[Unofficial] Roadmap to 1.0 and Beyond

AndrewTilley · July 24, 2023, 6:16pm

Itemization

Base Item Types

While it’s very unlikely we’ll see a new base type category prior to 1.0, there are plans to add more in the future to fill out certain archetypes that are currently missing. However, new base types within existing item categories are much more plausible in the near future and expected over the long-term.

July 14, 2023
Q: Any plans to add more crazy weapon types? I recently played Undecember and they have a weapon type called Bow Gun, which is basically dual wielding crossbows.

Mike: Yeah, there are some very intentionally missing weapon types that we think will fit really well with certain archetypes that aren’t in the game yet and we’re kind of leaving open in preparation for that. There are people who rummage through the game files a bit and they would have noticed a couple of these types that already have ID’s in the lists of item types ready to go but there’s just no item of that type in the game. For example, fist weapons and two-handed crossbows already have an item ID but there are none in the game.

We’ve intentionally left room for other item types to be slipped in as well. So things like, and I have no idea if any of these will be added but these are just the ones that come to mind for myself personally, things along the lines of a one-handed spear. There’s no one-handed spears in the game. There’s no two-handed shields in the game. There’s definitely room for some less conventional weapon types in the future. Maybe a one-handed crossbow.

As far as getting actual like “gunpowder” in the game, that’s not something we’re planning at the moment. It’s possible as a far future feature but not as anything anytime soon, especially not for 1.0.

Reimer: [In Twitch comments] We have ideas for sure, but nothing new planned in the near future.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Set Items

It was announced that there’s a plan to prototype a mechanical change for set items. No timeframe was given for this change, but it’s unlikely to happen prior to 1.0.

April 7, 2023
Q: Are there any plans to rebalance set items at some point?

Mike: So sets have – there are some good set items that are a lot more specific and a lot more niche than uniques or rares. They’re generally very specific in what they’re good at doing and in the situations where they are good they’re actually pretty decent, in some cases. There’s a handful of them that are pretty good. Are they good enough for us to not do something with? No.

We actually, for the first time, have a plan to prototype a mechanical change for set items and their place in the item pools. So we’ve landed on a prototype plan for them and we’re going to test it and see how it feels and decide if we want to add it to the game or not. It is something that we’re looking at, and it’s something that we hear the feedback on pretty loud and clear.

Source: YouTube Link

April 14, 2023
Q: Any teasers on what you intend for set items? While I enjoy them they can use some LP type of chase. Maybe a progress tree you can feed other set item drops into.

Mike: That’s a cool thing that we have talked about doing, where you need to find like 40 of this set item to fully power up the set piece or set bonus or whatever – and there’s some real problems there so we aren’t going to do that.

We do have plans for set mechanics and improving of set mechanics and expanding on the possibilities because there’s definitely room for awesome and they’re not awesome yet and we want awesome so we’re going to make them awesome. However, I can’t tell you exactly what it’s going to look like yet. We did very recently, last week, agree on a mechanical change for set items going forward that we’re going to test. It’s not in yet, we haven’t touched it yet…so it’s in the “queued for development” column.

Source: YouTube Link

May 19, 2023
Q: Set items, for the most part, seem very underwhelming.

Mike: For the most part I would agree with you there. There are some really good ones but yes for the most part set items are underwhelming.

Q: Am I crazy or is there a reason behind this madness?

Mike: Um, set items are kind of scary, from the developer perspective, and we’ve definitely aired on the side of caution with them – and aired is an appropriate term because they’re not what we want them to be. We do have a plan to bring them to where we want them to be. We haven’t executed the plan yet, so at least for this patch [0.9.1] they will continue to be a little bit underwhelming. A big part of it for a lot of people is that they don’t scale fantastic into the late, late game.

So set items have a lot going on with them, their tooltips are huge. I think I just got a ring…yeah, like this is I think the smallest set item tooltip of all – I think this might actually be the smallest one. Then if you hold Alt it’s already almost the full height of the screen. When we were making the tooltip system we had to make a system to shrink tooltips so they wouldn’t go off the screen, up/down. So they dynamically change their size so they can fit on the screen, even before holding Alt in some cases.

It’s just too much stuff to just slap legendary potential on them, but we do have a way that we think we can make set items – like get the core interesting part of a set item and incorporate that into your builds and have fun with it.

I kind of glossed over it but one of the big reasons why they’re scary is because you can really quickly get into a situation where your build is defined entirely by a set. Having that situation where like, ‘oh I’m going to play a Sorcerer this cycle and the Tal Rasha’s set’, for lack of a better term just because it’s the Sorcerer set in D2, and ‘Tal Rasha’s set is just the best set for it possible’ and so three quarters of your gear is just dictated by the set and away you go. There’s no real planning, there’s no real like, ‘oh how can I fit this item into my build’ and it cuts away a lot of the other systems entirely.

So we do really want to get it involved more in your build crafting and have it be in a situation where it’s not going to kind of take away that puzzle of putting together your gear.

Source: YouTube Link

June 30, 2023
Aaron: I’m really hoping your guys’ plan for set items is an augmentation system designed around a dungeon. You don’t have to say yes or no. You don’t have to blink. It’s just a blanket statement. I think that would be really fun, just like how you can augment a unique to turn into a legendary in one. I think that’d be really cool for a dungeon.

Mike: Yeah. I will say that the – here’s what I’ll give you. The thing we’re going with I didn’t think it’d be possible. I’d heard the suggestion before and it was sort of like a – when we decided for it at the meeting someone was like, and I can’t remember who said it but someone kind of said it as a joke and then someone else was like, ‘I mean we could do that.’ And everyone was like, ‘Are you sure?’ I was like, ‘Okay, well if we can do that, can we do that? Like let’s do that!’

Source: YouTube Link

August 11, 2023
Q: Concerning sets, will you allow us to transform a set piece into another random set piece to help us complete sets or do you plan for us to have to find each set piece “the hard way”?

Mike: We don’t have any plans for converting set pieces at the moment. I think there’s lots of opportunities for specific crafting on set items, essentially, through dungeon rewards. I think that’s a good place to put things like that and I think there’s lots of time to add those dungeon rewards. There’s also some changes coming to set items – which are not implemented yet, they’re planned, they’re not done, we’re working on it, but it’s going to be a bit still – that will change how you ask that question. I don’t know how else to say that without giving anything away. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Weaver's Will Uniques

While more Weaver’s Will uniques are planned to be added in the future, none are expected at 1.0. There’s also a story element concerning the Weaver that we’ve yet to see. While only a theory, this story element may actually be contained within a future dungeon whose reward might incorporate these items in some way,.

June 9, 2023
Q: Are there any plans on making more rare endgame Weaver’s Will items or are they going to stay as more common leveling uniques? I feel like we’d need a dungeon to modify them if we had any super rare ones, to be honest.

Mike: They’re a little bit in the experimental phase still. We’re definitely looking at feedback from players and how they’re experiencing them and what they like and what they don’t like about it. This is actually interesting, in what we were just talking about – there’s a few things that we’ve kind of got in the pipe for changes and upgrades and expansions to the system that we’re kind of being like, ‘We think that people are going to feel this way about it and they’re going to like this and not like this and if we do this down the road with maybe a dungeon reward or something it’ll expand that and enhance it more for people in a few patches, or something like that.’

Getting that feedback is important to try and solidify those changes down the road. So yeah, there’s definitely room for expanding that system and, you’re right, the early versions of a lot of them were more focused around making more of an earlier game leveling item. It helps scale you into endgame but there’s not a lot of the Weaver’s Will uniques that are available now that you’re like, ‘I’m going to theory-craft my endgame build around that Weaver’s Will item.’ That’s not happening a ton right now, which is fine.

Source: YouTube Link

July 14, 2023
Q: What is the teams current opinion on Weaver’s Will items? Did it meet expectations?

Mike: Weaver items are really interesting, from like an expectations standpoint. We didn’t have – it wasn’t a very big project. It was actually a very tiny project that kind of just – we were like, ‘Oh something cool, slap it in. Yeah do it. Go!’ So I’d say they’re doing well. They were never intended to be as big of a splash, and I don’t think we tried to tout them as such, as like the legendary system in general. I’m pretty happy with how they’re working. I think they’re interesting enough and fun enough that they’re sitting in a nice spot.

I think there’s lots of room for the types of Weaver’s Will uniques that get created to expand on. There’s been a few really cool ideas that have come through the pipe recently that I think they’re going to grow into a really great part of our item system. They’re a little thin right now, which is expected and known and…yeah. However, I think people will be very happy with how they fit into the 1.0 Last Epoch itemization system, as well as going forward beyond that. I’m very happy with them overall.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Shards

There are plans for a shard conversion system that will essentially convert one shard to another at a loss, though no timeframe for its inclusion has been provided.

May 5, 2023
Q: As some shards are insanely common, do you think an option to say tick a box and use 10 shards instead of 1…for an extra chance at crit success or something could make it into the game?

Mike: No, because there’s all these different things that are multiplying together to have the chance of having an item that is, let’s say, an 80% item – so an item that is 80% of the maximum power and there’s a whole bunch of different things, basically chances, that get multiplied together to say like, ‘this is the chance of it happening, here you go.’ If we say you can modify that chance pretty heavily by just dumping more resources into it then it puts an additive modifier on a multiplicative chance and it can cause some problems.

We’re probably more likely going to be taking a – because the other thing that doesn’t solve is say you’re like, ‘I play Rogues, I only ever play Rogues period and you have this increased void damage sitting over here and you’re like well I can’t do anything with that because I never use void damage because there’s no void damage on Rogues’ – there might be a tiny bit somewhere, anyways, the point is this still doesn’t solve that because you’re still not using any of those as well.

So there’ll probably be a vendor somewhere that’ll have – this is not next patch [0.9.1], for the record – but eventually we’re planning on having a vendor somewhere that’s just like, ‘oh I’ve got these super rare shards for sale and they cost 10 of any one shard to buy’ or something like that, you know. So you’re just trading in shards, like ones you don’t use for ones you do use. It’ll also kind of create this weird thing where like suddenly items that are just awful but have just like a bajillion affixes on them as they naturally drop are suddenly useful to pick up, which would be kind of funny, but I think you’ll still be picking up ones that have specific shards you want more.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Runes

A new rune was added in patch 0.9.2 and it’s unknown if any further runes will come at launch.

June 30, 2023
Q: I saw on your stream that you liked the idea of some kind of rare glyph and/or rare/time-consuming method to revert slammed uniques back to LP legendaries. However, you guys then changed your mind and reverted to “maybe”, and then even further into “low chance of happening”.

What are the reasons to avoid doing it? Diablo 2 had Hel runes, to clear runewords and reroll rune bases, and it was not an issue and never introduced any sort of power creep. Is it a technical limitation of some sort? Hard to code?

Mike: Yes, I do like that idea. I’m far from the arbiter of what gets put in the game or not so the best I can say for an idea I like is “maybe”. Having suggested similar ideas in the past myself and having them not make it out of the discussion stage for reasons that also apply to this idea, I think it has a “low chance of happening”.

It shifts the rarity of the items. Yes, D2 has Hel runes, the rarity of runewords was set around that being in the game. Adding a Hel rune to LE changes that rarity. To be clear, Hel runes did increase the average power of characters in D2. Not by much but it did. Also, Hel runes are a little different because in almost every case (yes there are a few exceptions), high tier runeword costs are skewed pretty heavily towards the runes, not the bases. LE is kinda the opposite, especially with the ability to use a Rune of Creation on the exalted to copy it and get 2 cracks with it.

I like to joke about knock on consequences of changes sometimes by saying “a finger on the monkey’s paw curls inward…”. Well, in this case it could be something like that the average LP chance of items would probably go down as a result to maintain a similar overall average power level. These changes rarely happen in a vacuum.

Personal anecdotes and hyperbole aside, we do watch ⁠suggestions-and-like-to-see and ⁠feedback for what people want to see change about the game and what people feel about how the game is now.

Source: Discord Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Glyphs

A new glyph was added in patch 0.9.2 and it’s unknown if any further glyphs will come at launch.

April 14, 2023
Q: Do you have plans for further/other crafting options, especially for endgame crafting?

Mike: Yeah, I mean, so there are – we’d like to add in more runes, glyphs, and things like that. I think that as you get further into the game – as you get into endgame and your power level goes up the room for improvements is going to go down just because you’re finding really specific things and needing to have those specific affixes on your gear is going to make a big difference.

So, yeah, we’ll be adding more glyphs. I mentioned this last time that there’s a new glyph coming. I think it’ll probably be down here. [Mike points to where he thinks it’ll be displayed on the crafting inventory screen] There’s a new glyph coming right there. It won’t really have anything to do with crafting so it’s not really a good answer but there are things that we’re looking at to expand crafting here and there – some like dungeon rewards are a great way to add in new crafting mechanics.

I’m trying to say things without giving stuff away about stuff we’re going to do here. But yeah, there’s things we’re planning and looking at doing for sure. What am I talking about, the Circle of Fortune is going to be a great way to do that – to help with deterministic item finding and crafting and stuff, so yeah.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Idols

Further additions to the idol system are a design space they’re purposely leaving open for after launch. Also, it’s likely we’ll see further common (small, humble, and stout) idols added at 1.0.

[ Table of Contents ]

Gear Progression

The addition of Item Factions at launch is expected to bring a certain level of power creep to the game. I believe these systems are going to require a lot of finetuning from the developers in order to strike the required balance.

September 6, 2023
Terek: How does EHG feel about the current gear progression? You were talking about trade, so how will Item Factions affect it?

Karv: Oh yeah, so of course you’re going to be trading so you’re going to have access to better items faster than before so you’re going to be able to destroy your enemies way faster. Also, the Circle of Fortune guys, like myself, can boost their item drops through prophecies to be able to target farm more and they’re also going to be getting better gear. So our power is going to be higher than the enemies would normally be. We have a bit of a low point in the early endgame where we have a bit of a plateau when it comes to the gear progression. So obviously the ceiling is going up now as you’re going to be able to trade for items so the plateau is like way up there now, and the same goes for the Circle of Fortune.

So that means that there’s going to be power creep – so the players are going to be stronger than the enemy so we have to understand that. So we have two things; one thing that we’ve already been doing, which is whenever we have a major patch we are increasing the monster health and damage. You can see this in the patch notes if you go way back. The second thing we’re doing is we’re making better monsters that are smarter, have cooler abilities, they’re way more engaging, and we’re reworking old and kind of bad monsters into way better ones as well.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Socket System

A socket type system has been something they’ve toyed around with in the past but don’t expect one until after launch. Also, expect it to be somewhat different than other socket systems considering their crafting system, with the act of placing affixes into gear, is already too similar to sockets.

June 30, 2023
Aaron: Anything about a future socket system? And I know you’re going to say the crafting system is sockets outside of crafting.

Mike: Yes, I was going to say that. But no, we don’t have any plans for sockets at the moment. When we do eventually – so a socket style system is one of those things that I would call a core expectation of most ARPG players to have somewhere in the game. Whether that’s like PoE’s is with their skill system and it’s wildly different than D2’s but it’s still kind of that similar socket style system, mechanically at least. Meaning it has that functional process of taking two items and combining them together and having them actually be physical things, and all that sort of stuff.

We’ve toyed with slotting that into a few places, socketing that into the game in a few places, but none of them have really come together the way that we wanted them to. However, I’d be surprised if one doesn’t find its way in. I know there’s a couple sort of back burner plans that have continued to float around with, in regards to sockets or socket style system. Maybe even one of them is something that was a name that was dropped from development and that the name would probably come back relating to sockets.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Item Models

Not all item 2D art will have matching 3D art at launch.

[ Table of Contents ]

AndrewTilley · July 24, 2023, 6:16pm

Classes, Skills, and Passives

Class Design

Judd briefly describes the process in which they design new and distinct classes/masteries within Last Epoch.

September 6, 2023
Rhykker: Amongst those 15 current masteries, each of them seems to fill some unique niche. How do you manage to keep adding more and make them all remain distinct?

Judd: Yeah, that’s a great question. So going into the design process of that a little bit you, of course, start with defining a strong class fantasy for a class when you’re working with the team there. You look at maybe what doesn’t exist in the game or what might be lacking or if there’s an element that might not be utilized enough in the game. Another tactic we use is making sure that we define what a class is not going to have. So, for example, the Mage class does not have minions and will not have minions and that keeps it from being so that the classes end up being homogenized in a way that we don’t want to end up having.

Rhykker: That’s very interesting. So for every class you kind of have like a “is not list” on it?

Judd: We do and it’s not always, you know, minions or something like that but there will usually be things that we say like this class isn’t going to have this type of element associated with it or it won’t have this mechanic or something like that. It does help us keep them differentiated.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Remaining Masteries

Both the Falconer and Warlock are set to release at 1.0. Mike provides a few details concerning active development of the remaining masteries – from their skills being designed and prototyped, skills being repurposed or incorporated into other skills, and even some visuals that are being worked on.

During the February 10, 2023 dev stream, Mike and Judd showcase concept art of the Falconer’s Falcon minion. Then on April 5, 2023 a texture mock-up of the Falcon is shown across EHG’s social media accounts.

May 5, 2023
Q: What’s the coolest unreleased mastery and why is it Warlock?

Mike: They’ve each got something really unique and cool and interesting about them that’s different, that we haven’t seen before, it’s a new mechanic, and it’s just different and new and cool. A lot of times different is a really big part of it. It’s kind of interesting stuff that we’ve tried to make work on other classes before, we tried to implement before, and just didn’t quite have the tech for it – things like that. I think I’m most excited about Falconer, personally. We’ve been working a lot on Runemaster lately so I’m really hyped on Runemaster, personally, just because that’s what we’ve been working on lately. We actually just combined two skills into one and added another new skill.

Source: YouTube Link

May 19, 2023
Q: Any info you can give on any of the 3 unreleased masteries?

Mike: Sure, I can tell you where they’re at in development. So they’re all going to be released at 1.0, it’s the plan. The Runemaster is the farthest along, it’s got the most stuff done on it. It has all of its base skills implemented, skill trees have gone through ideation, base VFX is very far along on all of them, conversion for nodes we think we want conversions for are started for most of them and possibly finished, pretty sure animations are in for them. Ah what else…Runemaster is basically just like skill trees and good to go. Which is “just skill trees” – just five full skill trees…no big deal right? It’s a lot of work, but still yeah. I think that’s probably the next thing we’re doing on those masteries.

Source: YouTube Link

June 16, 2023
Q: Has the dev team started work on the 3 missing masteries or not?

Mike: They are very much in work. All I’m doing right now is working on Runemaster, a bunch of us are. I’m working on – there’s two nodes left in one of their abilities that I’m struggling with. I can’t get a raycast to detect the right things, the right layer…something about the layer mask and the raycast, I’m not sure what it is. I’m almost positive it’s going in the right direction but it’s just returning nothing every time.

We’re trying to work out a new way to have abilities interact with other abilities, so it’s got to see if it’s going to hit another one and do something in response. It’s not playing nice. It’s being kind of a jerk, you know. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

June 16, 2023
Q: Are there any details that you can disclose about the new classes? Like high level mechanics/playstyle?

Mike: Not really. We’re kind of keeping that stuff under wraps, a little bit, until it gets closer to pushing it out. There’s some general stuff that you can kind of glean from it, just by what they are. The Falconer will be similar to Rogue – a high mobility class, lots of stuff it’s doing, fast attacking. There’s lots of stuff like that. There’ll be a falcon involved, you know. [Mike laughs] There’s not a lot of revelations I can share with it, sorry. They’ll fit really nicely into their classes.

There are certain abilities that we’ve kind of made and developed over the last couple of years with the masteries that are coming in mind. Like, for example, Glacier is kind of Runemaster-y, a little bit. It’s Sorcerer/Runemaster, but it’s Runemaster a little bit, especially the visuals if you look at how those spawn in. The same with Flame Ward, like you got those visuals there. We have sort of tried to preempt it with tie-ins from base class skills already, to the point where one of the Warlock skills is actually going to be – we’re taking a base class skill and it’s going to be one of the Warlock mastery skills.

Source: YouTube Link

June 30, 2023
Aaron: People have asked me this a lot and I think I’ve incorrectly reinforced this idea that the Runemaster class will be focused around traps – like it’ll be a trapper class and the original plan where it was also going to have golems and all this type of stuff. Anything you can share as far as theming? Similar to how you talk about how Warlock’s going to be like Jafar. Can you kind of break down theming of Runemaster?

Mike: Yeah, I don’t have as strong of a touchstone theme that I can call on like that with Runemaster. It definitely hits a fair few similar theming notes as Sorcerer does. There’s a lot of theme overlap there for sure – not with mechanical theme but like theme-theme. What we’ve actually been working on is having those feel and be distinct from each other, which is pretty important.

Aaron: But golems – am I going to be able to have an army of golems?

Mike: No, sorry. No golems. I’ll tell you that one for free.

Aaron: So the three golems on screen right now that’s just where we’re going to be?

Mike: Those are your golems. Golems are, at least for now, going to be a Necromancer skill. Though, elemental golems is a theme that I feel like there’s a good chance we’ll revisit at some point in the future, but it’s not going to be part of Runemaster…sorry.

Source: YouTube Link

August 4, 2023
Q: How often do you have to introduce new code functionality when developing new skills?

Mike: Every single skill that I’ve worked on has always had to add new functionality. There’s always been something new for every skill. It’s like, ‘Yeah we should add that.’ Sometimes they’re really tiny things and sometimes they’re huge things. There was a – Runemaster skills that I’ve been working on recently, I almost said the name of one of them…I’ll just call them Runemaster skills. [Mike laughs] There’s been quite a lot of stuff recently that have been introducing a lot of new mechanics for skills. It’s really common because so frequently whenever we’re making a new skill and we’re like, ‘Okay well it’s got to be distinct from…’ – like there’s so many other skills that are just naturally similar.

Okay, you’re making a projectile skill on Runemaster, let’s say, and you’re like, ‘Okay well we’ve got Lightning Blast, Fireball, Static, Disintegrate, Glacier, Volcanic Orb and they all have elements of that already.’ There’s so many things that have projectile elements to them. You may not consider Meteor a projectile skill but it kind of is in a sense and there’s just so many of these. So you’re like, ‘Oh it’s kind of like that in this other skill. How do we make it unique?’ Most the time it’s just like, ‘Well how we’re going to make it unique is by making new functionality that didn’t exist when we made that other skill.’ [Mike laughs]

There’s this new ability that’s a channeling ability but it behaves differently than other channeling abilities and so we had to make a bunch of new functionality around skills and channeling abilities to detect this new style of channeling ability. It’s got nothing to do with the skill really.

Source: YouTube Link

August 11, 2023
Q: What can we look forward to regarding the Warlock mastery? I was expecting what we got with the Lich. I’m ultra excited!

Mike: Yeah, so I can’t give you too many details on the Warlock. Our sort of like touchstone theme is Jafar from Aladdin, like 1990’s animated Aladdin Jafar. It’s a touchstone so I don’t want you to go into details on abilities, what he can do, that sort of stuff. It’s definitely pretty far from what their actual abilities are, but that feel of like “I am a dark wizard, I am a powerful sorcerer that doesn’t care about rules to get the job done.” So probably more similar mechanically to the Sorcerer a little bit, in certain ways, but with more an Acolyte spin on it. There’s some unique mechanics coming for it too.

I know I just said literally no information about what’s actually happening and I’m sorry but I can’t share anything yet…I’d love to. Ask me again in a few months. I hope we do like a little a pre-teaser with it.

Source: YouTube Link

September 8, 2023
Q: The only disappointment in minions I had was that Warlock will not get cool demon minions.

Mike: Yeah, this goes back to keeping the classes distinct and interesting. So with Necromancer one of the biggest things they have in their arsenal, the main defining thing, is that they’re a summoning class. That’s like the big thing about them and if we did Warlock as a summoning class too then there’s not really a lot of room for anything else in that mastery because you’d have two summoning classes and then one non-summoning class and you’d go okay, well the majority of the class specific stuff has to be minion builds and that’s really narrow for a lot of people. That’s not to say that we won’t eventually make a fourth mastery that has minions involved in classes that have two masteries already, but it just wasn’t time to add a second minion mastery to Acolyte.

I really think Warlock’s going to be awesome. I’m excited for it and work is well underway. I think Justin said he completed one of the mutators yesterday or the day before and there’s another one that’s well underway too, it’s great.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Missing Skills

There are currently a number of skills still to be added or implemented across the existing masteries. These include; one skill for Shaman, Healing Hand and one more skill for Paladin, two base class skills for Rogue, and one skill each for Bladedancer and Marksman. It’s unlikely all seven missing skills will be available at launch as the focus is primarily on the completion of the two remaining masteries.

June 9, 2023
Q: Will the skill revamps/additions be coming before 1.0? e.g. Paladin’s missing 1 skill, Shaman’s missing 1 skill, etc. Not necessarily the missing masteries specifically.

Mike: Our focus right now is getting the masteries completed and in. We want to have as many of those skills finished and ready to go as possible. It’s really going to come down to how much time is left once we finish the masteries. That’s really what it’s going to come down to, so as many of those as possible. [Mike opens Mage skills & specializations window] In a perfect world we would launch with every mastery having five skills, every base class having four skills, and every non-passive – like add five to this and they’d all look the same, like every class would have this plus five more…would be the perfect world. We know we’re having to prioritize and everything and as much of that as we can get done as possible is the goal. The missing masteries are priority number one.

Source: YouTube Link

August 30, 2023
Q: Will the Shaman be getting a 5th skill? Or more generally, will each class be updated to have the same number of skills before release? Separately, I remember when the Druid got its rework, there were plans to remove Ice Thorns and replace it, but it was left in for now. Is that still happening? Or is it staying?

Mike: Ice thorns is still on the chopping block, not sure if it will survive to 1.0 or not.

Each class will not have the same number of skills at 1.0.

Shaman will be getting a 5th skill, we have one planned for it that is going to go very nicely with the primary theme and I think be a lot of fun. I’m not sure if it will make the 1.0 cut-off or not.

And because we are talking Primalist, Tempest strike is still getting a big rework and another skill will take its place as a spam melee style skill.

Source: Discord Link

September 8, 2023
Q: Are there any plans to add one more skill to classes that only have 4 skills or are you happy with their current skill selection and don’t feel like any class fantasy is lacking?

Mike: So one thing we did decide this patch recently – so previously in the past I’ve always come into to the skill trees and been like, and lets just pretend that Frost Claw doesn’t exist and there’s this perfect grid of all of them, and I’m like see how they all fill up nicely. [Mike has the Skills & Specializations window for Mage open] It’s perfect and everything, great. Yeah they’re all going to be like this. Well…we decided that, why are we making them all the same anyways? Is it just for symmetry? Just so that it looks nice, like what’s the deal? Why are we even doing this? Um, and we couldn’t really come up with a good answer other than that it looks tidy and you don’t have people asking if there’s more skills coming or something like that.

There’s always going to be more skills coming and as soon as we start adding more skills it’s going to be off anyways so we figured hey, let’s just start putting it off now. This is part of the justification for adding Frost Claw because this does put it off from every other class immediately. So yeah, every class and every mastery will not have the same number of skills and the same skill complement as each other at 1.0. Maybe some mastery gets a sixth skill, probably not. Maybe some mastery launches with only four skills, you know, that sort of thing. There will be some slight variances in the number of skills that you see but it’s mostly just because we’re not using that as a constraint anymore.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Skill Updates

There’s likely to be several minor skill adjustments leading up to 1.0 and afterwards, but the often teased skill rework of Tempest Strike won’t occur until after launch. Tempest Strike is having its role changed to a heavier and bigger hitting skill that scales off of attack speed, with another melee skill coming in to take the role that Tempest Strike used to occupy and then they can finally remove the Ice Thorns skill that’s been on the agenda for years now.

February 10, 2023
Q: Any hints on the remaining Shaman skills or skill updates?

Mike: There’s not really anything I can say that I haven’t said already. There’s at least one new skill…

Judd: Are you talking about Tempest Strike?

Mike: I’ve mentioned…so what I’ve said about Tempest Strike – I’ve said Tempest Strike is going to be a pretty big overhaul, it’s going to have a new identity, it’s not really going to be sitting in the same space as Serpent Strike, Swipe, or Tempest Strike…it’s not really going to fit in that space anymore. It’s going to scale off of attack speed…ahhh, I think that’s all I’ve said about it. Oh, it’s going to be a lot heavier, a lot bigger skill.

Judd: Umm-hmm…Ice Thorns.

Mike: Ice Thorns is going. I know I’ve said that a million times over the years and no one believes me anymore, but it is. [Judd and Mike laugh] And yea, there’s another melee skill coming in to take the place that Tempest Strike holds and there’s…ahh, there’s not much else to say. There’s a new totem skill, I think, at some point. I could be wrong about that one. It’s either a new totem skill or a new branch to an existing totem skill. I can’t remember which one it is.

Source: YouTube Link

The following was asked during the May 19, 2023 dev stream and Reimer responded in the Twitch comments so I don’t have any record of it beyond my word.

June 30, 2023
Q: Can we expect any complete overhauls of existing class skills for 1.0?

Aaron: I think Mike can answer this one but he’s going to say Shaman has some stuff going on.

Mike: Yeah, so there is a plan for Tempest Strike to get an overhaul. It’s getting moved where it is in the unlock order, it’s role in the class is getting changed, a lot of this functionality is getting shifted a little bit, and it’s tree will get redone. I don’t know if that’s going to make it in my 1.0 or not. Our whole skill team is just masteries. Once the masteries are done we’ll look at things like Tempest Strike, which will probably first on the list.

Aaron: I would be very surprised if Tempest strike in its current state…

Mike: [Mike finishes Aaron’s sentence] …gets left out for 1.0. Yeah.

Aaron: I feel like I’d be pretty upset, just because…

Mike: I really hope not but it will not be a blocking feature for 1.0, I’ll put it that way.

Aaron: Okay, no that makes sense. Tempest Strike isn’t a, ‘Nope, we got to push it back!’

Mike: Yeah, we’re not pushing 1.0 because we didn’t get Tempest Strike finished or anything like that.

Aaron: Okay, that’s fair…that’s fair. I absolutely accept that.

Mike: But yeah, Tempest Strike’s the biggest offender for sure. There’s also other skills that are kind of underwhelming, and don’t really have the same polish as some other skills that are in the game – they also might be similar or on other classes, so then we get a little bit of that class envy that happens…and things like that. We totally see all that stuff, but the masteries come first. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

August 11, 2023
Q: Skills like Sigils or Maelstrom need to be recast so often, honestly it’s a lot of busy work. Can we expect some options: a different way to cast them like “on hit” or after walking some distance like Static Charge?

Mike: Um, maybe. I don’t want to say like, ‘Yes you can expect these’ but I think it’s reasonable to expect that we at least look at it because I do agree with you that there is room for improvement. I know Sigils – we do have plans for changing Sigils already, specifically around this. I…yeah, I don’t want to say that, sorry. We’ll look at it.

Kain: [In Twitch comments] We generally don’t want the best way to use abilities to be, not use the abilities. We’re aware they need some changes, but making them more passive generally isn’t the goal.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Skill Progression

There’s a plan to eventually improve the advancement of skill trees in the late game, though this likely won’t take place until after launch.

May 5, 2023
Q: Judd mentioned in his interview with Ziz that he feels there’s a sort of plateau once skills max out at 20, but there are plans to smooth that out and offer further progression for skills beyond that. Any specific ideas that could be discussed on that subject?

Mike: Uh no, I’m surprised he said that. I didn’t actually watch that clip. I’m surprised he mentioned that, but yeah we do have something in the works that we do plan to implement that will umm – I’m just taking your word for it that he said this…you could just be taking a shot in the dark and I’m like, ‘yeah, it’s true!’ [Mike laughs]

Yes, there is a plan to alter the progression curve on skills and how that unlocks and progresses into endgame. It’s in concept phase still, but it’s going to be good I think.

Source: YouTube Link

June 2, 2023
Q: Any plans to increase the impact of additional levels for skills?

Mike: Yes we do because yes that’s a good point. This is something I’ve noted before is that the value of a point in a skill tree changes based on the total number of skill points you’ve invested previously in that skill. Usually the first five points, at least, are less impactful than the next 10 points and then the next five points after that are less impactful again is usually what happens. You get those middle ten points, like the really juicy points. Usually it’s where the build comes together – you get specific key nodes, you get multiple key nodes that are really important, and then it kind of falls off again which is unfortunate.

So we do have a planned mechanical systematic change, which I know is a bunch of buzzwords, to help alleviate this problem and breathe some life into late game skill tree advancement. Am I going to say anything else on the matter? Nope, sorry. It’s still one of those things where someone’s like, ‘I got a plan’ and everyone’s like, ‘that’s a good plan, we should do that one day right? Yeah probably.’ So don’t expect it next patch.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Passives

The Druid rework in patch 0.8.4 brought forth the introduction of threshold nodes. Several nodes within the Druid’s passive tree received additional bonuses for placing a certain number of passive points into them. This system was well received by the community, but has yet to be fully implemented into the remainder of the base classes and their masteries.

The two remaining masteries will likely have these threshold nodes incorporated into their newly created passive trees while older passive trees will gradually see them added over time as they receive updates after launch.

[ Table of Contents ]

New Base/Mastery Classes

Expect new masteries for the current roster of base classes to happen far in advance of new base classes being added. However, don’t expect either to happen until sometime after launch.

[ Table of Contents ]

AndrewTilley · July 24, 2023, 6:17pm

Campaign

Cutscenes & Presentation

New cutscenes for the campaign are being working on, though it’s unknown at this time if they’ll be ready for 1.0. Presentation is being improved and new tools are coming online that’ll allow for more detailed and varied environments in the future.

August 12, 2022
Q: Are you going to have more cutscenes/short videos during key moments, such as when we finish a chapter?

Mike: Oh yeah. We’ve got plans for improving the way the story is presented, in general. So lots of little things – anything from just the way that the dialogue boxes show up and dialog boxes are presented to things like cutscenes and more voice acting. There’s all sorts of of little extra things that we’re going to be adding in to help us with storytelling in general.

So things like – PoE and Diablo both do this, I think, and probably other things do too where you just walk over a little book and it plays a short audio clip that sort of brings you into the lore of the area that you’re in without having to stop and stay still and read it and everything like that. So you just keep going but you get a little lore bite as a sort of little reward for exploring around the world maybe. So things like that, just trying to bring more of those story telling elements together.

Part of that is extra cutscenes, whether those are – and we’ve also been improving our tools for making cutscenes. The ones we’ve had so far at least are the in-engine ones that have been pretty bare bones with the tools. So yeah, we’re adding more. I really like the intro cutscene style where it’s the voice over on the movie images and things like that. Compared to a full CGI cutscene they’re super cheap to make, which is great because it means we can make more of them but I also really just like the style.

Source: YouTube Link

September 15, 2022
Q: This guy’s asking about cutscenes…well, they’ve already mentioned that.

Judd: Yeah, we have a number of cutscenes being developed right now that you guys will experience throughout the campaign, oftentimes at the start and end of chapters, but we have quite a few of them coming along. We’re really excited about getting those to everyone. Those won’t be in 0.9 but we’re hoping to have those in the game by 1.0.

Steelmage: That’ll be awesome. I’m a cutscene enjoyer.

Mike: It’s going to help a lot for just getting the storyline across and getting people immersed in it. I think it’ll help a lot.

Judd: Yeah, there’s a lot of presentational elements to the story being improved right now. A lot of the chapter content that was developed in the game was done early on when we were a much smaller studio with way less resources. We now have a new world and story lead, we have all the dialogue being rewritten, we have NPC portraits, we’re having custom NPC’s being developed for all of the major characters, voice acting across the game. If you look at chapter nine, the latest chapter we have in the game…we call it chapter H internally, but it’s the one – I won’t spoil it in case somebody has gotten there. But if you look at that, every chapter that we go back and retouch we want it to be at least that level of quality.

Source: YouTube Link

During the June 30, 2023 dev stream Mike shows off various new visual fidelity tools that their environment artists & level design teams will be able to incorporate into future scenes within Last Epoch.

Also during that same June 30, 2023 dev stream Mike shows off some early chapter cutscene storyboard art and cinematic trailer test footage.

July 28, 2023
Mike: There’s a ton of stuff that D4 does amazingly well. The one that always comes to mind first is the presentation – their animations and their visuals are just stellar. Yeah, I’m jealous of their animations. Let’s be real here. [Mike laughs]

I think that’s a field we’ve been improving in a ton lately, which is so cool. There’s new animations coming next match that I think are really great, and we’re tying them in more specifically to individual skills. One of them is just a matter of scale for us. So we’d have like, ‘Okay well here’s the Mage’s wand equipped spell casting animation’ and we just used it for all the spells and then we started to slowly be like, ‘Okay well maybe this spell has a different wand equipped spell casting animation’ and just started to get more custom stuff for each situation leading it to feel smoother and more cohesive and all that sort of stuff. I think it’s really starting to come through which is great.

Source: YouTube Link

July 28, 2023
Mike: Also, I’m just thinking back with that question you were asking earlier about map traveling, another thing that you may not realize is if you click on a quest it takes you to the map where that location is. On top of that, whenever you click on an area we’re adding a little thing here so it’ll display the level of the zone that it is to kind of help you get a feel of where it is in the storyline.

We’re also introducing better chapter progression stuff so you’ll be able to see which chapter you’re in as well as having chapter cinematic delineations so you’ll be able to – they’re not full-on CGI crazy cinematics, more in the style of the opening character intros that we have now. That’ll help keep things in place. So yeah, it’s just better presentation really.

Source: YouTube Link

During the August 11, 2023 dev stream Mike shows off a couple examples of level design/environmental improvements that are coming.

September 1, 2023
Q: After playing the updated Temple Rooftop map at Gamescom I was wondering if any other maps got a visual/layout update? Any spoilers which ones?

Mike: So the version you saw at Gamescom is not what’s going to be live. So we did change that level for the next patch and then we took what we changed and we just cut out small sections of it for the Gamescom version. So the Gamescom version is like a super streamlined version, just because we didn’t want people wandering and having to know what’s going on at all. We wanted to make it as streamlined and straightforward of an experience as possible, which isn’t super exciting for very skilled players who maybe know the game really well and… [Mike dies in-game, ending his thought]

There are some other zones that got updated, it wasn’t just that one zone. There were a bunch of monolith zones that got updated – so there was a bunch of echoes that have been updated as well.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 10-12 won’t be arriving until sometime after launch. However, I do anticipate there’ll be a continued effort to improve certain aspects of the existing campaign in order to bring all areas up to the same quality level of more recent releases.

June 9, 2023
Q: What’s the priority of bringing other chapters close to the level of Chapter 1? Only the oldest chapters? All existing chapters?

Mike: The next focus for level design is going to be more around endgame and new chapters coming out post – I’m trying to say the end of the game without announcing it but I’ve already spoiled what the end is currently. Finishing off the story content that we already have and more endgame content is the current level design priority.

We’ve added a lot of new tools to our world building arsenal over the last couple of years. It’s sort of one of those things where we build something with the tools we have and then we go build a new chapter and we’re like, ‘Oh we really need this feature for this chapter’ and we make a new tool to make that feature available. Then we’re like, ‘Oh that would have been cool to use in another chapter wouldn’t it? Yeah, so I guess we’ll go back and do that eventually.’

I think the disparity between our now worst chapter and best chapter is – that gap has closed, I think, a little bit from what it was before the Chapter 1 rework. We will continue to upgrade and update the older chapters that are in the game and that sort of stuff, but it’s not a super priority right now. It’s not a main project, there’s not like another “rework Chapter X” that’s on some major project right now. Not to say that it won’t happen, but it’s just not the main priority.

Source: YouTube Link

September 6, 2023
Rhykker: Is the campaign something you plan to expand upon with future either cycles or expansions or anything?

Judd: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ll be continuing to add more chapter content to the game. There’s a lot of story that we intend to tell with Last Epoch and we’re not trying to rush a number of these story arcs. So the story of Last Epoch will continue to evolve and be told for many patches into the future, absolutely.

Rhykker: Now you guys have the whole time travel element to the story. I feel that kind of gives you a lot of leeway in being able to continue the campaign in interesting ways by well, go back in time and something else happens.

Judd: Absolutely. Yeah, time travel is going to enable us a lot of great things, it already does, but for the future development of the game 1.0 is just kick off and the things that we’re able to do with time travel are going to be really, really awesome. Also, it lays a really great foundation for endgame because we get to go and tell the stories in different timelines and realities of what could have been and that gives us this foundation to just expand upon forever. So if we’re developing the game for many, many years into the future this does really good stuff for us.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Mastery Quest

Expect changes to when, where, and how the mastery quest is presented to the player sometime in the future, and hopefully prior to launch.

[ Table of Contents ]

Lore Stations

These were introduced with patch 0.9.1, but you can likely expect many more to be added throughout the campaign in the future.

[ Table of Contents ]

Quest Rewards

Improvements and additions to the quest reward system have been discussed for a while now, but it’s not something I’m personally expecting to happen prior to launch. Though, it would be a pleasant surprise.

July 22, 2022
Q: Is there anything happening with story rewards? I don’t see much need to do the story beyond getting the passive points and idol slots. Will there be a reason to go to Chapter 9?

Mike: Yeah, so there’s this weird dichotomy that happens with the story. It’s a really useful way for us to get specific rewards in the hands of new players as they’re leveling up a character – things that help you as you go, things that we know you’re going to need at certain points in the game, stuff like that. It’s really useful for things like that – like giving you little boosts, little tangible long-term rewards such as passive points and idol slots, things like that. It’s tricky to hand out really powerful quest rewards throughout the campaign because it creates this… [Mike is briefly distracted]

Oh yes, about quest rewards/campaign rewards. So there’s this thing – people like making a lot of characters and we want to make the campaign fun and useful to do but having too much of it be static and mandatory puts a little bit of handcuffs on us, as far as allowing for skips of subsequent characters, things like that. So we try and give rewards but a lot of the hard character rewards that you can only get from the campaign we try to make it so that you can get them from multiple places in the campaign. That’s sort of the general goal.

I think there’s going to be – I know we have plans for more variety in quest rewards in-game, specifically in the realm of gear rewards. Which is one thing that we’ve never had, is this like, ‘Oh you’ve completed this, select one of these four pieces of gear.’ One of the really big things that are useful about that is that we can put things that are really specific in there and possibly a little tricky to get to enable certain leveling playstyles that weren’t really very great before. A really good example of this, I think, is there’s a point with throwing builds that you get to where they kind of drop off in the middle of the campaign and I think it’d be really good to have a quest reward somewhere in the middle of the game where we could say like, ‘Okay here’s a really specific only good for throwing builds item, and here’s a really specific only good for cold spell damage builds.’ We could put a few really specific items in there and a couple more generic ones and I think it would let us give a little bit of a helping hand to a few builds partway through the campaign. I think there’s a few spots that are good for that for a few different types of builds.

As far as specific incentives for Chapter 9, I’d like to see the campaign bosses just getting better drop rates, in general. Just dropping more stuff and getting better drop rates, in general, so that maybe if your character isn’t doing amazing you can be like, ‘Okay well I’m going to go do this boss and get a good chance of getting some sweet gear for my character to get into monolith’s easier’ or something like that. Which will just naturally happen to newer players because they’ll do the whole campaign, probably.

Source: YouTube Link

June 9, 2023
Q: Are you guys planning to add other spicy quest rewards, like the +1 to all Attributes?

Mike: Yeah, there’s some functionality in the quest reward system that we never really fleshed out that we need to for sure. A lot of that revolves around some multiplayer issues that we had early on with it. A quest reward type that we really need and we’ve ideated how to do it a few times, and things like that, is gear quest rewards where it’s like, ‘here’s a piece of gear, pick two.’ We do have some like that – so we’ve got the Artem’s gambler ledger book at the start of the game in the Council Chambers.

I think there’s room for a quest rewards style where you’re presented with the options in front of you where it says, “Okay great, thanks for completing this quest. Here’s four options, you can pick any one of them. Which one do you want?” That’s the type of quest reward we’re definitely missing right now.

One of the big things that you can do with that type of quest reward, that we can’t do right now, is you can present kind of specialized types of gear. So you could put like a rare item, an item that is yellow, that has maybe two fixed mods and two random mods on a specific base or something like that. So we could say like, 'okay we’re going to make a ring that’s a throwing ring and it’s guaranteed to have like two mods on it that are really good for throwing builds and then we’re going to put two random mods on it, and it’ll generate that item. It’ll be really specific and anyone who’s a throwing build, especially early in the game when it’s kind of hard to get build specific items for less common builds rolling, it’ll be really neat to have this type of item. You’ll be like, ‘oh it fits perfectly with my build.’

Now we can’t just give that single item as a reward because there’ll be so few throwing builds at that point. It’s one of those things that we need to have options. So you put three really specific options there and then one more generic one to sort of catch the rest if you need it, or something like that. I think that adding things like that to side quest, especially, is really good because it gives you this, ‘hey I know that if I do this side quest as a throwing build I’m going to get something interesting.’ Then maybe some other side quest has a guaranteed drop for a shield focused build. Another side quest has guarantee drop for a minion focused build.

Suddenly, if you’re like really optimizing a run or a leveling process or things like that, maybe you’re specifically targeting certain side quests because you know they’ll have more build specific items for you to help you level faster. Quite often those little incentives that make small differences here and there for different builds as you’re leveling can have a cumulative effect of actually making that leveling process more diverse, and I think that’s interesting.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Campaign Skip

A full campaign skip is not something EHG is currently planning to implement. However, each dungeon allows the player to skip a different portion of the campaign on subsequent characters. Unfortunately the difficulty of these dungeons on new characters is not properly balanced at this time, nor is there a full complement of dungeons to truly satisfy this feature. As more dungeons become available and they’ve been properly balanced for alternate characters this feature could hopefully become a more viable solution for those looking to skip a majority of the campaign.

May 5, 2023
Q: In the near future will there be an option to skip the campaign once you’ve already completed it so you can focus on the endgame?

Mike: We don’t plan on anything like that specifically no. So if you’re unaware, the dungeons are campaign skips. If you complete a dungeon then at the end of it you are spat out significantly further along in the campaign than when you started.

Those campaign skips are not great yet, especially not without some serious gear. The first version of them is usually a little too hard to get through on a character that is just getting there naturally, especially if you’re an experienced player and you’re rushing. So with the changes that we are eventually planning to make for level requirement changes to legendary items created, that should be a tool for making those a lot easier for players that are on their third, fourth, hundredth campaign runs. There’s also some talks about changes to the actual tier one versions of some of the dungeons themselves to make them more conducive to that type of encounter, in general.

There was a suggestion I heard that I liked and I don’t know if it was from the community or not but I did like it and I don’t know if we’ve talked about it, I think we probably haven’t, but it was like having the first one just not cost a key.

Reimer: [In Twitch comments] We don’t plan on having full campaign skips. But we are planning to add more dungeons and make tier 1 dungeons easier, so they can be used for chapter skips so you can customize your campaign experience to an extent.

Source: YouTube Link

May 12, 2023
Q: Are you going to make it possible to skip the campaign once your first character has completed it? Since having to go through the campaign again with a new character isn’t really entertaining.

Mike: Right now no. So quite often when this question gets asked my answer is, ‘Well did you know that the dungeons are campaign skips?’ The answer is most of the time no. [Mike laughs] That’s because they’re not really good enough for that job yet, but we are hoping to improve that interaction a little bit so that it’s something that gets explained to the player a little bit better and also it works a little bit better on new characters.

So you can go into a dungeon and when you leave the dungeon – if you like actually leave the other side instead of portaling out it jumps you ahead really far in the campaign. Lightless Arbor, for example, just spits you out in the End of Time. So it goes from when you enter the Lightless Arbor to the End of Time, which is a pretty big jump in the campaign. There’s two other dungeons as well. We’re going to add more of those so you’ll be able to skip chunks the campaign easier, and then we’re also going to make the lowest tier of those – I think the plan is to make them more accessible in some ways for subsequent characters while leveling.

Also, we’re changing the way legendaries have their level requirement calculated. So legendary items right now calculate their level requirement by taking the higher of two numbers – the two numbers are the base level requirement for the unique itself and the level requirement that a hypothetical magic or rare or exalted item would have if it were a level one base item with the affixes that have been…the red affixes that are on it, the ones that have been moved over onto the unique. If you just take those affixes and you see what level a level one base item would be with those affixes, if that’s higher than the base level of the unique then that’s the level the item gets. That’s what it is now. We’re taking that last confusing bit out and just having it so that making it legendary doesn’t change the level the item is.

You’ll be able to make low level, really awesome legendaries to do the early campaign a lot easier. You’ll be able to rip through dungeons and make the leveling process for subsequent characters more customized. It won’t be the same campaign – it’ll be the same campaign done differently and you’ll be able to do it a lot easier because you’ll have gear.

On top of that, if you have a a friend and you’re playing online you can get them to like just go to the End of Time. Party up and you can just portal to them and you’re at the End of Time and you’ll get your mastery and you’re level two. You’ll be level two because there’s an auto quest that completes there that’ll bump you to level two right away.

We don’t have an adventure mode planned. We don’t have a way to say like, ‘Alright, here just do the arena until your max level and it’s done’ or anything like that…no.

Source: YouTube Link

June 23, 2023
Q: Are you going to have to keep doing the campaign?

Mike: We don’t plan to remove the campaign from the game. The campaign is always evolving and all that sort of stuff. The only thing I can say for certain is that at 1.0 and our plan, initially, going forward after that is that the campaign is still part of the leveling process. Something that we haven’t tutorialized well enough to players, because every time this question comes up and I mention this most of the time the answer is ‘oh my god, I didn’t know that was a thing.’ [Mike laughs]

Just in the off chance you haven’t heard this, dungeons are a campaign skip. Each dungeon is not an entire campaign skip but each dungeon skips a chunk of the campaign. So, for example, Lightless Arbor takes you to the End of Time but you can access Lightless Arbor way earlier – oh wait, this might have changed with the structure change. There are campaign skips! [Mike laughs] Each dungeon is a campaign skip so each dungeon skips you forward in the campaign.

The idol slot and passive point quests – there are more idol slot and passive point quests than there are rewards. While there are 15 passive points you can earn through quests, there are more than 15 passive point reward quests. [Mike opens the map to view quests] Like this quest right here, it would reward a passive point if I hadn’t got 15 rewards already. So I don’t have to do this quest, though I still can for the other rewards but you can skip chunks of the campaign and not lose out on rewards at the end because you can pick those passive point quests up later elsewhere.

Source: Forum Link

June 23, 2023
Q: Thanks for the clarification and I did not know dungeons could be used as campaign skips.

Mike: Yep. [Mike laughs] The tier 1 of dungeons isn’t tuned probably yet. That’s something that I really want to get on to as soon as possible – is making an early dungeon on a new character feel possible.

Something that we did do in the last major patch, that I think helps leveling alts a ton, is legendary items not increasing the level requirement to use them from the base unique. So you can now have a legendary with sweet affixes on it and it’s the same level as the base unique item. Low level uniques have a high probability, compared to high level uniques, of having more legendary potential so you can have surprisingly high powered leveling items for these low level legendaries.

So you can make some pretty sweet leveling pieces. Even if you’re not going to use them long-term just having a 4 LP Hammer of Lorent – I know people always used to talk about how it was a useless item because even if you stuck awesome things on the legendary stats for it then it was no longer a low level item so you couldn’t level with it properly. Now it’s an amazing leveling item, because it also scales with your level.

Source: Forum Link

June 23, 2023
Q: Will something be included for those of us who have finished the main story and want to create a new character but don’t wish to start the whole story from the beginning? It really takes a lot of time.

Mike: Okay, so this comes back to if you’re re-running the campaign on another character you’ll have dungeon keys and use those dungeon keys to skip ahead. If you’re in multiplayer you can just get someone to warp you to the End of Time very quick. We’ve also pulled the entrance to the End of Time earlier so you can access it quicker.

There’s also lowering the level requirements for legendaries so that they’re not upgraded based on the affixes that get added to them from uniques so it saves their unique base. It makes leveling alts easier as well. Leveling alts, I think, in Last Epoch is faster than most other ARPG’s, and there’s some tricks you learn along the way to make it go even faster obviously. But yeah, you’re very first alt will probably take a similar amount of time to your first character, but your tenth alt will take way less time.

Source: Forum Link

July 12, 2023
Q: I just wanted to ask if we’re able to the skip campaign for alts? If not, do you have plans to support it in the future? Thanks!

Mike: There are 3 dungeons in the game. Each has 4 tiers. They are located along the campaign and the lowest tier is roughly the level of the area it is found in. When you finish a dungeon, walking out the other side will send you a significant distance through the campaign.

There are side quests in the campaign which grant passive points and idol slots. There are more quests with rewards in each of these categories than you need so you don’t have to do them all to get full character power. This lets you customize your playthrough.

You can also make low level legendary items with endgame tier stats on them to make the leveling process of alts way faster.

We have no plans for a complete campaign skip.

Source: Discord Link

September 6, 2023
Rhykker: When we’re looking at the cycles, do we replay the campaign every cycle or do we have an option of skipping the campaign?

Judd: Yeah, good question. So we do think that the campaign is an important part of the experience of creating a new character and so we intend for players to play the campaign. Now there are things like dungeons in the game which can help you skip a swath of content especially if it’s your second character in a cycle, it’s an alt, and you have these dungeon keys. So there are ways to speed up that progression but yes, we do feel it is important to make sure that players get to experience the campaign when they go into a new cycle. Also, we’ll be continuing to add cool stuff and random events and things like that so that it’s not just the same exact thing every single time.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Enemies

Expect many new and updated enemies leading up to and after launch, especially as new chapters are released. Below are most, if not all, of the new or updated enemies they’ve teased over the months.

[ Table of Contents ]

AndrewTilley · July 24, 2023, 6:17pm

User Interface

UI Changes/Updates

Expect new and updated UI elements leading up to 1.0 and beyond.

July 21, 2023
Mike: We are working on – this is one of the things we’ve been working on this week, is the mini-map on lighter areas. You just can’t see it at all there, but you can see it here because it’s a darker background. So having something that’s adaptive or just finding the right mixture of eye of newt and tail of musk ox to make it play nice. I’m currently operating under the theory that we’re going to have to have some sort of adaptive overlay map for what type of zone you’re in. So like we’ll have to have zones tagged as “bright” or “dark” and then change the UI slightly for bright or dark zones. That would be my guess. We do have a couple zones that as you move through them it like flips.

We can’t do – like on this map [Mike points to the mini-map with the black background] even on the brighter areas looks fine because it has that background. We can’t put that background on your whole screen because it would just look awful. I know there’s some adjustments to some zones that are also happening as well to just make this less of a problem.

We’re also looking at other UI elements that sit on screen that maybe don’t look as fantastic in the – I’m trying to position one of them really specifically so that it’s really terrible and it’s frustratingly not that terrible in this scene to prove my point. Sadly it’s not working. Why do you have to be so good when I’m trying to say you’re bad? Uhh! [Mike laughs] Okay, the quest logs on the right here. It’s kind of hard to see in this scene right here so we’re working on improving that as well.

There’s all sorts of little things that we’re improving. Polish, touch-ups, pretty.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Character Sheet

The long discussed update to the Character Sheet was recently confirmed to be coming after 1.0. Hopefully it’ll be worth the wait. Below is an early design mock-up that was shown more than two years ago.

April 9, 2021
Mike: I’ve got a very early…very, very early preview. This preview was built in about 20 minutes, but we really like it and the UI designers are going to hate me for even showing it. So it’s probably going to be pretty close to what we’re going to do. This is a mock-up for a new style of character sheet. This is going to be redistributing the things on the screen and hopefully making them a little bit more clear what’s grouped with what, and then breaking off the details into a separate panel that pops out. As you can see, there happens to be 5 hexagons on the right there in that panel – I don’t know what that means but you know, there’s a few of them there. [Mike has hinted before that the new character sheet will show more detailed information specific to your specialized skills, so one can assume that those 5 hexagons are your 5 skills that you can see more detailed stats for by clicking on them.]
Timestamp: 1:46:20-1:47:35

Source: Forum Link

November 18, 2022
Q: Why don’t we have throwing crit chance appear on the character screen like the others?

Mike: Ah, that’s interesting. I don’t know why. Is there anything that actually gives that stat specifically? Yeah, it’s not there. That’s weird, I don’t know why it’s not there. We may not have had – the stat may not have been around when we created the character sheet, which was a long time ago. It’s before the Rogue really. We’ve done some updates to it to add in stats but I’m surprised that’s not there. Yeah, that’s interesting. I don’t know why we don’t have it there.

There’s sort of this nebulous idea of one day we’re going to update the character sheet and it’s going be awesome. We’ve gone so far as to create a mock-up of it and set out design specifications for it and just never finished the actual – we actually even started it briefly and then we’re like, ‘Okay person working on that, this other thing is way more important. You got to change what you’re doing now’ and then it was just one way more important thing after another and it kept getting pushed down the line. It’s still in the works and things like that will be added in.

What I’d really like to see, and I don’t know how possible this is but I think it should be doable because of the way the stat system is set up, is to actually have a like custom – and just to be clear, this is a Mike pipe dream request for a system like this if I was making it and that’s to have a custom stat field. [Mike has the Charater Sheet open and cycles between the various stat tabs within it] Maybe there’s a favourite stats section – so like there’s a whole bunch of these tabs and you can favourite some of them so that they show up on the front screen.

Then even if something’s not in here you could, with a drop-down menu, pick multiple tags – because all the stats are just a collection of tags. They’ll have a base property and then it’ll have added, increased, or more value and that makes up the stat and sometimes there’s additional things. So like ‘increased ignite chance’ is actually the stat property ‘ailment chance’ with the optional tag ‘ignite’ with the actual number that’s involved with it as an increased chance. So if you could just pick those things from a drop-down you could make your own stats to stick out there, which I think would be really cool.

That’s a lot of work and who knows if we can actually pull something like that off, but I think it could be really good because there’s just so many stats. If there’s some obscure build that you’re like, ‘I really need to track my bow reflect damage for this build because it’s a really key component.’ I don’t know…but yeah, I think you could put some really cool stuff in there.

I know we really want to get – the key thing we want to put in an updated character stats screen of some sort is ability specific information. This is a lot easier now since the rework to most skills has been finished – actually I think all skills now have been finished, as far as their back-end functionality for stats is concerned. For example, you could get like, ‘Okay my Warpath has this much chance to ignite and my Warpath has this much chance to poison and then my Void Cleave has this much chance to ignite and this much chance to poison’ type thing. Also, you could separate it out by each individual skill which is probably the most important thing for people.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Game Guide

The game guide requires some back-end improvements before it’s likely to receive any major additions. Also, Kyle and Mike have expressed an interest in adding a bestiary to the game, though Mike doesn’t explicitly state whether or not this feature would reside within the game guide.

May 12, 2023
Q: Any plans on expanding your game guide to explain certain bosses?

Mike: Yeah, so this is a tricky one – about adding information on bosses to the game guide. I think that there’s a decent chance that we would possibly add in, well I know we’ve been working on a bestiary – so something that will be able to record detailed information about the enemies you have fought and killed, is usually the way it goes instead of the things you are about to fight and kill.

I think there’s a low probability that we’d add like a strategy – the game guide’s not meant to be a strategy guide, it’s more meant to be a way to give information about the way things work in game…the way mechanics interact with each other. I think it would be less about having specific like, ‘here’s the boss and here’s their five abilities and here’s how you dodge them’ and things like that. I’m personally torn and we haven’t ever talked about doing something like that. I guess that’s the best answer I can give you right now.

Source: YouTube Link

June 23, 2023
Q: Have you guys thought about doing an in-game lore or bestiary codex?

Mike: Yes, I know that’s something the lore-master has been wanting to get wrapped in for a long time now. We’ve started adding in little story moments with the books you can find to help people explore the story a little bit. Something I’d really like to see is having a place where you can view all the books you’ve ever picked up and maybe have it show you all the ones you’ve missed, maybe be greyed out with a question mark to show that there’s another one that you haven’t found somewhere or something like that, and a bestiary to show details about enemies that you’ve killed…all those sorts of things. I really like the idea – a Pokedex is basically a bestiary and I really like how it starts off with if you’ve seen one it’s got some information and then if you catch one it gives you extra information. I really like that distinction. It’s something I’ve always thought was a nice touch there.

Source: Forum Link

June 23, 2023
Q: The in-game game guide is such a great feature, are you planning to add skills and whatnot? I’d love to see it fleshed out!

Mike: Oh yeah, it’s going to keep getting expanded. It got added and put in there to a point where it’s pretty good but not fantastic. It needs to be expanded, it needs to be improved. I set it up initially and I’m sorry, I made some mistakes when setting it up that I see now were kind of dumb. [Mike laughs] We’ve been adding things to it in the dumb way that I set it up. But it’s kind of frustrating to add things to it right now. We need to improve the editor interface for it. That’s the big thing that needs to change before we can really expand it too much.

The big inspiration for that feature – I played a lot of Civilization and the Civilopedia that’s in there was a big, big inspiration for the game guide. It’s definitely very different because big difference in the genre so big difference in the things that need to be in there, different ways things need to work, and all that sort of stuff but that’s where that idea came from initially.

Source: Forum Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Stash

There’s seemingly plenty of plans to improve the stash system overall, but I wouldn’t expect any major changes until after launch.

November 11, 2022
Q: Are there plans to have like a collectors section in the stash where we can stash each unique/set item once? I’m a collector.

Mike: Yeah, this is a cool feature that actually gets requested a fair bit. I’d really like to have something like that. I think it would work better as an achievement tracker in the – there’s pros and cons for both of these in different ways, but there’s sort of two ways to do this.

You have a single stash page that scrolls and has a unique space for every single unique item to go in it and you’re filling it up like a coin collector book or a stamp collector book where you’re filling in these slots with one of each thing that can go in there – which is very cool! It’s a little unwieldy. It’s a little like, ‘There’s a lot going on here. There’s this giant page that I’ve got to scroll through just to find it and everything.’ It kind of sucks.

The other option that I’ve seen suggested, which I think I actually prefer but I don’t know and I could probably be pretty easily convinced one way or other, is having it be more of an achievement tracker. One of the big upsides to this as well is you don’t have to actually take a copy of the item that you found and stick it in that slot. It would just work on – like every time you find a unique it would just update an achievement tracker. It wouldn’t matter if you – you’d still have to pick it up but it would be like, ‘Have you ever picked up this unique? Check. Have you ever picked up this unique? Check.’ I think that’s the way I’d probably prefer to see it myself, but super open to feedback on it.

It’s definitely like grail quests. I’ve gone on a couple D2 grail quests. I’ve only ever completed it once, I think. I think I finished it. I don’t know, it was so long ago. I know I’ve found every item in Diablo 2 – I know that! I don’t know if it’s always been on the same time. I know I’ve started a couple of grail quests. They’re tough – I’ve definitely given up on more than a couple.

Anyways, having it automatically track makes things a lot easier.

Source: YouTube Link

May 19, 2023
Q: Any plans on possibly using loot filter type queries on your stash?

Mike: No.

Q: Maybe even letting you use them to put items in your stash?

Mike: So I said no really quickly and usually that gets followed up with wanting to change the colours of things in your stash. There’s a performance problem there. This isn’t just a design decision, this is like, ‘A finger on the monkey’s paw curls and we add that and I steal 90 FPS from you. Deal with it!’ [Mike laughs] You know, like terrible things like that. I don’t know what the actual number is, but we don’t have a way to do it nicely at the moment.

I think we’ll likely be seeing some regex adjacent search criteria. I do really like the idea of having “defines” on specific tabs being like, ‘Okay, if you have like exalted rings and you just quickly move them into your into your stash then the exalted rings all just go into this one tab’ or something like that. Having loose defines – there’s a lot of stuff in there that we’d like to do and unfortunately it’s probably a post-1.0 feature set right now because there’s so many things we want to get in.

Mechanics like that that are solid but maybe missing some nice little extra bonus feature then the nice little extra bonus feature generally isn’t high enough priority to hit 1.0…generally, it depends. If it was like, ‘Oh this is going to take me two lines of code to change and 10 minutes of testing to confirm. It’s super low risk.’ Then you’d slap it in type thing. However, this is a little more involved though because there’s a lot of performance concerns.

Source: YouTube Link

June 9, 2023
Q: Will we have infinite stash tabs available upon release?

Mike: No.

Q: Because I really love crafting in Last Epoch and I like hoarding items for future characters.

Mike: No, we can’t do infinite stash tabs. The stash tabs that we do offer, I think, goes up to like 200 tabs right now. It might be more than that. I don’t know what the limit is. I remember putting the limit in and thinking like, ‘That’s insane! No one will ever want that.’ Obviously some people do, but the limit’s pretty darn high. There’s also an increasing gold cost on it so getting to the max is tricky for sure. There’s a ton of stash space available. If you’re hitting that cap with stuff that you’re genuinely planning on keeping and trying out, you either got to make more alts or keep less stuff because that is a ton of gear.

Source: YouTube Link

June 16, 2023
Q: The stash system is awesome, do you plan on implementing affinities like in PoE to make dropping off items smoother?

Mike: Yes, though it probably won’t be exactly the same. We’ll look at how we can improve that process of dropping off items into your own stash, specifically for Last Epoch and how our stash is built and how our game is built and all that sort of stuff. It’ll be a little bit different probably. We’ll look at just how we can improve the process of dropping off gear in the stash for Last Epoch, but I think affinities are a good example of how it’s done well in other games. We would probably just try and design something from scratch for ourselves, but it might look very similar, I don’t know. As a goal, it’s a good goal.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Loot Filter

There are plans to improve the loot filter system that will hopefully allow for some of the more common functionality requests players have in the future. Also, there are some minor functionality improvements coming that should allow us to select specific affixes with more granularity than before. Outside of features, there’s also plans to improve the tutorialization of the loot filter.

March 31, 2023
Q: Have you considered restricting low-level loot from dropping in high level areas?

Mike: Um, probably not.

Q: I know it can be adjusted with a loot filter but it’s too overwhelming for new players.

Mike: I think the answer to this more so would be having better loot filter tutorialization. One thing that I really want to get in with the loot filter and I don’t know when we’re going to have the time to do this, but a feature that we first came up with during the initial ideation of the in-game loot filter, that we sort of put on the books, was having an in-game loot filter sharing system.

So you could browse other filters people have made or you can upload your own. That’s kind of why there’s that description field there in the loot filter. You can leave a description that’s big enough for your own purposes in just the title, but that description field is kind of useless for most people. That’s why the description field is there because one day we hope to have that built-in.

If you’re not going to customize your own filter but you really want something that someone else has done quickly where you can just say like, ‘Filter the filters by Mage filters’ and be like ‘Okay, I’m Mage Fireball and there’s like 10 Mage Fireball filters and this one’s rated 5 out of 5 stars and there’s a bunch of great comments under something’ – you know, that sort of thing. I think that helps with this a lot.

Source: YouTube Link

March 31, 2023
Q: Will you be able to copy and paste loot filter rules amongst your various filters?

Mike: Yeah, it would be nice if you could copy a rule from one to another. You can duplicate them inside of a filter and you can duplicate filters themselves, but you can’t copy one from one filter to another filter yet. I’d say that’s something I’d like to see.

All the suggestions are great. If I’ve reacted positively or negatively to a suggestion here I will forget it as soon as the stream ends so do not take me reacting to a suggestion as something that I’m going to put into the game or do anything like that because they’re in one ear out the other right now because I just get so many of them. You got to go leave them on the proper places for things like that or else they’ll just get lost.

Source: YouTube Link

June 2, 2023
Q: Will we be able to filter shards or at least allow the pickup box to be bigger?

Mike: We don’t have any plans to add shards themselves to the filter system. As for the ground item labels, which is what we call these, the height of them needs to be consistent and will stay consistent relative to each other. They can all get bigger or none of them get bigger but they can’t have variable heights on those labels. Which might seem kind of arbitrary but it’s actually very important. Mostly from a – the ability for us to like, when I say us I mean us as players, to be able to look at a large number of items…I don’t have a large number of items to look at really, but having this still be a functional environment to be in a lot of that has to do with these being a consistent height. You can interact with the world a lot better. They blend into nothing a lot easier when they are a consistent height – if you’re trying to look past them you can basically.

Source: YouTube Link

June 16, 2023
Q: Are there any loot filter upgrades in the works? Like changing the font size…

Mike: No, that will not happen.

Q: …altering crafting materials…

Mike: No, that will not happen.

Q: …roll ranges…

Mike: No, that will not happen.

Q: …and legendary potential related values?

Mike: That’s not planned and I don’t think it’ll happen. But yes, there are loot filter improvements that will happen. I don’t know those specifics where I can say this is the next one coming or anything like that. We really specifically, and this is a concept that I find doesn’t go over well when I say it, but we do really intentionally make it so that you can’t make a perfect filter. So that you can’t say like, ‘Okay if it drops I pick it up.’ That’s a situation that we really don’t want people to be in.

Where you’re still evaluating gear that drops to say like, ‘Hey is this something that I want?’ I think that’s a really important step in the leveling process, the character building process, your growth as a player for discovering new builds and discovering items for alts and even just discovering new items for your own character that maybe you didn’t consider would be awesome, and to prevent people from having their loot filters set up too strictly. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why we don’t want perfect filtering to be a thing.

Source: YouTube Link

July 14, 2023
Q: Is there any plans to make your loot filter have mini-map effects?

Mike: Not currently. We’ve been talking about this and we know this is something that a lot of people want and there’s a lot of really not so obvious functionality problems and performance concerns that come into play here that seem like they’d be really trivial, and they’re super not. [Mike laughs] We know this is something people want to have access to and we are planning loot filter improvements in general. There’s a couple of little things we’re planning on there. I don’t – I’m almost positive this was not approved at the most recent meeting, so I think it’s unlikely to happen right now.

I know there’s other ways we’re looking at solving the problem where something drops a little bit far away, like off camera, and maybe a minion killed it or maybe it was a DoT and you walked away from the enemy and the DoT finished them off and like an awesome item drops. An awesome item that doesn’t have a beam, it doesn’t have a special something that goes with it, and it drops behind you and you don’t see it. It’s not on the mini-map. You don’t know what happened. What are you going to do? Do you have to go back and recheck everything?

I know, for example, it was really fantastic when they added auto-pickup for gold in D2 because it was really important to pick up gold. It was really important to pick up your gold because there was a maximum number of objects that could show up on the screen at the same time. So you could have like a Ber rune just sitting there on the ground and you’d never know it because the gold was taking up those item tooltip slots. Things like that. I’ve more than once come through Chaos Sanctuary on a really low level character trailing way far behind and just found a high rune because no one saw it because it wasn’t displaying on their screens yet.

We understand there’s a problem there and we’re taking steps that we think are going to be more performant and less prone to potentially really negative experiences if used incorrectly, that’ll help with that problem.

Kain: [In Twitch comments] It’s a common request, but it’s a lot more expensive of an operation than it seems, so allowing it for just any filter could cause issues. So we need to decide when it can apply, and create support for that before we could implement it. I don’t believe it’s currently planned, but not off the table.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Passives Reset Button

A button that’ll functionally reset the entirety of the passives trees has been confirmed to be coming, though no specific timeframe was given but hopefully it’ll be included with 1.0.

February 10, 2023
Q: Hey Judd, when are we getting that passives reset button?

Judd: Are we talking about the…like…
Mike: Passive respec’s and not having to do them individually.
Judd: Oh yeah. Did we ever implement the ability to just press the Enter key?
Mike: Yes, we definitely did that.
Judd: Okay, okay. The overall passives respec button, I would say that that is probably pretty low on the list at the moment…if I’m being realistic.
Mike: It did, it did – well, first off we do have that button internally already so all it is, is exposing a function into a UI element. So the barrier to put this in is super-duper low. [laughter]
Judd: Ahhh…who’s feeling leaky now Mike!
Mike: [laughter] I’ve told them this. That’s not new info, that’s not new info. That’s old!
Judd: [laughter] Good old info. I know we had a…
Mike: But no, no…last time we talked about it we said no.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Blessings

How the blessings selection screen appears immediately after defeating the timeline boss is scheduled to be improved and hopefully in time for 1.0. Also, previously discovered blessings and their highest rolled value are planned to be interchangeable within the Blessings window, possibly by launch.

[ Table of Contents ]

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

[ Table of Contents ]

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

[ Table of Contents ]

Masochist Mode

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

[ Table of Contents ]

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.

[ Table of Contents ]

AndrewTilley · July 24, 2023, 6:17pm

Accessibility

Localizations

EHG is working with a video game localization company to bring several additional languages to the game. They announced that the initial languages, outside of English, planned to be available are: Simplified Chinese, French, German, Brazil-Portuguese, Spain-Spanish, Polish, Korean, and Russian. These localizations were made available in patch 0.9.2 and are set to be improved in the leadup to launch.

May 19, 2023
Q: Regarding the language setting in Last Epoch, when will it be possible to set another language? For example, Polish, English, or Russian in patch 1.0 or at all?

Mike: Um, like full-on game localization, so being able to set the whole language of the entire game, is something that we are actively working on. I do not know when that’s going to be fully available. We’re doing a lot more languages than we initially planned, which is great.

I think Polish is one of the languages…oh it might not be though. I don’t know what all the languages are. Yeah I don’t know if that’s one of them. I know Russian was selected as one of them. I know like French is one of them, Spanish is one of them, like I think all the EFIGS is in there. I know there’s some that use other character sets – that use like Japanese, Chinese, Korean character sets…Han, Hangul, I’m sorry if I’m like horribly butchering these things. I really apologize, I’m just ignorant and I try to learn these things but I’m not good at it. But yeah, we’re working on that. We ran into a problem with like Korean chat recently and the combinatorial nature of it, but I think we have a solution for it now. It’s a whole thing.

Source: YouTube Link

July 14, 2023
Q: When will the Polish language be available in Last Epoch? I’m asking because I don’t know English as much as I would like, besides there was only one Russian language at school.

Mike: I don’t know the date that it’s going to be available. I don’t want to say it’s going to be a launch feature but that’s what I want to say. [Mike laughs] I don’t know the full status of it but I know it’s being very intensely worked on in general, and all of them will be together.

I know there’s a couple issues with some Korean type setting that we’re having but I think that may have been solved. I learned a ton about how words are formed in Korean recently while trying to set up the character set for it, which is actually really cool but my goodness it’s a pain to program. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

July 14, 2023
Q: Hopefully the German translation will be better than the short teaser Mox posted. I don’t want to have “Artikel Bodenetikett Anbringungsindikatoren” in my game.

Mike: I have no idea what that says and I am quite sure there’s going to be mistakes out of the gate. It’s just such a monumental task there kind of has to be right, but I’m sure we’ll get reports on those and get them in. One thing we’re being really careful about with the translations, and this is a really hard thing to do, is to have the mechanical information conveyed in item and skill tooltips and things like that be really precise and consistent.

I don’t think I have a good example on a single item here, but this is kind of okay – like it’s just the added, increased, and more thing. In some languages the word “more” is translated as the same word as what you’d say “plus” would be translated for, at least verbally. So there’s tricky stuff there in trying to make it so that it’s obvious. Getting that to be precise is really important because if there’s problems there then people will not understand what things do, and if there’s any ambiguity there we will be in trouble. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

July 14, 2023
Q: My main concern was the word “Artikel”, which is “article”. It was translated from the word “item”. But in the context of “loot” there are some better words in German like “Gegenstand” for example. It just feels like the company doing the translation does not have the context needed for a loot-driven video game, which worries me.

Mike: They definitely have that context and they are very familiar with it. That early translation I don’t know why that happened but they definitely have that context. I have discussions with them every single day about context. They’re specifically a video game localization company. That’s the whole thing they do. [Mike laughs] And yeah, there’s lots of different video games and everything like that but they’re definitely coming at this from the right angle. It would be a little obtuse to ignore it and it wouldn’t be an acute problem to have.

[Mike coming in hot with the geometry puns]

Source: YouTube Link

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Controller Support

Controller support will see further improvements at launch, but won’t have “full controller support” until sometime afterwards.

November 4, 2022
Q: Can this be played with a controller?

Mike: It definitely can be played with a controller. I wouldn’t say it has full controller support because there’s certain elements like text input for naming characters and things like that that do not bring up an on-screen keyboard to work with. So you do still need a keyboard for some select things. I think getting into game at the very start might struggle with the controller at the moment. We do plan to round out controller support for 1.0 so that we can say, ‘Yes it has controller support’ and there’s no caveats or asterisks there. However, right now I would give it a solid B+ for controller support. At the moment it’s not perfect, it’s not finished, there’s work to do, but it’s pretty good and it’s pretty fun. I know a lot of people that actually actively play with a controller.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Subtitles

It’s still unknown if the new cutscenes will be ready for 1.0, but if they are then it’s very likely they’ll include subtitles.

June 30, 2022
Kain: Accessibility such as subtitles is certainly something we want, but subtitles don’t help if the game doesn’t even work. While we certainly understand and appreciate different people’s priority for different items, there are currently higher priority items such as ensuring the core game works. Items like accessibility are “on the list” because they’ll be scheduled in once the people who would be able to complete them aren’t working on something higher priority.

[…]

We absolutely want accessibility options in the game, however for us it’s currently not higher priority than some other items such as ensuring players can enter monoliths reliably in multiplayer. I most certainly understand that different people have different priorities, and I apologize that this is higher priority for you and we’re not able to get to it yet. At the very least, I can say “yes, it’s on our list”.

Source: Forum Link

[ Table of Contents ]

UI Scaling

This appears to be a future consideration. Don’t expect UI scaling to arrive until sometime after launch.

[ Table of Contents ]

Colour Blind Options

Colour blind options appear to be an active consideration and may or may not come with 1.0, but definitely sometime afterwards.

February 10, 2023
Q: Are the drop chances being lowered in the normal game and is there a way to better highlight chests? I have a disability and it’s kind of hard to see.

Mike: Oh, like seeing if a chest exists there. Umm, maybe. That’s the sort of stuff that’s really good as forum feedback. Like a screenshot with, ‘this is where it’s hard for me to see.’ That sort of stuff is really useful there. I don’t think we have any plans for it specifically right now though.

Judd: We’ve always intended to bring in like colour blind options and stuff like that but they haven’t quite gotten to the top of the list yet. I would love if we could get some of those in before 1.0 though. We’ve even made graphics for the different rarities of items and the paper doll and the inventory and stuff like that so that if people are colour blind they can differentiate more easily there but we haven’t quite got them into a build yet.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

WASD Movement

WASD movement is not in active development but it’s also not something that’s been outright dismissed. However, if it does come to the game it’ll be after 1.0.

[ Table of Contents ]

AndrewTilley · July 24, 2023, 6:19pm

Future Considerations

Character Customization

Having some form of character customization available in the game has routinely been stated as a long-term goal for the company. However, do not expect this feature to arrive with 1.0, or for some time afterwards.

This specific quote below used to be in the Future Plans section of the Official LE General FAQ but was removed at some point, for whatever reason.

March 7, 2022
Q: Will there be character customization or gender options added to Last Epoch?

Kain: Last Epoch is a class based game and we prioritized creating distinct silhouettes, visual themes, and animations for the different classes over the ability to customize their appearance. There is a lot of work that goes into creating a distinct player character, such as voice acting, modelling, rigging, skinning armor, creating animations, and adding character customization would increase a lot of that work, even doubling it in some cases.

However character customization is a feature that has been very frequently requested, and one that we enjoy from other games. We also have a lot more resources and technical capability than we had when we first scoped out the project, so character customization is not entirely off the table. Those resources are needed in a lot of places though, so regardless of what we decide long term, character customization will not be a feature for the 1.0 release of Last Epoch. As we’re reworking older content of Last Epoch, we’re also keeping this avenue in mind to not make things too focused on the existing pre-set characters to keep things open for this in the future such as cinematics and dialog.

Source: Archived Forum Link

April 7, 2023
Q: Will there be character customization/gender swap for classes/transmog system in Last Epoch? I find it helps a ton when making multiple characters in the same class with different masteries.

Mike: The short answer is yes, but not anytime soon. We’d really like to add a character customization system long-term to the game. We think it would be awesome to have. We have put literally zero work into it and will not be putting work into it pre-1.0 at all and it will not be a high priority feature post-1.0 either. It is something that we hope to get into the game when we can, when we have time for it. We are looking forward to having something like that but it’s going to be a while, at best.

It’s one of those things where there’s so many higher priority things – like improving the endgame, adding more models for various things, adding more skills. There’s so much of the game, mechanically and functionally, that’s just not done yet that we really have to hammer home first before we start adding in character customization and things like that.

Let’s be real here, apart from in the character selection screen, if my character had like different eye color you can’t see that, especially when zoomed out like this. That has no effect on gameplay right now whatsoever. I’m not saying it’s not important, because it’s definitely something that a lot of people really find very important and what’s important to our community is important to us too. I don’t want to brush it off as like a, ‘Oh whatever type feature’ because we do know it’s important but we just think that there are things that are more important that we still have to get done. The game needs to function better, it needs to have more things to do it, needs to be more fun, it needs – there’s lots of things that still need to happen before we get into that.

Source: YouTube Link

April 7, 2023
Q: What made you go gender-locked than giving people the choice to choose? I understand it doesn’t ruin the game, just wondering.

Mike: One of our core design pillars has been character identity. We’ve done this…like mechanically we do this when we look at what – the big example that I always pull out when I talk about this is Beastmaster versus Necromancer when it comes to minions. There’s a lot of mechanical differences there and theming differences that go with it. For example, in the passive tree Necromancer has tons of buffs for when your minions die and you get a cool thing. It incentivizes your minions actually dying. Primalist doesn’t have a bunch of that stuff. We then look at the ability for Primalist companions to be resurrected from their downed state.

So there’s these mechanical differences that we try and work into the differences between these classes. Part of having this character identity, class identity, as a real thing is having these characters be a specific character. Instead of them just being “a Rogue” it’s “the Rogue” and that’s where the non-character customization kind of works into that.

The second half of this is just that it’s a lot of resources to develop a system like that. It slows so many things down and if we were to add character customization into the game – like something as simple as just adding a new body armour for one class would suddenly take, not twice as long, but it would increase the time it takes.

Kain: [In Twitch comments] Double the amount of work for models, animation, voice acting, gear fitting, spell and ability syncing, etc. Also ensuring characters have unique silhouettes so they are easily and quickly recognizable. More game systems, mechanics, activities, etc. made sense. It’s possible at some point in the future, but didn’t make priority for 1.0.

Source: YouTube Link

June 30, 2023
Q: Will there be character customization in the future? Beyond just changing genders, will there be options for things like eye colour and hair and stuff like?

Mike: In the future? Yes. By 1.0? No. Is the short answer to that. We kind of bundle eye colour, hair colour, gender, and all that sort of a stuff as a single feature. As far as we’re concerned all of that is character customization, in general, as a feature. It’s not in progress yet, it’s not being worked on yet – which I know is frustrating to hear for a lot of people. It is something that we are planning on doing still. It is a feature that like, ‘It’s coming, it’ll happen…it’ll take a while.’

A lot of stuff comes down the fact that we just we have to prioritize things, and having characters be customizable isn’t something that’s really super high priority for us compared to performance, bug fixing, better in-game communication to the player, new endgame features, finishing the mastery classes, etc. There’s so many things like that that are just so much more important that they’re going to take priority. But yes, character customization is still on the list. It’s not going anywhere. It’s just on vacation. [Mike laughs]

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Transmog System

There are plans to add a transmog system, but don’t expect it until after launch.

[ Table of Contents ]

UI Customization

There’s no plans to add UI customization, nor is it a long-term consideration at this time.

[ Table of Contents ]

PvP

PvP is something they’ve expressed a strong interest in adding post-1.0. In fact, many years ago it was on the early access forecast and briefly discussed within a developer blog. It seems highly likely that some form of PvP gets included in the future.

June 9, 2023
Q: I know you guys talked before about not having PvP in the game yet, because well balance and stuff, but how do you guys feel about low level PvP? Easier to implement and balance.

Mike: No, okay so maybe we’ve talked about balancing in general as like a struggle or a hurdle or a challenge with PvP, but that’s not the reason it’s not in the game right now. Right now it’s just a priority feature and time thing. I think PvP is one of those things that will very likely get added to the game. I will push for it to get into the game because I love PvP stuff. I think there’s lots of room for really fun PvP, especially non-traditional PvP modes. That’s something I’d really like to see still. That’s even something that we had as an optional stretch goal on our Kickstarter to do. I don’t think we got to that one.

I’d love to see some less traditional PVP modes that cause some creative stuff to happen. There was – I’ve told this story before but it’s been a while. One of the earliest multiplayer tests we did was where everyone had one hit point and everyone had Fireball and there were no teams. It was just anyone can attack anyone. It was a big green square, like the whole thing was just a giant big green square, and it was a really early test. It was just like, ‘Get in and try and use an ability, and every ability is just Fireball, and everything’s a one-hit kill.’ It was a ton of fun! So yeah, think like Goldeneye mods – like Golden Gun mode, big head mode. I feel like there’s room for some less serious and fun PvP modes to slip in alongside some more serious PvP modes.

Yeah, balance is definitely an issue and there might need to be some more creative solutions to balance PvP and some of those could be things like even just banning certain abilities. You see this in TCG’s all the time, where they ban specific cards and stuff like that. I feel like you could, it wouldn’t be ideal to ban things, but having PvP adjusted skill trees is a little outside the realm of, I think, the amount of work we’d want to put into an initial version of that. Something like that.

I really can see PvP being something that eventually gets added in. However, it’s just not as high priority as updating the endgame, as getting new endgame modes in, as making the endgame modes that are already in there more fun, as finishing the existing classes, as getting trade into the game…you know. These things are all just more important and as a high time investment, like a man-hours investment, to get into the game it competes with those other features…pretty directly.

Source: YouTube Link

June 9, 2023
Q: If you wanted to add really basic PvP, and not care about balance or anything, basically just enable a way for players to damage each other, would that be “easy” to do?

Mike: No, it’s crazy hard to do. Super-duper mega hard to do. That is a massive feature and a huge undertaking because the feature has to be polished. It might not be feature – it might not be like an exhaustive multiplayer feature and even if you don’t put any sort of like automated matchmaking in, which would be one of those things where it’s like, ‘Well you put PvP in and you didn’t put matchmaking in? Like what’s wrong with you?’

Then you got to have an ELO system and you got to have like all sorts of stuff. It’s one of those things where it’d be really easy to make a system, well it wouldn’t really be that easy…it would be “easier” as there’s still a lot to do with it, but it would be easier to make a system that technically functioned and was more of a beta PvP playground than an actual PvP feature. However, all it would really do is make the people who really want PvP mad because it was a terrible version of PvP and take time away from other features for people that don’t want PvP.

So until we can do it right it’s not worth trying to do, and even a basic version is a surprisingly large undertaking…because it’s not just as simple as letting people be able to hurt each other. Because that can be done. It’d be nice if that’s all it was, my goodness!

Source: YouTube Link

June 23, 2023
Q: Do you think its possible for an ARPG to have good PvP?

Mike: Absolutely yes, definitely! Now just to clarify, our distinction of good PvP is extremely different I bet. [Mike laughs] But yeah, I think that there’s room for – I don’t know if there’s room for a PvE-first ARPG, like Last Epoch is, and I would argue that all of them are right now. Oh, there’s probably an example that I’m not thinking about right now. Anyways, all of the major ones…we’ll say that. I don’t think anyone has achieved awesome, high quality competitive balance in PvP. Similar to the way that, for example, like WoW, and I am not up-to-date on WoW’s PvP scene at all, but they do strive for a competitive balance and there’s a competitive meta that evolves and all these things that happen around PvP in it. Maybe League of Legends would be a better example. That’s a PvP first, basically PvP-only game and that’s really the focus there. So I think that there’s ways to do PvP well in an ARPG, I think it’s totally possible. There’s certain expectations that people have for making PvP systems that would be required to make it good that those expectations might not be possible to hit.

I think sometimes it comes down to like a banned list, is something it needs to have. I’m going to use Magic cards as an example here. It’s something I know really well and can talk about. There’s different formats for Magic cards. So you’ll have a Magic card that gets printed and it can be played in many different formats, and so we’ll talk about formats in the same way we talk about PvE vs PvP as a different format for playing an ARPG. Let’s say that a skill is analogous to a card. So you have these skills that are designed for one environment that end up getting used in another environment. So you have PvE skills that end up getting used in PvP.

So you see in Magic that Commander is a popular format, Standard is a popular format, and Limited is another popular format. There’s different pools of cards that you can play in each one of those formats, and there’s a lot of other ones too – there’s Pauper and Historic and Alchemy and Legacy and Type 2 and Block Constructed…there’s lots of different formats. I didn’t even hit them all – Penny Dreadful, and if you’ve never heard of it and you like to play Magic I recommend checking out the format DanDan. It is the single weirdest format ever but is super cool. Anyways, and I think that having these different – so Magic gets away with having these different formats, different banned lists, and different card pools because there are, I don’t know how many cards, like a million cards at this point…200,000 cards, I don’t know. It’s some huge amount of cards that you can pick from and so you don’t need to have all them available to make a fun format. There’s enough options to pick from.

So, I think, in order to make a successful PvP mode in an initially PvE developed and focused ARPG – I think the key piece is having a skill ban list. Having certain skills that just aren’t available because there’s not really going to be a fun way to make them functional in PvP as they were designed initially with PvE in mind. I am bringing this back to Last Epoch, don’t worry.

We’ve created a pseudo PvP environment in the arena. The limited arena runs end with you fighting an NPC, an enemy, that is using player abilities. So it’s kind of that PvP environment where you just got an AI controlled PvP character because it’s using PvP abilities, right. There’s a Rogue there, and I talk about this almost all the time because I just love it…the person that made it great job, and one of the abilities that the Rogue casts in the limited arena runs is Decoy…against the player. Wow, what good does Decoy do? It doesn’t actually force you to ever target the Decoy so what’s the point? It doesn’t do anything, right? It just explodes after a little while and you just walk away and don’t take a bunch of damage. Okay, great. But if you kill it quickly enough it drops a bunch of runes and glyphs and stuff so it does draw your attention. It acts as a taunt.

So there’s subtle things you can do like that to change skills – and that probably wouldn’t really work in PvP because you’d just have people agree to not hurt each other and just keep spawning Decoy’s to get infinite glyphs and shards, so we can’t actually do that. However, I think it’s a good example of an out-of-the-box workaround to making a non-PvP functional skill work in PvP. If that’s not possible then I think just banning it is fine. I think there’s things like that that you can do to make PvP fun. I just think you can’t be scared to make big changes and to really shake things up for a PvP situation. Now one of the hard parts about that then – I’m saying, okay, yeah, it’s possible to do it. You got to make a lot of changes. You got to do a lot of stuff. That’s a lot of work. That’s a lot of scope that’s tacked onto the game and so it can’t just come as a small little thing and be fun, I don’t think. I don’t think there’s a way to do PvP in an ARPG that’s initially developed PvE focused quickly, cheaply, and good. [Mike laughs] You know, you got to pick two of those things and drop the third.

Source: Forum Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Guilds

Guilds won’t be coming prior to 1.0, but are a possibility afterwards.

June 30, 2023
Q: Will something like clans/guilds be added to the game?

Aaron: I think you’ve mentioned that – I think the word you guys, EHG, want to use is clans. I could be wrong.

Mike: Really? I don’t know if we’ve come up with a specific name for it. But yeah, guilds, clans, that sort of system is something that I think will sort of eventually make its way in. However, I know it won’t be a 1.0 feature and I don’t think it’ll be a shortly after 1.0 feature either because it’s one of those things that kind of tends to… It’s really cool. When it works well people can build a community around it in the game and all of those things are awesome and we want to get those in.

Aaron: But then you have to answer the questions; Is it going to have like a shared stash? Is it – like what are the social features? Are you having a guild area?

Mike: Yeah, and we aren’t putting a shared stash in for them. So it’s like what is the mechanical benefit of a guild at that point other than just a sort of a shared friends list?

Aaron: Or like a shared chat.

Mike: A shared chat channel. So a shared chat channel and a shared friends list. Which is not nothing. It’s not nothing, but is that enough to warrant pre-1.0 dev time compared to…

Aaron: Yeah, it’s hard because you couldn’t do like achievement only clans because then you’re forcing people to go into – like they have to join a clan to get the achievement.

Mike: Yeah, so there’s some tricky things there. I think there’s a good chance we will add them at some point, but it’s just one of those things that’s not high enough priority. Right now so much of the core focus that we’re doing is polish, performance, getting what we have feeling really awesome, and a lot of these like very important but what I would call secondary features – I think having more polish on the primary features is more valuable than having these secondary features created.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Player Housing

There’s no immediate plans for player housing but they are a possibility after launch provided they can find a good mechanical reason to add them.

[ Table of Contents ]

API

With the help of the community a beta version of their API is currently in testing with Maxroll and LastEpochTools and will eventually be made more publicly available after it’s been thoroughly tested, though no timeframe has yet been given.

June 23, 2023
Q: Any plans for an API for LE? Would an API interact with the bazaar, or the goal is to be only in the game itself?

Mike: We do hope to eventually release an API to help with some things around like character information and possibly game data in general. Like how much damage does Lightning Blast deal, and what are the roll ranges on armour when it’s applied to a helmet, things like that. As far as interacting with the bazaar API, we’ve actually talked about this and it’s explicitly not planned. We don’t plan to be able to set up a way to interact with the bazaar, like to be able to build a website that lets you be able to use the bazaar when you’re not playing the game. We have no plans for that right now. We actually have plans not to do that right now. Usually when I say no plans it’s like no plans either way, but this is like plans not to.

Source: Forum Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Steam Deck

There’s no immediate plans to support the Steam Deck but it’s something they’ll consider doing after launch.

September 14, 2022
Q: How is the game going to run on a Steam Deck or a controller? For example, Blizzard puts a lot of effort into making the controller experience just as good as the mouse and keyboard experience.

Judd: Yeah, so there is a bit of UI work that would need to happen before we’re happy with how the game is supported on Steam Deck. There’s a lot of UI in these games and so it would be a significant amount of work. However, there are things that we are intending to do in the long-term, either way. Things like UI scaling is a common request that we are actively looking at. We’re going to continue to make controller support better as time goes on. So with these initiatives that we already have in the pipeline we’ll get to the point where Steam Deck will be naturally supported through those efforts.

Zizaran: Very nice.

Mike: Just to be clear, Steam Deck is an entirely different platform for us. It’s something that we are sort of incidentally supporting but we’re not really prepared to commit to directly supporting it yet. It’s something we’re really interested in. It’s just so new, it’s an extra platform, and we have to really focus on getting our core system and core platforms out the door first.

Dan: It is optimistic there. I actually do the overview because Valve does a QA process themselves and without going into details we’re like only a couple steps from being viable on the Steam Deck…from their point of view. We’ll have a lot we want to do for our controller experience on it, but Steam Deck is certainly in our uncertain future because it’s already pretty close.

Mike: There are people that do use it already. I’ve seen people saying that they’ve got it working but it’s not consistent and it’s not just out of the box ready.

Source: YouTube Link

November 18, 2022
Q: Last Epoch is surprisingly fun on Steam Deck…

Mike: Cool, I know some people have been getting it to work and some people haven’t been able to and some people have so it’s interesting to hear that. At least you are, that’s cool.

Q: …but it could use some control/UI improvements if you ever get the time. I’d love a hybrid controls/input scheme that incorporates the best parts of PoE Steam Deck and LE Steam Deck.

Mike: Yeah, we’ve put literally zero time, effort, thought into the Steam Deck at all. What does work is purely incidental luck. [Mike laughs] We’ve completely ignored it and have no intention to support it until we’re a little bit closer to release or possibly after release. It’s not a platform we’re paying attention to. It’s something that we’d love to get more involved with and have it be an actually supported platform but we don’t have the resources allocated to that at the moment. If it’s working, cool! If it’s not, oh well we’ll work on it later type thing. We just got to get to launch and adding more platforms to our launch platforms will delay that so it’s on the back burner for now.

I’m glad you have it working to some degree. I will say that there are also a lot of incidental things that will improve it. So just general UI improvements that are coming down the pipe will help it and general controller support updates will help it a ton. That’s the biggest problem with it right now, that we don’t have full controller support and that is a launch feature. So there are incidental things that will happen to improve that experience but it is not something that we’re focusing on at the moment.

Source: YouTube Link

April 14, 2023
Q: Has any testing been done on Steam Deck for the 1.0 launch?

Mike: No. We haven’t touched Steam Deck at all. I know that there are people that have managed to get it working and it’s kind of hit or miss. I’ve seen people be like, ‘It works perfect, it’s great!’ I’ve seen other people just be like, ‘It doesn’t work at all. It’s completely broken, fix it!’ So I don’t know what the difference is there. I don’t know if there’s – I’ve never seen a Steam Deck in person so I don’t know if there’s specific things you can do to make those processes better, more reliable…I don’t know.

Steam Deck is a really interesting platform and I think it’ll be one of the ones that we will look at post launch, but we don’t have any plans to put time and effort into making it be an officially supported platform for 1.0. Although, we do have a Linux client and we do have controller support which are kind of the things you need to make it work so it’s not a big stretch to make it function pretty decently.

If we start getting a lot of people asking about it and there’s some bug that’s like a low-hanging fruit with a big upside then it’s possible we might be like, ‘Alright, let’s fix this one little thing.’ Though, the moment we say, ‘Okay, this is an officially supported platform’ – as soon as we do that every time we launch a new build we have to test it on that device and I don’t know who on the team has one yet. I know there’s a couple floating around but we don’t have like a company Steam Deck or that sort of stuff yet.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Console Port

The PC release is their current focus, and will be for some time, but it’s something the team would like to revisit in the future when the games production and live ops pipeline is well established and running smoothly.

September 14, 2022
Q: Is Last Epoch ever going to be available on console?

Judd: Definitely interested in console in the future. Again, with the things that we are advancing in the game for PC, it naturally lends itself to console fairly well. We need to make sure that the initial platforms that we’re supporting are in very good standing and then if we are to shift any development power we need to make sure that the game is on very solid footing in all regards before we would consider consoles. If we do console it’s not going to be at release, certainly, and it probably wouldn’t be for at least a while afterwards.

Dan: We’ve got a lot of good advice there from GGG, and a lot of the pain that goes into that process. It’s something we’ll look at when we’re – like Judd said, when we have a lot more availability. We don’t want to take away any focus from a successful PC release.

Judd: I guess something that I can say is that we are focusing on expanding the playerbase that we can reach with the PC version of the game. We are actively working towards localizing the game now, which is something that we haven’t stated before.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Gany · July 24, 2023, 6:46pm

Wow, awesome post, incredible contribution. Thank you for not only providing all of this information, but backing it up with sources as well.

This is a lot of work and amazing quality of information hard to acquire for a lot of people.

AndrewTilley · July 24, 2023, 7:21pm

Thank you very much. Yeah, it’s been a long time coming. The scope of this got a little out of hand but most of my posts tend to get that way.

But it’s finally in a state I’m satisfied with. Glad you enjoy it.

Houlala · July 24, 2023, 8:06pm

Totally amazing, as always. Many thanks.

Judd, Mike, when 1.0 comes out, I think there should be a nice cosy little room in the End Of Time with a statue of AndrewTilley. That would be well deserved.
(Might as well put a bust of Dammit in there while you are at it).

PvtVlad · July 24, 2023, 8:19pm

Thx you very much for this

Force · July 24, 2023, 8:44pm

Andrew, you’re awesome.

Iceberg · July 24, 2023, 11:06pm

If you can spend 28 years compiling all of this I can spend a few mins liking every post on my phone. Outstanding work!

CaiusMartius · July 25, 2023, 1:40am

Dude, you’re a legend.

Goatbuster · July 25, 2023, 4:05am

Cheers!

SirAurix · July 25, 2023, 3:15pm

Great job man. Now someone have to do it in off wiki.

P3H4 · July 25, 2023, 7:27pm

Incredible work !! I can’t imagine the time and effort that got into this. You could have a 2LP Omnis by now.

…And now, can you please reorder every entry by pertinence, please ?
(i’m joking, of course)

psychodrive · July 30, 2023, 3:10am

Phenomenal work Andrew. Thank you so much

kenm130 · August 1, 2023, 3:18pm

Thanks for putting this together. Hope to see official Steam Deck support down the road!

SAimNE · August 5, 2023, 8:48pm

Tbh the steamdeck experience is already quite good. Gotta set it to low or it crashes, but thats all. As the game is now they could probably obtain “playable” by just setting up the graphics automatically locking to low instead of medium for the deck.