What we do in the Monolith is preparing. We prepare our characters. We get blessings, we find good gear.
But what for? Pushing corruption enables us to find even better gear, but once again, what for?
Even chase items are only a step towards good preparation.
I don’t know what the other endgame activities will be, but at least one of them needs to be an ending. We prepare our character for something, so something needs to happen. And, seeing how we prepare the characters, this “something” needs to be epic!
We need a goal to accomplish. After that, we still can farm for even better gear, but we’ll know what it is for!
So that’s it: after the current endgame system, we need a goal to accomplish.
Also needs more objectives in Mono’s other than rushing to the end. Maybe a bar that fills up and spawns a mini boss at X percent or other incentives other than the loot from the node. Maybe something that even modifies the node reward.
It’s just a matter of needing more content and other end-game systems. It’s probably going to just come down to content over time that gives us some kind of final bosses at the end like Path of Exile.
The main “goal” of a loot driven game was always to just improve and fine tune your character for me.
But we certainly need more “fixed difficulty endgame content” like the new dungeon boss.
Infinitely scalable content is fine and dandy, but things that have a decently high difficulty but are fixed can feel much more like “milestones” and thus give you a very good feeling of when you finally can beat one of them after working on your character long enough.
In PoE terms I hope that we will get more bosses like Shaper, Elder, Uberelder, Conquerors, Maven etc. (just from a boss progression standpoint, not with all the other mechanics surrounding them).
A lot of people thought Shade Of Orobyss will be something like this, but it’s more of a core mechanic, than a true endgame boss.
If that is true, I feel it lacks something.
I like your idea of
As you said, that could be milestones. There are chase items in the game, there should be chase quests. Something that makes you say “Now, I see I’m stronger”. T4 Julra is a first step towards this.
All these milestones don’t need to be super powerful. One important milestone (that should be materialized more) is when we unlock Empowered timelines. This is an accomplishment. Defeating an empowered Shade is an accomplishment also. And so on, towards the “final boss”.
We can continue improving and tuning the character for long, but we also need something that says “Goal”.
The current transition from the campaign to the endgame refers to it as preparation. However to me that feels like a temporary transition because the campaign isn’t done yet.
Yes, that can be an idea.
Arena is not for me, I’m not a competitive player of this kind. And corruption pushing is the same as empowered: finding new gear.
For me, the ultimate goal is a kind of super boss.
The goal of all video games is to entertain you. Video games are pass-times.
All video games are finite. You will “finish” this game, like it or not. Just as you have “finished” every video game you’ve ever played (and no longer play now).
The idea of infinite content to retain existing players is nice and all, but financially speaking, EHG is better off spending money on marketing to get new players who will naturally go through the game (which takes time if you explore all classes and several builds/class). I’m not saying they shouldn’t do Seasons or create new content, dungeons, etc. I’m saying there is always going to be an “end” to the game, no matter what they create.
I expect there will be more major bosses in the same weight class like Julra, each having their own mini-narration and theme where players may work towards to.
Either by completing certain amount of high level timelines, reaching certain character level or finding special items in high level zones that unlock a new boss area similar as Dungeon.
Maybe even a boss gauntlet with increasingly harder bosses as you push forward that gives you new rewards, either as items or buffs.
I’ve done some further considering, and I think monos themselves could use some additional narrative support. When you enter a new timeline, the only thing you know about it is its name. Only when you first unlock quests for a timeline do you learn some notable differences to your own timeline. But there’s no real engagement. No impact on you or the progression of your own timeline (beyond the loot, which is meta).
What are we really trying to accomplish? Is this purely an academical effort? Are there forces in these echos which may yet escape and threaten us? Are there key moments in these alternative histories which we need study, to avoid steering our own realities into the same dead ends? Why do we visit these dozen or so timelines among the millions which must be out there?
I do agree, but there is a problem with this.
In a game like Last Epoch, most players don’t care about the story. I’m always appalled when I see the quantity of players who have completed the campaign dozens of time and still don’t know what it is about.
Players don’t read. They don’t care. They want to kill monsters, so they kill monsters and that’s all. Even some content creators with thousands of hours say they don’t really know what the story is about.
For me, the most intersting thing in the timelines is this alternate reality story. But I’m a huge reader and I’m a writer, so I’m attracted by story-telling. And in games like Last Epoch, I feel lonely.
It’s almost like PoE. In PoE you do maps (the Atlas) until defeat the madness caused by “Sirus, Awakener of Worlds”, so Zana (NPC) after beat him tell you that at least your job is “done”.
“But at least you’re done now, right, Exile? You’ll leave the Atlas alone… right?”
But the player seems to go to the insanity and keep murdering for more power, like the Conquerors (4 mini-boss like the player -exiles- who you beat to access to Sirus).
Here in LE, I imagine we will have a similar story, we look through timelines (nodes/maps) to find a way to stop the invasion caused by Orobyss -the big boss- (I don’t know well the lore here, but Orobyss can play with timelines and send his army to contaminate everything?) and we will not be done until we defeat him. At the end, I assume we will have an excuse to keep doing Monoliths, maybe to keep fighting “the remanents”.
So, to be honest, I really want the lore to be more involved as you all say, but I always assume it will eventually come since this game it’s still in beta, so I think it will happen in a future.
Have a hard-end game boss to beat for most builds, and then another that is UBER hard for the people that want to spend hundred hours on one character to beat. The rest can just stop playing or make new builds.
I don’t think that’s what he was thinking of and I agree with him, there needs to be a goal. I’m just waiting to see if the Immortal Emperor or Orobyss is the final goal of the game.
We always finish playing a game, but that doesn’t mean we “finished” the game. There is a difference.
Truly endgame fight with real Orobyss