[Unofficial] Roadmap to 1.0 and Beyond

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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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