stuff out there?

Mike: No, we’ve considered dodge-roll for Last Epoch on and off for the last five years. We’ve had versions of it…like we built the UI, we’ve had versions of it in the game for internal testing and then we pulled it out again. We started working on a generically specializable version of a dodge-roll for all classes – we started looking at that. We started doing one that had a full skill tree. We started doing one that was just a tree stub – like a really bare-bones version of it, more akin to like…this is a weird reference to use for this because no one played it but the StarCraft 2 original Wings of Liberty campaign tech tree, like meta progression tree, which was left or right. It was like eight left or right choices and that was the whole thing. So we did a version of it that was along those lines. Yeah, we’ve considered dodge-roll many, many times.

Seeing how the combat flowed in the example that was present at ExileCon for PoE 2 did make us evaluate what their dodge-roll was accomplishing and if that was something that we were already accomplishing or if it was something that we needed in our game or not. I think what it’s accomplishing really well, and the big thing that I liked that their dodge-roll is doing, is it gives you an ability to – when you’re designing enemy encounters, boss fights, even just trash mobs or elites and anything like that you can assume that the player has access to a movement ability. Right now the only thing that we can assume that our players have access to are these two buttons here, move and attack. Those are the only things that we can absolutely assume that a player has. You could generally say that you’re going to have a melee replacement attack that’s basically just attack but better. All classes have that as well. All classes unlock one of those at level six, I think. So you can kind of assume that too, but that’s basically just the same as saying attack.

You can’t assume that you have like a fire damaging ability. So you can’t say like, ‘Oh this boss needs…’ – there’s like a phase in this boss fight where you have to deal a bunch of fire damage to this spot and a bunch of cold damage to this spot and there’s a red and a blue crystal that pop up which you have to do a bunch of fire damage and cold damage to each one of them to shatter the crystals and then it moves on. You can’t guarantee that each character has access to fire or cold damage.

One thing a dodge-roll does is it guarantees that every character has access to an “oh crap movement ability” to get out of certain effects and so you can design boss fights with that in mind. It does open up some cool things that you can now do. So that’s the biggest reason why we’d consider adding a dodge-roll in, and why we have considered adding a dodge-roll in. It’s also just fun and it’s an active thing you can do even if you’re making a build that’s kind of like a one button build. Even if you’re just making a build that’s really like, ‘Okay I don’t want to do anything. I want minions, minions, minions, maybe some minions, and just finish it off with some more minions.’ You’re just like I don’t want to do anything, but still having that dodge-roll button really helps to have something to do even if you’re not a big fan of doing things and it’s a fun thing to do…for most people anyways.

There’s also room for cool effects in there too. So if you have dodge-roll with a charge system and have like three charges you can do things like maybe “non-critical hits deal 100% more damage if you’re at max dodge-roll charges and max potion charges.” I don’t know. [Mike laughs] It’s just another thing that you can scale stuff off of, which I think is kind of cool.

Source: YouTube Link

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Passive Tree Mastery Bonuses

Mike reveals that there are plans to allow us to scale the mastery bonuses in some way via items, likely through the use of new affixes. It’s definitely worth clicking the source link to read the entire thread that Mike is replying to for further context.

July 24, 2023
Q: What if we had items that give you additional points for specific passive tree nodes?

Mike: I really like this idea. So much that I’ve pitched it internally before. Sadly you might have noticed that it’s not in the game.

It would take some minor be features to make work but it’s not a big deal really. The main reason why we haven’t done it so far is just that it’s a little too specific without being detailed. When a player reads +2 points to a passive is column 5 of your mastery tree, they probably have no idea what is even in that column. It’s either going to be awesome or useless. They would have to go look at what is there to evaluate if it’s even worth looking at or not. This inability to know what the item does without referencing a lookup table is a step we would like to avoid.

There are also some problems with removing items and having them remove a passive point and then losing access to a skill all together in some situations. Also invalidating your whole tree if they were what got you to the next rank of nodes.

So, these points wouldn’t be able to count as normal points in a lot of ways. So they could probably “overcap” nodes and just not actually count towards things in general.

They kind of have to be something other than passive points with this many distinctions.

Generally I think that if we were looking to give passive power on an item, we would just give an all-purpose passive point instead of a specific column or just give the effect of specific nodes on the item itself. This second option is usually what we do. We have moved/copied several passives to items over the years but there is still room for more interesting interaction there for sure.

Q: Was there ever an idea of scaling the Mastery power? For example, “Your Mastery bonus is X% increased” could be a useful stat if you build into that specific class mechanic. (Sort of the WoW Mastery stat, I guess. Generic stat, but different effect depending on class)

Mike: Yes, and if we were going to do a specific generic stat like that with regards to passives, that would be where it would go. And we for sure don’t have anything like that planned at all…nope, no way, not at all…ok fine you broke me, we’re doing it.

Source: Reddit Link

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Offline Mode

The game was originally announced to include an offline mode but over time there were a lot of things said, that I didn’t include here, that brought into question just how “offline” it would be. However, this was finally all cleared up and made perfectly clear that the offline mode would be truly 100% offline by 1.0.

February 10, 2023
Q: The last time I asked about the 100% offline mode for 0.9 it was unknown at that time if it was a 0.9 or 1.0 feature. Curious if that is known yet?

Judd: Which feature?

Mike: Pure offline mode. Like don’t even have to have Steam on.

Judd: Oh, I see, I see. So we’re working towards a more pure offline build here. We will be releasing offline with services with 0.9. So we do expect you’ll be able to use the chat feature and stuff like that, but it’s actually just a little bit of work to de-couple those things and hasn’t hit the top of the priority stack yet. So 0.9 will launch with a somewhat offline feature – it’ll be very similar to what you guys are experiencing on live though.

Mike: Yea, we’ll have basically the same offline mode that’s already there and then the other one is still in the pipe.

Source: YouTube Link

February 15, 2023
Kain: This actually kicked off a discussion internally as well regarding it, so we can get some more details in order regarding “offline mode”. As I had said in that thread, the facts simply weren’t known, even by us, because we hadn’t dove into it designing or implementing it yet. We want to support as “offline” as much as we can, but questions remained of “how much is as much as we can? what kind of things might prevent us from having an offline that never verifies? What kind of features wouldn’t work and need to be redesigned for offline without any connection ever?”.

Because this conversation got kicked off internally as a result beyond “yes, we want offline”, I should have some more firm information in the near future regarding what our plans for “offline mode” will look like for 1.0.

Source: Steam Forum Link

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Marketing

There’s a number of marketing materials being worked on for the launch of the game.

September 15, 2022
Q: With multiplayer release this is a huge opportunity for Last Epoch to start competing with the big games in the genre. How do they effectively plan on marketing this?

Judd: We have a comprehensive marketing plan going into the 1.0 version of the game. Patch 0.9 is going to be a soft launch for multiplayer and we don’t want to put a ton of marketing effort and spend towards 0.9 because, you know, there’s going to be bugs and there’s going to be things that we need to figure out. There’s been studios much larger with much more experience than us have issues on release of a server authoritative multiplayer game. So we expect there to be a little bit of turbulence right there at the beginning, stuff that we will react to quickly, but we do have a comprehensive marketing plan going into 1.0.

I can give a few details there because we do have some fairly exciting stuff going on. We’re working with an agency called Buddha Jones who are incredibly talented, very cool people – they’ve made trailers for lots of games and movies including things like the Mandalorian, a bunch of Marvel and DC movies, and countless games. They’ve done things for like Dark Alliance, Age of Empires, etc, etc. So we’re working with them for the 1.0 release trailer of the game and we’re very excited about that. We are working on quite a few larger video content pieces than we ever have before. We’re working on a lot of like 2.5D cutscenes, we might have a short CGI trailer that actually comes out before the 1.0 release trailer, we’re staffing up the marketing and support team right now, and we’re spinning up a Discord for content creators to share information with them as soon as we’re able to. We’ve got all the traditional social marketing stuff that you would suspect from any type of marketing campaign – of course that’ll be rolled in.

Then, you know, a core of our marketing has always been to just continue to interact with the community on a personal basis. There’s no better way to market than actually having people go in and enjoy the game that you’re creating and then tell others that, you know, ‘the game is good, we like the people creating it’ and so we’ll be doing more stuff like this and continue to engage with the community.

Steelmage: Yeah, I know one of the questions on this list was actually about cutscenes because I know in Diablo those cutscenes were so like – yeah, I love those cutscenes.

Judd: Yeah, they’re incredible. Their CGI team is just absolutely outstanding. If they turn into a movie company one day I wouldn’t be surprised, it’s fantastic. I’ll set expectations – we’re not going to have any like full 3D three minute long trailers that are completely like movie-esque.

Steelmage: Million dollar trailers.

Judd: Yeah, yeah…it’s not in the cards for us at the moment. Maybe one day, but not soon. However, we will have some very cool stuff coming in a stylized approach that we’re really excited about.

Source: YouTube Link

The quote below is before Judd officially announced that it’d be releasing later this year, but Mike did reveal that marketing was being set up for it.

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Quality Control

Quality control processes are being improved behind the scenes in an effort to release higher quality patches with fewer initial issues and bugs.

June 9, 2023
Q:Will new patches work better on patch day than previous updates? What measures do you or can you take to ensure functioning content?

Mike: Yeah, I mean, the most recent problems with towns was a little frustrating. I think it was fixed after about three hours. We do – like I know it sounds ridiculous, but all of it goes through a very strict testing and staging feature branch. We’ve been playing with towns on Steam for internal tests for weeks at that point and we just took the build that was working great on our development branch and moved it to our production branch and it didn’t work, you know. Sometimes there’s things that we can’t test for and sometimes there’s things that get released that unfortunately shouldn’t have been, which sucks.

In light of the most recent patch release and the problems therein, we are putting the cut off for content earlier than it was last time. I mean even earlier than the last time – we moved it up last time and we’re moving up again. We’re going to expand the testing circle earlier and bigger – getting more people in earlier, you know, that sort of stuff. So yeah, there’s steps we’re taking to improve that.

There’s a few other things behind the scenes that I’m not going to tell you about unfortunately, sorry. It’s one of those things that we’re still learning how to improve that process. This was our second multiplayer patch launch ever, like major multiplayer patch launch. So I think there’s still a little bit of learning we have to do in how to optimize that and improve that process and all that sort of stuff. We’ll get better at that as time goes on.

Source: YouTube Link

July 28, 2023
Q: I wonder what automatic testing looks like when working on something like this.

Mike: Yeah, so most of the automated testing that we can have – we do have like a a build pipeline that has automatic testing for basically if a build is going to work or not. So there’s lots of things that can cause builds to fail so we have automated testing for those checks, but so much of it has to be checked manually by a person. However, we’re increasing the automation on a lot of things we’re doing. I think we just added an automated character creation system for better testing. So there’s a nightly build that happens to just make sure everything’s solid that QA checks every day, and that sort of stuff. So if we do end up with a problem we’re never really far behind fixing it.

Source: YouTube Link

August 11, 2023
Q: When new skills or masteries are added there are bugs, which is expected, but are there any concerns about releasing 3 masteries and a bunch of skills at 1.0?

Mike: I mean, absolutely. We’ve been working to make our cut-off – we live up to our company name of Eleventh Hour Games, a lot of stuff happens at the very last second. A LOT of stuff happens at the very last second and it’s not good. We’ve really been working hard – this is one of the things we’ve been doing to improve our workflow as a company is to cut-off development a lot earlier for patches and spend a lot more time in testing, where some people have moved on to the next patch and people aren’t trying to sneak things in at the last second – which I am one of the, if not the worst offender of that, and just like more time in testing.

We’ve resurrected the CT program, at least we’re starting to…we’re in the process of that – to get community testing back online because there’s stuff coming for this patch that we’re already looking at it and going we don’t have much time to change stuff. We need some feedback now.

Source: YouTube Link

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Achievements

An achievement system is planned but won’t be ready for 1.0. We’re not yet sure if they’ll implement their own solution, use Steam’s built-in solution, or potentially do both.

April 28, 2023
Q: Do you plan to have challenges/achievements to accomplish for each cycle, potentially with MTX rewards?

Mike: Yes. I think there’s sort of like two types of potential MTX rewards for something like that. We haven’t really fully discussed or laid this out. I think there’s – I do have some thoughts on it. So if I was going to set the system up right now I think it would look something like this.

First, there can be achievements for things as simple as just beating the final boss of the game, unlocking all of the monoliths, or beating all of the monoliths in empowered. There can also be landmark achievements such as beating all tier four dungeons, beating the Shade of Orobyss, and just beating certain bosses. It’s all pretty standard achievement type things. Then having some sort of relatively common, achievable, and straightforward MTX that’s associated with that. So like, ‘Oh you’ve completed all of these things that most characters are going to complete’, if they’re trying to, and then giving it some sort of MTX reward – like a really big hat with a feather in it.

Then there’s the second category of things where it’s like, 'Okay the top 10 people who finished on the ladder at seasons end the first place gets this thing, second place gets this thing, third place gets this thing, and fourth through tenth gets this other thing…something like that. I think that if we were going to do something like that, which I don’t think we’ve talked about explicitly if we are or not but if we were going to do something like that, the way I’d really like to see it happen is having those rewards being a little bit more generic. So maybe there’s 10 rewards that can come from specifically doing well on the ladder – so like ladder cycle rewards, competitive ladder cycle top spot MTX rewards…things like that where it’s like, ‘Okay you’re really awesome at the ladder so you get this reward.’

I’d love to see a pool of those things that each have a cost – kind of like a different virtual currency that you can earn through competing in the ladder. So maybe if you get first place you get 10 Crests of Valor and if you get second place you get 5 Crests of Valor and down the line in tenth place you get 1 Crest of Valor and it’s still cool and everything. If you trade in like 3 Crests of Valor you can get this sweet MTX chest piece and if you trade in like 8 Crests of Valor you get this even more ridiculously sweet pet that follows you around, or something like that…I don’t know. If you wanted to unlock one of these things you could but you’d just have to – maybe if you won you’d get like two of them, like you’d have enough to buy two of them right away, but if you came in third place eight seasons in a row you’d be able to get the same thing. Something like that…I don’t know, I’m pulling ratios and numbers out of my butt here.

That’s the style of system I’d probably pitch for it if I was going to pitch a system like that because it does a few things really well, and there might be holes in this because I haven’t really thought about it too much, but one thing that I think it does really well is it means we don’t have to make 10 unique rewards every cycle for this. So that cuts down on development time which is great, which I just thought of. [Mike laughs] The other thing it does is if someone didn’t quite do well enough to get the thing they were after that cycle then they can always come back next cycle and finish earning it.

Also, maybe we’re adding in or removing MTX rewards from the pool every cycle or something like that…I don’t know, it’s all getting made up as we go here. However, I think something like that would be really good – where you can still work towards earning it even if you didn’t quite achieve it the first time around so there’s not this feeling of, ‘Oh well I came sixth instead of fifth and I didn’t get this thing I was hoping for and it was only for that one cycle and now it’s gone forever and I can’t get it and all the time I just put into that was just completely wasted.’ I think that would feel really bad, especially coming so close and failing but knowing that you could still get it if you just played next cycle and did similarly well. I think that would be comforting.

I don’t know, what do you guys think about it? That’s something I’d be interested in hearing about. If people like or don’t like the idea of having MTX rewards – and I when say MTX rewards…so cosmetic rewards is really what it would be. Cosmetic rewards for top tier achievements in cycles.

Source: YouTube Link

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Masochist Mode

Masochist mode is currently not a priority task and it’s unknown when it’ll return.

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Cosmetics

Cosmetics have thus far been a low priority feature but will likely become more prevalent after launch. Also, cosmetics do not currently show on the character select screen but this is likely be fixed by launch.

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