You need a 1.2 BEOFE Q1 2025 or LE will die

[DJSamhein]

@Kulze

‘I enjoyed it greatly!’ does tell us after all… nothing… at least nothing useful. It’s subjective, has no basis and we don’t even know if we did something right or not since we don’t know what the base-premise for deciding that is for that person.
We need a lot of people to have it become a general sentiment and then derive information from that.
As an example: ‘I enjoyed the meal greatly! I’ve never had something that great!’… if that person had been starving for example nearly every slop tastes like a Michelin-star menu. So no information can reliably derived from it.

And yet devs (and chefs) are human beings and like to be congratulated on their work. Especially amidst a sea of negative comments (many of which also aren’t feedback either), it feels good when someone enjoys your work.

And if I say that I enjoy the game as is, it’s wrong to say it says nothing useful. It tells the devs that there are people that enjoy the overall game identity they created, even when there is still room to improve.
If all they hear is “This mechanic sucks”, “this part of the game sucks”, “I don’t enjoy whatever” all the time, then they aren’t aware that there are also people that do like these things.

[Sartheris]

@DJSamhein

And yet devs (and chefs) are human beings and like to be congratulated on their work.

Exactly! If people are motivated, they’ll keep doing great work, regardless of all the “constructive criticism” out there. I’m pretty sure they already have enough planned ahead with or without additional ideas from players.

[Kulze]

@DJSamhein

And yet devs (and chefs) are human beings and like to be congratulated on their work.

Praise /= Feedback though.
We need to discern between them.

Praise is nice, feedback is not supposed to be praise though, it’s supposed to be feedback, being a praise on top is a bonus and good to do when you think about it at the moment… and deem it worthwhile to do.

@DJSamhein

If all they hear is “This mechanic sucks”, “this part of the game sucks”, “I don’t enjoy whatever” all the time, then they aren’t aware that there are also people that do like these things.

That’s also sentiment solely, becomes valuable in large amounts, not beforehand.
Replying without giving a reasoning for it is without intrinsic value at the start… can become with large amounts though since it gains overall sentiment.

@Sartheris

If people are motivated, they’ll keep doing great work, regardless of all the “constructive criticism” out there.

That’s a common misconception that praise is inherently good.
Praise can also lead to complacency and often does. ‘I did everything right, I don’t need to improve anymore!’ has been and still is the downfall of many companies and individuals.

Both negative and positive replies have to be given with the proper meaning.
If something is quite bad then providing praise is destructive, the positive sentiment behind it becomes a negative.
Obviously we’re not talking about actively toxic comments which are outright attacks. You can derive meaning from those as well but far less so, much like you can’t derive much meaning from outright praise.
The same also goes for negative feedback, nitpicking solely without giving information that something is ‘good’ and ‘liked’ can be a detriment since that actively destroys motivation ‘nothing is ever enough’ is a big problem.

So both sides have to be taken with a grain of salt and it differs from person to person how much of it they need, so you can’t even say ‘this much is good or bad’. Makes it a bit hard

[Scipo0419]

@Kulze

Praise /= Feedback though.
We need to discern between them.

Praise can be feedback if provided correctly.

“I like this game, it’s fun.” is praise.

“I like the game, the monolith system is the best iteration of the endless content I’ve experienced so far and I love being able to use the forge to customize my equipment!” is praise that’s also feedback (used as examples, not representative of my personal feelings.)

[HorusKBZ]

@Kiadaw

People can call it unfair, but modern gamers expect LE, or any arpg to be at least within stone throw distance of existing arpgs, while compariable updates, or even faster to breach the gap.

I am sorry to say that, but the expectations of modern gamers are often those of spoiled brats with entitlement-issues, devoid of a perspective that is coherent with reality.

[WeAreViledNation]

I am not sure how many modern gamers play this game. I am one of the few genZ players is the game. Everyone I asked in game chat are over 30-40. Most are around 50+.

I don’t want to point out that most of the gamers who will be buying games in next 7-20 years are gonna be my generation. If we build LE for the current player base and it takes the dev 10 years to finish the game. Who are we really making it for? Gonna be what 70-95?

One of the main reasons this genre has slowly imploded. I made a topic before about what GenZ want from games. But I won’t detail this convo: just mean to explain that most of the players who play this game are older players

[HorusKBZ]

Ah, the hubris of the youth.

I mean modern, not young. Everyone affected by the zeitgeist and going with time can be considered modern.
The current zeitgeist seems to be ‘everything is total shit if it is not 100% perfect’ and ‘Trust me, bro, I’m an expert, I’ve read the Wikipedia entry’.

[Llama8]

@Scipo0419

I’d take a story driven GD/TQ experience over seasonal/cycle content any day

I’m genuinely not sure which I’d do. On the one hand I like the “polish” that GD has, but I just can’t play it for long anymore I’ve probably overplayed it, which is where seasonal content comes in. I can play game A for a week or 2 with its new content then when I start to get bored I can move over to game B or C for a bit.

@Kulze

So, if EHG gets close to GGGs employee count I expect the same quality and cadence of updates

Broadly yes.

@Kiadaw

Took them 5 yers to finally have a full campaign. (it was painful to level 3 difficulties before, at least for me)

Was it not a “full campaign” when it was just 3 acts? The campaign was much shorter, certainly, but was it not “complete” before they then extended it? Is GD’s base campaign not complete because they extended it in Forgotten Gods?

@Kulze

And actually reasonably so.

Yes & no. It’s reasonable to expect a game to learn from other games in the genre’s “mistakes” (& successes), but it’s not reasonable to expect a small team to put out as much content as a much larger team, to a team that’s never made an arpg to hit all the balance/content point right first time.

@Kulze

It was fine during pre-release, it’s not after release, the expectations are different and vastly harder to fulfill.

Yeah, I think that’s fair in principle & mostly in practice.

@WeAreViledNation

and it takes the dev 10 years to finish the game

Is that a reasonable assumption though? Does it matter whether a live service game is “finished” or not?

@HorusKBZ

Ah, the hubris of the youth

To be fair, that’s *always& been the case, every generation’s youth always think the know best & that their parents/grandparents known nothing/are out of touch/etc. It has always been thus, so lets not judge them too harshly, we were like them too at one point.

[WeAreViledNation]

I think I can agree with you on that even as a genZ. I heard that a lot from people my age. I tend to work at things to improve them, but I got almost no patience. Apple Rots not far from the tree, even if the Apple is further from the others

[HorusKBZ]

@Llama8

Was it not a “full campaign” when it was just 3 acts? The campaign was much shorter, certainly, but was it not “complete” before they then extended it?

Debatable. For me, it didn’t feel complete.

GGG didn’t consider the campaign finished, for all I know, as Chris Wilson openly talked about that they planned to add act after act. The original statements were something like one act a year, and they expect the game to last ten years.

After a few years without new acts, they dropped the campaign bomb, wrapping the campaign up with 6 additional acts at once, getting rid of the 3 difficult modes used to extend campaign play time.

Well, plans changed, as it is often the case with project work - that’s one of the realities of life.
People underestimate how strongly a project can be affected by circumstances.
A release schedule can die alongside a single dev, for example, as you can’t just replace expertise with a new guy.

@Llama8

It has always been thus, so lets not judge them too harshly, we were like them too at one point.

I know, even though I never fielded the out-of-touch argument, IIRC. Then again, I had a circle of friends 10 to 20 years older when I was a teen (on top of having friends my age). Listening to the old farts (who were younger than I am now) gave me the valuable insight that they have already experienced all the shit I was just going through ^^

[Kulze]

@HorusKBZ

I am sorry to say that, but the expectations of modern gamers are often those of spoiled brats with entitlement-issues, devoid of a perspective that is coherent with reality.

At times, and the contrary is also the case, not expecting any basic decency at all which is otherwise in every other segment world-wide a given.

So I would say it evens out a bit in that regard

@WeAreViledNation

I made a topic before about what GenZ want from games.

Yeah, and it has no proper basis when you tried to display it.

@HorusKBZ

‘everything is total shit if it is not 100% perfect’

No, that’s not the case.

Though you also have to agree that going ‘with the times’ is a general necessity, which includes quality in video games.

We don’t have clunky controls in the majority of games anymore because… we found out how to make them not clunky feeling.
We have safety checkboxes so people don’t lock themselves into outcomes which cause them to basically ‘loose’ tens of hours of gameplay at times (not the case in LE but exists).
We have…

You get the gist I hope. With progress in design those things have become a ‘Standard’ and hence people expect this to happen. That makes getting into the sector harder… but causes overall quality to rise for core gameplay. A shitty Ubisoft game 20 years ago would’ve been a fantastic game, nowadays we say ‘It’s crap’ because it simply doesn’t hold up to the provided competition on the market anymore.

It’s just that many many publishers still act like it’s 1990 where you go and make ‘something’ and can expect it to be well-selling since there’s no competition, nothing’s been done and everybody simply wades through issues left and right which aren’t solved yet by anyone, often getting in the position of being ‘the one’ to solve it first and being praised.
Those times are over.
Nowadays you better get your research done right, create a product with all those Standards implemented and then provide it to the customer… because that’s our basis to date.

@Llama8

Does it matter whether a live service game is “finished” or not?

Yes, it does.
Otherwise we have tons of ‘Anthems’ flying about. Games which are fundamentally flawed but could theoretically with effort become good when those flaws are worked out. But… in 5 years we’ll have 20 other games already which will likely have higher quality in the same genre.

In the diablo-clone segment it’s the same, we got PoE 1, PoE 2, D3, D4, Torchlight Infinite as competition. Each of them provides a few (or many) great things and a few (or many) bad things.
For example Torchlight Infinite needs 3 major things and it surpasses LE already… which is fixing their UI, providing proper QoL and opting out of the Pay2Win crap they got. They’re fairly close in difficulty and overall sentiment to Last Epoch but instead provided a bit of a cash-grab product. Big minus.

PoE 2 might also be a massive competitor to LE given what we’ve seen. Not having the fast-paced combat of PoE 1, more visual clarity while also being more straight-forward then PoE 1 since they removed detrimental mechanics like the sockets on items.

The question for us as players and customers is… will those games become ‘better’ in providing what LE provides before LE actually manages to get to the point they want to be? And that’s an issue… because it seems the answer is ‘likely’ currently with the pace and focus of EHG.

[WeAreViledNation]

@Kulze

Yeah, and it has no proper basis when you tried to display

I don’t really need to. You can see the numbers yourself when you see how much money mobile games make and how it’s killing even companies such as Sony and Nintendo and Xbox.

Making a game for GenZ is an entirely different endeavour. Not saying LE has to cater to GenZ Skbidi Toilet levels. But attracting our generation is gonna be needed for wellbeing of the games industry

[Kulze]

Yeah, as mentioned… wrong basis to go from.

First of all the medium is not put into perspective. Secondly you don’t put the scale of those games into perspective. Thirdly you don’t put the target audience into perspective. Fourth you don’t take into perspective that mobile games are actually getting more and more regulated - far too slowly though, I’ll definitely argue that.

It’s starting from the utterly wrong premise there and your train of thought has been followed by ‘AAA’ publishers for a while, which is the core reason as to why they’re struggling.
Star Wars Battlefront is a prime example of what happens when you go into PC gaming with that mentality, you get wrecked and your product fails

[WeAreViledNation]

Keep in mind there are no direct examples as no one had the idea to make a arpg diablo like aimed at Gen Z. Closest I can provide you is a place to look. Can’t provide you a direct example as the ones I would would break ToS as they are nsfw and are aimed at Gen Z who are 18+.

Check out ItchIo if you want to. Keep in mind your sanity. Many of these games sell for millions of copies. I recommend you check out asmongolds video about the platform that sells nsfw games and it’s bigger then steam

[DJSamhein]

Trying to compare the games industry with the porn games industry is like trying to compare holywood movies with porn movies. They’re different industries, with different standards, goals and targets.

Saying that a porn games platform is bigger than steam is like saying that pornhub is bigger than youtube. Which of course it is and it’s actually no surprise to anyone.

[Kulze]

Looking on itch.io I couldn’t find any hack’n’slash games or ARPG games that were diablo-clones and anywhere near reasonable in development or even having proper sales numbers.

Likely because the genre itself is a niche on its own.

Next up… 18+ games don’t have a need for as much quality as other games. There’s a reason why the adult sector was the biggest industry world-wide before gaming became a thing… for the whole history of mankind nearly.

I literally can’t find any reasonably developed diablo-clones on itch.io. If you can guide me to them then please do so, I’m curious which ones are there.

[TyphonBaan]

@DJSamhein

I actually never went to 4chan.

Me either, I’ll I know is what I’ve heard; it’s epically unhinged, hateful and fairly kinky.

[TyphonBaan]

Here’s my opinion. The very second you (anyone) start talking about, “this new generation”, you should know you are full of shit. For whatever reason.

Why are newer player seemingly so picky? Because people with options like the options that are more polished. We’re actually the unique ones. We came up during a time when there were few/no options.

The market now is pretty rich with options. Most of you… well, us, are here because of familiarity and nostalgia. It’s a game-type we like, and it’s based upon a game we liked.

But I’m frequently full of shit as well, so,

[DiceDragon]

Anyone who is saying “A better quality update is better then a rushed one” is a fool imo.

We waited a year for 1.0, was it a hot buggy shit mess? 100%.

I dont even think that is the devs fault! I think its way to hard for them to get enough tests/feedback in dev to get a 100% working product. So more dev time =/= better quality patch.

What works way better is releasing your product that is mostly sound to the world letting the 50k players find all the weird niche bugs your testers didnt, fix em real fast, and get feedback on the experience. even if they have 5k testers which I doubt, its 1/10th the testing power of even a fraction of what they could be getting.

I really dont jive with their choice to push back 1.2, and think its a terrible choice. They never should have left beta, because the game still has problems it had in beta, and balance issues that at this point cant ever be fixed because going a year between every patch and getting some minor tweaks every year isnt enough to fix it. They need strong quick balance patching at this point.

I think they tried to copy the “industry standard” of cycles, without understanding what makes cycles tick. PoE drops stinker patches all the time, but they get a constant 3-4 patches a year. So they can patch shit up in a few months. its not a sinking ship, it takes on some water, gets patched and drained then a few new holes pop up and it keeps going. At this point LE is a sinking ship because they patch the holes extremely slowly, and while new holes are not appearing, they are not patching or draining the water so its just slowly sinking.

[Kiadaw]

@Llama8

but it’s not reasonable to expect a small team to put out as much content as a much larger team, to a team that’s never made an arpg to hit all the balance/content point right first time.

EHG has their part to blame. They have to know people expect 3 month season, which is the norm. They even set up a nice roadmap, generating more expectations. They even priced their MTX like POE (which is one of the worse offender for over the top mtx pricing) , for a day but retracted after getting backlashes.

Didn’t also they sell supporter packs for every cycle. Then yeah, people expect more beefy contents.

No one put a gun to EHG head for the game to be live service. No one force them to sell MTX. But they do, hence people expect 3 month cycle with decent updates.

If they follow a traditional model, base game , +DLCs every day or 1,5 years, then people will not have set current expectations on them.