We’re working on making skills in Last Epoch look better!
There are many aspects to making skills look impactful, exciting, and “real”. One of these is the use of lighting to cause skills to be reflected on nearby surfaces. This is something that we have historically shied away from, primarily due to performance concerns.
Our onging optimisation work now allows us to begin the process of updating the visual effects used by our skills to contain a number of lights. Both skills available to players and skills used by enemies will be updated in this way where it makes sense for them to use lighting.
We’ve prepared a small number of examples of these updates below;
Either something is wrong with the animation timings on Fireball, or the recording system lagged taking both of those movies: While I am definitely in favor of making things look and feel better (because I think as amazing as Last Epoch is, it’s going to have a hard time selling itself in a world full of sad POE junkies), this might be a bit premature.
These all look really nice. but will extra particles and bloom effects with these updated graphics will eventually have optional settings to cut down the high graphical lights and blooms?
Nice. This is one feature I really missed so far. Especially in the darker areas the lack of skills as a lighting source is very obvious. With this great feature the immersion gets a good improvement. Very excited about all the new stuff you are teasing.
Looking pretty good. I just have a couple of wishes as a player who’s clocked thousands of hours in other Diablo clones:
Please don’t repeat the-game-that-shall-not-be-named’s mistake in putting pretty above performance. It’s great to have “next-gen” visuals but the goal first and foremost should always be to make game performant in every reasonable scenario for average hardware. “Extra” effects that are not critical to the gameplay like contact shadows, dynamic particle lighting etc should always be optional because I think every ARPG player would rather turn some non-critical things off rather than run their game at 30 fps.
Please have a clear “visual language” for different elements. (Pardon me) again I hope you guys don’t repeat the-game-that-shall-not-be-named’s mistake in having various elements in different shades of the same color. I think in this regard Diablo 3 is a very good benchmark to look at. Every element in the game is easily recognizable in split second - white for ice (with foggy, crystal-ish animation), blue for lightning (with erratic, random behaviour animation), purple for arcane, red for fire, yellow-brown for physical etc. I don’t think I have anything to worry about in this aspect for LE since it seems like you guys are already putting visual clarity as a top priority but I thought I’d mention it as a player.
I hope their is a bug with the Preview of Fireball cuz it seems like its lagging/losing frames
? Maybe taking another look at it is not a bad idea, the other 2 skills look Amazing!
Nice community tester privilege flex.
Edit: Also wanted to say, the news has been pumping for 8.2 the last couple weeks and we’re still months away. Looking like the next patch is going to be large and in charge.
The extra shadows, light and bloom seems like it might just compound some of the performance issues that people are seeing now.
I have a 2080 Super and an i7-8700K and I have to play on very low settings or I get too much fps lag. These new improvements may just make it worse for me.
Looks great, the game is looking better and better every patch.
Please don’t forget some of the skills that have ‘too much’ visual clutter. For example, recently I was heavily considering creating a meteor build- but one of my instant first concerns was that I may not be able to see enemies/ projectiles in arena and if that essentially becomes a negative for me if using said skill effectively ‘blinds’ me in some situations, especially since I enjoy that skill so much and really want to build around it but maybe I can’t. Similar example with judgement proc’ing 4 smites- which are all converted to lightning- I’m considering whether its going to be a factor in combat that I simply will not be able to see what enemies are doing or what projectiles are coming towards me as a drawback of some builds actual viability, which simply steers me away from those builds.
I remember one time playing a volatile dead build in poe, the visual clutter of having a hundred bright suns on my screen was so intrusive that I felt compelled to buy MTX to make them black so as for the game to become playable again- this was an experience I strongly disliked.
