It’s honestly a problem. I feel like Carlos Mencia in South Park’s Fishsticks episode when talking with some people, but I just can’t stop. And I live in the USA where, I’m sure you’ve seen, politics has become more about entertainment than actual politics and I just see people and want to shake them awake.
i agree with everything you are saying same reason i’ve not been back…
They are forever lost.
They also blew their release, which is the #1 way to get new players and you only get to release your game once.
In my view, people who are managing developing LE are too ineffective managers. Dev team had many good ideas, but they couldn’t use them to make a great game. They still made a good game, but also made it unpopular by stopping developing it. I wouldn’t say it’s dead, since thousands of people are still playing it, but it is on its way there and I don’t see how this route can realistically change, considering that same people run the company, those who clearly failed to do it efficient enough.
But it’s still being developed…
Sure, it’s just hard to notice. If we will compare game with its state few years ago — I can see the difference. I think for many people who left the game, statement that it is being developed sounds arguably, and it might be the main reason why they left.
Outside of the communication which has happened a short while ago (with the monthly updates starting off to alleviate the issues of them not properly communicating before, very good choice btw from EHG!) we haven’t seen a substantial amount of that.
Had it happened from the get-go rather then beginning after the information that the next cycle won’t happen for a substantial amount of time then we could argue about it. Like this though the majority of people which were looking forward to the new cycle and solely waiting for that have turned their eyes away from the game. It was ‘too little too late’ basically. Had they started before announcing the pushback it would’ve changed things likely to a decent degree.
You always need to keep your game in the perception of people after all. For example a ‘major’ mistake (upcoming pun intended) was to proclaim the Immortal Uprising to be a ‘Major Update’. It was a decent update but in no ways ‘Major’… because what would then be a cycle update? A ‘humongous’ one? A ‘massive’ one? It was a bad choice of wording simply but pushed people away. ‘If that’s what they deem sizeable then we won’t see the game changing substantially for years’ is a viable perception coming from that, even if it doesn’t hold up to reality. For the ‘common’ player without in-depth knowledge about games, or the people which come from other games similar to the genre and having experienced how things are called it was not a good choice for example. Should’ve simply been announced as a special event.
Same as some other Patch notes. EHG has a notion to ‘overstate’ the substance of their version numbers.
If a x.1 version releases the expectation is for a viable amount of changes to happen. In relation to EHG 1.1.1 (Hence release-version, Cycle 1, Major version Update 1) changed… unlocking Aberroth for Legacy as was told to us from the beginning. That’s not a x.1 viable result. And 10 Bugfixes on top are ‘Hotfix’ quality as well.
1.1.2 Is the ‘actual’ 1.1.1 when it comes to viable version updates size- and content-wise. It’s a bad notion to implement the above mentioned as it causes player expectation to shift away from excitement for changes to apathy. That’s not how you keep player engagement properly handled.
Yes, we also see regular hotfixes early on, which is good, as should be. Albeit they fell away after 1.1.3 basically. This usually is a sign of ‘the focus is on the development of the next Cycle fully now’ which is fine… but the ‘next Cycle’ sadly never came, being postponed.
Also Faction issues were supposed to be handled in a major way after release in 1.0, which was first promised to happen in 1.1… which was then postponed to early after 1.1… which was then postponed further down the road and instead happening when 1.2 was regularly expected to release.
You can see how that poses an issue when core functionality of newly implemented systems aren’t touched for whatever reason. The UI changes to MG for example were not a ‘miniscule’ issue but a top-tier priority as it hindered functionality to a severe degree, up to the state of making it not usable (with missing affixes in the system, not allowing searched to even happen).
The affixes for example should’ve been a hotfix or a 1.1.x version update very early on. But that never happened.
That’s the issues I’m talking about and why in the perception of peoples minds it’s understandable why the game is depicted as ‘very slow in progress’ or outright ‘dead’ given that high-tier priorities weren’t properly handled and even less properly communicated.
EHG has since then shifted the communication aspect to a good degree, we’ll see if it’s enough to steer it around with the April update or how badly they ruined their engagement… it - with guarantee - hurt them though. And those are things which are basics and should’ve been avoided.
It’s the equivalent of a carpenter dropping the piece of furniture you’ve ordered, something splintering off and he’s simply not telling you, enforcing you as the customer to be the first to take action rather then being up-front and informing you accordingly and dealing with it. That’s a non-acceptable communication state.
Customer communication is what decides the rise and the fall of a product which isn’t at top-tier quality when having substancial competition on the market.
Very likely for a substancial amount of them. And that’s worrying.
They have put some measures in to adjust their dealings with their customers. The monthly updates happening since the end of the event are a good sign of them being able to change their methods.
It’s just things which should’ve become the norm for them pre-release and not months post-release. Too late. They are too reactionary and lost their proactive methods they had right at the start, a common thing to see when a game is developed for a while and a negative indicator.
What has substancially changed since the release?
For the common player the changes are summarized:
We got a new Cycle which had a mini-mechanic that’s very simplistic (Nemesis) and a pinnacle boss with sub-bosses (substancial).
We got loot lizards.
Done.
That’s not good for the type of business model they try to provide.
We have had only one patch and a half since released, so sure we haven’t had a lot of content. I agree it’s taking too long, but saying the game isn’t developed anymore is not true. They are still people working on the game. 1.2 in April is said to be the biggest content drop we ever have (we will see if that is true).
If u dont want playing just dont play. A lot of people believe last epoch in future will be better
they should tune yes bad skills up not tuning good skills down, when tuning all the fking time good skills down, i dont even want to play the game anymore, when its nerf after nerf, atm its u must play this skills what are strong atm, u dont choose bad skills at all, tune the damn bad skills up so we can make more builds, not tuning fking big dmg skills down and cant soon fking play any builds, LE got anyway low player counts, better lissen players and u keep this small player base into game, one thing is tho, cycyle its damn long, i understand short of devs, but common, half year one cycyle
When did they say that?
Major updates were 1.0 and 1.1. And will be 1.2. I didn’t see them saying 1.1.7 was a major update anywhere.
You’ve forgotten the new shrines, but that’s beside the point.
Since we’ve only had one major update, it’s only natural that there hasn’t been too much content yet added. If we compare to PoE (which is always the go-to comparison and closest to LE), their first major content releases were Ambush and Invasion. Which only added a few mobs and bonuses. Followed by Rampage and Beyond. Which only added a few mobs and bonuses.
So the first 4 major releases of PoE added even less mechanically than LE did in 1.
And i dont want to play builds that can oneshot bosses with zero investement. Thats boring for me because i like to have a difficult, more challenging fight (at least against pinnacle bosses)
Falconer is the best example. Every falconer build scales the same way. Its the most broken and boring mastery atm.
They do, and they also listen to players with experience and good feedback about balance issues. But balance is not the main reason for the current low player count.
They will, but at the same time you need to bring down overpowered/broken builds to keep the challenge. Its called “balancing”
Balance is a pretty big issue.
The games campaign hasn’t had a single balance pass, so you end up playing the first 5 minutes of the game where it actually feels like an interactive video game and you can die and your choices have weight.
Then you ding level 5 or 6 and are turned into a god lawn mowering down enemies like a 1k divine POE1 character until very late into the end game 40+ hours later.
Act2 the difficulty drops even further, where the game is a mindless auto-battler you fall asleep playing.
It isn’t until Lagon that you need working eyes and fingers.
The difficulty progression throughout the entire campaign is extremely unpolished and early access.
The developers kept saying there would be one during the early access, but then “forgot” and now the campaign is in the dire state it’s in with no fixes in sight.
This game isn’t in maintenance mode, but it’s stuck in purgatory where it can’t actually get out of early access and never will at this rate. They have ideas, but never fully finish them.
It’s a leadership issue.
EHG have been talking to the players a massive amount since alpha, on here, discord, twitch & presumably reddit (never been there), it dropped off when they started receiving death threats after the issues at launch. So you really can’t say that EHG have only recently started communicating with the players. That’s bizarrely myopic.
When did they say that? I thought they usually referred to it as an event? Like here when they announced it.
TBF, the early PoE leagues all fearured massively indepth & complicated mechanics.
Yeah, I regularly play different games, it’s not a bad thing.
If you want to nitpick… the game is in a bad state and given my past experiences of playing games of different genres for over 3 decades I come to the conclusion that this game is declining rapidly and will most likely not recover from it. Sure I hope I’m wrong but this happend again and again and again. LE just delivered a weak first impression because it was overhyped and underdelivered. Soooo average people who look at the player numbers would call it dead without a second thought but we’ll see when and if season 2 arrives. Untill then calling it dead is as valid as calling it alive and kicking.
That’s not completely true. For example Diablo 1 had no more support for a veeeeery long time but was never abondend. It was just a finished product and that’s that. Project Genom for example is abandonware because the devs stoped working on it and left all players behind. Then it bacame a graveyard because everything shut down. If devs and publisher have abonden a game it’s abondware untill it changes and either dies or if it get picked up again.
There are no second first impressions… as sad as it is.
For me it’s a simple thing… I want LE to be good and played by many people because you need to be a real jackass if you want a game in a genre you play to be bad and ruined. Then again I have no high hopes and I don’t know how long EHG is able to survive with whatever money they have left. Sadly we didn’t got the quantity (that got reduced again and again and again) what is something I could’ve lived with but sadly we didn’t got quality either so right now it’s a lose:lose situation for EHG. I hope they come back like No Mans Sky or Cyberpunk or whatever other comeback game and deliver an amzing product. Sadly my hope dwindles.
Cyberpunk 2077 would like to disagree. It had one of the most disastrous launches of recent memory, it had the game pulled from the playstation store, lots of refunds, universally panned by critics and players alike. And yet they kept at it, fixed the game and it’s now one of the top 30 most sold games of all time, with mostly positive reviews and a successful expansion.
You can still buy D1. So yes, it’s not abandonware. If you couldn’t buy it anymore, it would be.
The literal definition (taken from wiki) is:
“Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, which can no longer be found for sale, and for which no official support is available and cannot be bought.”
Look up the message on Steam, it’s listed under ‘Major Update’ there.
That was more then a decade ago, in an environment where game development was vastly harder since they had to use a homebrewed engine (unlike the Unity base which eases game development compared to back then substantially). Also in an environment which had no already setup established methodology of what works and doesn’t work well in a rough direction.
By now we got competition though like Torchlight: infinite which is vastly newer then Last Epoch but provides also more substantial and reliable updates then EHG does. Which simply doesn’t bode well.
I can only repeat… they’ve positioned themselves in a live-service environment with established competition around, hence they need to also provide the relevant quantity and quality accordingly. Nobody cares about a situation when the only competition on the market was a single other company which also went an entirely different direction to establish their playerbase (Diablo 3). It’s just not the same environment anymore, it’s harsher, it’s more flooded, it has less space. Hence to be successful magnitudes of effort and care need to be put forward to be able to provide a proper environment to thrive.
In terms of difficulty scaling I wouldn’t even call the game ‘beta’ there, it’s a very very early status, so enormously unbalanced that it’s a joke. And since 1.0 the end-game is also suffering majorly on top with the downsides becoming more glaring then before because of the factions.
For the majority of people there’s exactly 1 place where they get their information: Steam. And there we don’t have this amount of information provided.
Even if we branch out and say it’s the official website… it’s a horrible setup for a 1.1 version. The home site has a layout like a beta version or a 1.0 version, focusing on pulling in a new audience and majorly explaining the core aspects of the game in a far too big font compared to what it should be at an established product (starting 1.1). Similar to the PoE website the news feed needs to be visible at the first look, a direction over to the core aspects with a single click topmost of the site and whatever else. The layout currently is similar to a league-reveal from PoE though, those are for a reason put a click away from the frontpage.
So both do a mediocre job (not a bad one mind you) to convey properly the state of the game, which they are supposed to do. The majority of customers don’t take a single step further, you already have established customers beyond this point which decided to stay and invest their time. And EHG is beyond the point of puling in new people, that ended with 1.0, from then on the focus should’ve been on quality and not beta-like behavior like before. They failed to convert over to their new situation simply, seemingly thinking ‘all will stay the same’ which is obviously not the case.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a ridiculously rare exception from the norm. 99,5% of games which did a job like Cyberpunk did die off, be it AAA game or indie game. It’s just for some reason gotten into the head of people since No Man’s Sky that a bad initial show nonetheless is viable to lead to a top-tier product over time.
And no, it isn’t viable, it’s the exception from the norm, it can be done but fails in the vast majority of cases. Fantastic to have that exception! Not to be expected though… and I always find it baffling to have people behave like it’s just ‘normal’ to pull something like that off.
Actually, while not common, it’s not that rare. There were plenty of games that had bad launches and came back from it, especially online ones. Besides No Man’s Sky, Fallout 76, Destiny, Battlefield 4, SW Battlefront 2, Assassin’s Creed Unity, Halo MCC, FF XIV and even D3 managed to recover from a terrible launch.
Yes, there are many that do fail in similar conditions, but that’s usually because they can’t manage to fix their issues. Or because they had invested heavily into it and couldn’t afford to keep investing.
The difference between many of those games are that the majority mentioned there was simply ‘badly executed’.
Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky on the other hand actively broke promises towards customers, lost their goodwill right away and re-earned it afterwards.
And besides those 2 I can’t name any other substantially sized game which managed to come back from that.
It’s why I’m still here after all, I’m not writing LE off, it’s just ‘in a really bad state’ after all. And given the changes we see in communication style I’m optimistic that they potentially can pull of the comeback.
Though I’ll also say - the safe worst-case scenario which should be voiced - that it’s a small chance that it’ll happen. But that’s normal for nigh every product on the market. And my realistic side is the one simply not playing for the moment but following updates, and since I enjoy discussing about topics related to game- and community-design I’m here voicing the possibility of the positive side and tempering expectations with saying it’s really unlikely for them to pull it off 
Exactly
Which is why for many yrs u could download diablo 1 from my abandonware webset. Which is how i used to get the game to play it again.
This is were i get alot of old games u cant buy anymore. Used to get games like wizardry there as well. That was untill Nintendo forced my abaondonware to take down all Nintendo games
Now GoG sells the game after blizzard gave them the keys to it. Effectively making it no longer abandonware.