[Unofficial] Roadmap to 1.0 and Beyond

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.

AndrewTilley · August 19, 2023, 5:35pm

First, I’d just like to say thanks to everyone for all of the support. The overall response to this thread has been phenomenal.

We’ll soon be getting new information during Gamescom (August 23-27), but before we do I’ve updated the following sections of this thread. I’ve included all the updates in this post so that you don’t have to go hunting around all of the sections to find the new stuff. Same as before, please let me know if you find any errors.

Cheers, and thanks again!

Roadmap Discussions

August 4, 2023
Q: What’s currently the priority for Last Epoch? Endgame? New skills? Or something else?

Mike: I mean, it depends on – there’s lots of priorities that come up and sometimes it’ll be like… Okay if we’re going to pick like the main priority for the whole team then maybe it’s – okay the priority is getting to 1.0 and it’s like, ‘Okay what are the things that are mandatory to do before 1.0 comes out?’ is kind of what it is. So what’s the most important thing? Oh let’s say it’s like server stability and performance and all that sort of stuff. Well, the people who write dialogue for quests don’t really have much to do in that category so you end up with a ton of different priority elements. So yeah, there’s a lot of things that are called priority, but server stability and performance are really high up there. Finishing the classes – so a bunch of new skills. Beefing up endgame. A bunch of new content, that sort of stuff, things to do…mechanics, functionality. Improving old stuff that’s been in the game for a while. The Item Factions. So there’s several priorities and things that are getting worked on simultaneously.

Source: YouTube Link

Release Date

Theorizing Patch 0.9.2

There’s always new uniques each patch so this isn’t any surprise, but we have been shown a few uniques during the dev streams.

Item Factions

July 28, 2023
Q: When it comes to the trade faction, Merchant’s Guild, how hard will it be to obtain the “currency” to sell and buy items?

Mike: Well, every time you kill an enemy you’ll get some of it or like progress towards – it’s just killing enemies. So real easy. [Mike laughs] There’s no random drop luck associated with it, it’s just killing enemies. It’s the same way to get favor, which is the term for it. The same way you get favor for Circle of Fortunes is killing enemies as well. You only get favor for the faction you’re currently representing. So if you’re representing the Circle of Fortune and you kill enemies then you’ll get Circle of Fortune favor. If you’re currently representing the Merchant’s Guild and you kill enemies then you’ll get Merchant’s Guild favor. Then you use that favor to interact with the systems for those factions. So you’ll spend Circle of Fortune favor in order to interact with Circle of Fortune mechanics, like buying prophecies and things like that, and you’ll spend Merchant’s Guild favor on interacting with the Bazaar. Buying and selling items will cost some amount of favor based on what you’re buying and selling.

Source: YouTube Link

July 28, 2023
Q: I’m worried about the amount of gold you can make with trade and how you can reinvest it into Lightless Arbor to basically get a shit ton of potential more gold and so on. Was this a conversation in the team, and can we expect a Lightless Arbor nerf because of it or will it not be a problem most likely?

Mike: Lightless Arbor will likely act as a tempering mechanic for runaway gold prices on the bazaar. Basically it’s just a really good gold sink. And yes that does mean that we may adjust the rate at which it provides gear and/or the gold cost of each type of option. (We do this anyways already though)

This is possibly concerning if you are more interested in playing the CoF. However, CoF will have tools in their arsenal to get more out of all sorts of item drop systems, including Lightless Arbor.

This is a key relationship that we will monitor closely and adjust based on feedback, data and our observations.

Source: Discord Link

During the August 4, 2023 dev stream Mike shows off concept art of a new NPC. While not explicitly stated, one can assume this new NPC is likely associated with the Item Factions.

NPC - Concept Art

August 7, 2023
Q: If at all possible please remove direct person to person trade from the MG factions, and make the anonymous trade as close to 100% anonymous as possible.

Mike: Direct trading will still come with the exact same limitations and costs as using the bazaar. You just have to coordinate the trade yourself so it’s harder. The only upside to direct trading is that you’ll know who you are trading to.

The obvious concern here is that people will sell huge items for unreasonably cheap in game for real money outside right? We have many restrictions and requirements in place that make item selling en masse, at best, very impractical and easily detectable. If you are selling many things to many different people for 1g all the time, that’s going to be super suspicious.

You have to level up your MG rank in order to sell the big ticket items, this is a lengthy process that adds to the time cost of making a new account after getting caught. You also can’t hide items on mule accounts due to the 1 time traded rule. You also have to farm favor to do the selling each time. You can’t move the items around various accounts so you have to sell on the same account as farming.

So while it might be possible to slip a few RMT sales under the radar here and there, it’s not going to be viable to set up a business on it. We currently predict that we will be able to keep the RMT to a level that is invisible to almost everyone while still providing the functionality of person to person trading for those that want it.

All of this is subject to change based on what actually happens and we will be keeping a close eye on it. With the current plan, one thing I am confident in though, you won’t see mega expensive top tier items for sale on day 1 of a cycle.

Q: That all sounds very intimidating.

Mike: We’ve put a lot of complex stuff in place to fine tune the numbers and prevent exploitation but using the system will be very streamlined. This should all sit comfortably under the hood and you can pay as much attention to it as I do my car.

It’s also an optional system because you can just pick CoF instead and still do limited friend trading with resonances. Party drops being tradable in the party is also sticking around.

Source: Reddit Link

August 11, 2023
Q: Is trading coming with 1.0 or before?

Mike: It’s not coming before 1.0. Before 1.0 would mean next patch, it’s not coming next patch. It’s not done. We’re still working on implementation. The UI has been designed, but not implemented. It looks fantastic, it’s not finished, but what’s there looks fantastic. We’re working hard to get real powerful search and sort functions in there. Um, like really specific details – I know one, the loot filter intentionally leaves things out so there’s very intentionally things that you cannot specify in your loot filter and we’re not really planning on changing that too much. There’s a few things we’re changing to make it a little bit better, or a little bit more open, but for the most part – so there’s a bunch of things that your loot filter just can’t do and we’re not putting the same restrictions on the Bazaar search and sort. So you’ll be able to specify very specific – the plan, it’s not finished yet, so like the plan is that you’ll be able to specify very specific items. For example, filtering by legendary potential is something that we are planning on doing for the Bazaar but is not available in the loot filter. There’s way more specific things but that’s just the one that comes to the top of my mind.

Source: YouTube Link

Cycles

July 28, 2023
Q: Do you guys have a backlog of ideas for future seasons mapped out?

Mike: Ah, not specifically. It’s not like, ‘Hey this season’s going to be this mechanic and this season’s going to be this mechanic’ or anything like that but we do have tons of ideas that we’ve got that are on the list of things that’ll happen. So yeah, there’s a bunch of season ideas we’ve got in a big document and there’s a couple that we’re like ‘These ones will probably be earlier than the other ones’ type thing, but when it comes time to pick the next one and design the next one we’ll go back to that list and look at new ideas and things like that. So they’re not set in stone but yeah, we’ve got a ton of ideas. Ideas are the last thing we’re lacking in every category.

Source: YouTube Link

Server Performance/Stability

Towns

Future Plans

August 11, 2023
Q: Would you mind sharing any insights on updating the endgame, and adding more story and more boss fights?

Mike: Yes, we’re doing those things a lot. [Mike laughs] I was playing some late night Civ a few weeks back and I had a really good idea for a boss mechanic that I’m going to try and get in at some point. I don’t want to go into too many details on it but yeah, new endgame boss fights, especially like a pinnacle boss fight and capstone content – so in Diablo 2, pre-LoD, killing Diablo type content. Where you’re like, ‘Wow I did it, I made a character that did it.’ Having that type of content is really important to us. We want to get it right. I think that putting that type of content in at not the caliber we want would be more damaging than delaying it slightly. I’d be surprised if that like pinnacle boss actually lands by 1.0. I really hope we get a chance to get it in, but I’d be surprised.

We are expanding the chapters for the campaign. We are expanding endgame. The biggest thing that we’re looking to expand into for our endgame systems is what I’ve been calling unexpected content, and it’s something that PoE really thrives with. It’s the “you’re going along, you’re in a map and hey look at this map device just chilling here. I’ve got another map I can go into inside this map.” Or the classic D3 treasure goblin and you walk up to it and it’s just like, ‘Hey shiny, I’m going to run away but if you catch me and kill me’ – it’s like a leprechaun…it’s like a dark, twisted leprechaun. I just realized that. That type of mechanic where it’s just really, really brief and you stay in the same space but it’s like a mini-quest that happens and there’s a big reward for it or a specific reward for it. So things like that, adding that into the game. I’m very intentionally not saying the first thing we’re adding in that category but we will continue to add more things in that category as time goes on as well.

More dungeons, more types of monoliths, more completely unique endgame systems. It’ll take us a long time to get up to the volume of endgame content that PoE has because oh my goodness it’s a lot. But yeah, we’re definitely working on it. We know that’s a very key part of the ARPG gameplay loop and fun and challenge.

Source: YouTube Link

Combat Feel

August 4, 2023
Q: Will the feel of battle still be improved?

Mike: I mean, we’re always improving that sort of stuff. I personally think it’s great right now but there’s still room for fantastic. So yes, we’re always working to improve it. Sometimes it’s really little things. Such as the timing of when sounds happen and being able to change the different sounds based on how the skill is specialized. So like, this was a couple years ago when this was added but I think it really helped, where we can change the casting sound that’s going to happen based on the element that the skill’s converted to. For example, if you convert Lightning Blast to cold the sound that it makes when you cast it changes, which is pretty obvious, but it didn’t exist at one point. So yeah, we’re constantly adding things like that just to give us new tools to make it feel better. We’re also going back and looking at how things were set up and maybe it’s an animation that’s really old or VFX that’s just out of date…that sort of thing. So yeah, we go back and improve little things like that, and sometimes we make more wholesale changes.

Reimer: [In Twitch comments] We will always try to improve combat, as it’s what we’ve been doing in pretty much every previous patch, and will continue to strive for better combat.

Source: YouTube Link

Minions

August 11, 2023
Q: Just my feedback for the game: minions feel better than in D4, please don’t change it!

Mike: We actually are making a change to minions coming next patch [0.9.2]. Right now you can press “A” to target your minions at a specific location. If you have minions out and you press “A” to target a specific location and have your minions move to that location it will do that little arrow thing that you can see right now on the ground when I move myself. Instead, a little red version of that will show up to say like, ‘Hey you’re sending your minions here.’ Just so you know where you’re sending them specifically, and a little bit of feedback that your command actually registered. So it’s kind of a joke answer because we’re not really doing much to change them, yet!

We probably will add some more features into the minions to give them a little bit more control. That’s something that we think is missing from our minions – having a little bit more granular control in the sense of, I guess, being able to set personalities a little bit. Sometimes you want your wolves to really be in the front-line ahead of you pushing, pushing, pushing…and sometimes you don’t. Being able to control that just a little bit to give them a little bit of an offensive or defensive type mentality we think would be really, really good. However, we’re not quite ready for that yet.

Source: YouTube Link

Quality of Life

July 28, 2023
Q: Audio for loot drops are the same as PoE, current ones are a bit weak in volume.

Mike: Yeah, there’s no specific slider for audio drops there. I know audio cues on loot drops is a topic we’ve been talking about a fair bit lately. There’s a bit of an issue we have conveying to players when an item drops off-screen. It isn’t terrible but it’s definitely there and we’re discussing and trying to figure out how to do it better. So whether that’s like a DoT you had that finished an enemy off after you ran away or maybe a minion ran off a little bit in the distance to kill something or even just like you shot a fireball and it goes really far. [Mike laughs] Having those important items be notified to you that you do have to go back and do that instead of having to check behind you every few feet. So we’re still working on that too.

Source: YouTube Link

July 28, 2023
Mike: Oh, here’s a cool teaser I can give you…a random little extra one. Here’s an extra teaser. When you have a minion out and you press “A” – if you didn’t know this, you can press “A” to force the minion to go stand in a certain spot or if there’s an enemy nearby it’ll go attack the enemy that’s there. So you can direct them out of AoE attacks, which they don’t really need to do as much as they take so little damage from AOE attacks, or you can force them to attack a certain target if you want to push them forward in the fight, that sort of thing. So now there’s a little – those four little arrows every time I click that show me where I’m moving, there’s a coloured alternate version of those for issuing a minion command. So now you’ll see it happening and where it’s actually issuing the command to.

Source: YouTube Link

Set Items

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

Weaver’s Will Uniques

Idols

Remaining Masteries

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

Skill Updates

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

Dodge-roll Mechanic

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

Passive Tree Mastery Bonuses

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

New Base/Mastery Classes

Cutscenes & Presentation

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.

Enemies

UI Changes/Updates

Character Sheet

Quality Control

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

Masochist Mode

Controller Support

Transmog System

CaiusMartius · August 19, 2023, 6:50pm

Great googly moogly. 38% movement rate and t6 level STR/DEX/INT?

immanuel_aj · August 28, 2023, 2:00am

Thank you so much for this. I haven’t touched this game in a long time now and was wondering when 1.0 was being planned for release. There’s so many good games out there to play this year and I was concerned about which ones to schedule first. 1.0 is very close and if they don’t want to clash with PoE then probably a Jan/Feb release is likely. I’m thinking they will release the game later rather than sooner because they want to polish as much as possible.

Heavy · August 28, 2023, 6:31pm

1.0 release is confirmed this year.

The devs further confirmed this again at gamescom.

AndrewTilley · August 28, 2023, 6:36pm

Confirmed is a strong word. Everything I’ve seen EHG say thus far has been either we’re “targeting” or we’re “aiming” for 2023.

Heavy · August 28, 2023, 6:44pm

Yes that is what I thought as well, but it seemed that it got more and more solidified.

While talking to several devs they said that release will be this year and I specifically questioned that if its something like “its planned” or “maybe”, but it really seems to be solidified.

Of course plans always can change and I personally wouldn’t be mad about it.

But release this year seems to be pretty save.

AndrewTilley · August 28, 2023, 6:47pm

For those that haven’t seen it already, @Averielle shared the entire Runemaster passive tree on the LE Discord a few days back so I’m just passing it along here.

I used the individual screenshots for each passive to form one giant image of the Runemaster tree. Hopefully it’s useful and if not that Discord link has everything there.

Also, @perrythepig has discussed Runemaster skills, passives, and other stuff coming in 0.9.2:

Several news outlets interviewed Judd at Gamescom and here are those articles. If there’s any others I’d be interested to know:

WCCFTech - this one was my personal favourite
PCGamer
RockPaperShotgun

Lastly, here’s some random EHG tweets:

Correction: The tweet stating “9 new languages coming in 0.9.2” is slightly incorrect. There are 8 new languages coming (Simplified Chinese, French, German, Brazil-Portuguese, Spain-Spanish, Polish, Korean, and Russian) in addition to English for a total of 9 languages.

darkdeal · August 28, 2023, 7:50pm

If they are trying to be honest, they can never give more than that. Even if it is planned to release tomorrow, there is still not 100% certainty as there could be a random freak hardware issue that prevents it.

DirePenguin · August 29, 2023, 4:11am

That’s a completely different thing, and really has nothing to do with that he said. When I tell my boss “I’ll have it done tomorrow”, of course that’s barring me getting hit by a bus on the way into the office the next day. Making commitments to project deliverables 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of the time do not take into account extreme and unusual circumstances.

“Sorry I missed the deadline, I was shot in the chest during a robbery, and was in a coma for 10 days.”
-DAMMIT! You were late, I don’t care about the pathetic excuse you came up with!! YOURE FIRED!

If we could use every unforeseen event as an excuse to not commit to a deadline, then no one would ever…EVER…commit to anything. Why? Because there’s always a chance the power will go out, or that they could get in a car accident on the way home, or a meteor could crash into the ocean and kill 90% of the population.

darkdeal · August 29, 2023, 11:37am

Sure, when making a commitment to a boss or something else work related, but that isn’t how it works with an audience. There are going to be a large number of customers that don’t care about the reasoning. They will see it as a promise broken. There are even many that would sue if there were legal ramifications (I doubt there are in the case of a video game release).

All you really have to look at for proof is the kickstarter for LE and the vitriol so many had that some things needed to be changed.

DirePenguin · August 29, 2023, 2:18pm

Making commitments is making commitments. The audience is irrelevant. That’s why it’s important to communicate status with the audience. If a delay isn’t communicated until the last minute, and it’s not due to extraneous circumstances, it will almost always be poorly received. Just about everyone understands that, if power at a server host goes out, that will cause an unexpected delay, and something that can’t be communicated until it happens.

There’s also a massive difference between a server crashing, and scope creep, or changing priorities. Those aren’t last minute, unavoidable or unforeseen, circumstances, that can’t be communicated ahead of time. Regardless of whether or not some dissenting voices get upset with changing timeframes, you can still make commitments to deliverables, and adjust based on complexity or a changing of requirements. That’s how progress is measured. Its the communication that’s important.

AndrewTilley · September 4, 2023, 11:45pm

I’ve updated the following sections of this thread. I’ve included all the updates in this post so that you don’t have to go hunting around all of the sections to find the new stuff.

If I’ve missed anything or you find any errors please let me know.

Release Date

I completely gutted my Theorycrafting Patch 0.9.2 section to only include features that are either confirmed or likely coming in the patch. This section will be removed entirely and the roadmap updated after September 7th. That said, we recently learned that one of my previous predictions for the patch didn’t quite make the cut.

Cycles

Matchmaking

Server Performance/Stability

Remaining Masteries

Missing Skills

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

Cutscenes & Presentation

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

Chapters 10-12

Achievements

Controller Support

Character Customization

Console Port

CaiusMartius · September 5, 2023, 12:24am

So next update after 0.9.2 is 1.0. Guess that means they’re still currently trying/on target to nail by end of the year.