Dev on Twitch said he thinks it’s too easy.
It may very well be for those no lifers that play 24/7.
You want to see your population plummet? Go ahead, make it harder.
You have until PoE2 releases to make this game better and yes it does need a ton of work still.
Call it 1.0 all you want. This game is still in a beta state.
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PoE has a much harder grind to lvl 100. So will PoE 2. What are you talking about?
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That’s already happening. Of course it is said that it is completely natural. If a game is really good, technically and in terms of content, players won’t run away in droves after just 4 weeks. The game has very good approaches. But just a very good crafting system or a now very cheap storage system is not enough. I really appreciate that there is no p2w or that flashing icons after logging in make me want to click on them and then a window opens that this skin is currently on special offer.
Maybe they ran out of money or investors put pressure on them.
But the game wasn’t finished.
There are so many bugs. That and class balancing alone would take a lot of time. And then there is still the question of whether everything would run smoothly. And now they want to introduce seasons and season mechanics that will probably create even more bugs.
It’s a shame, but the game is stillborn and time will prove me right.
That’s already happening. Of course it is said that it is completely natural. If a game is really good, technically and in terms of content, players won’t run away in droves after just 4 weeks.
Happens to POE every cycle. POE gets around that with constant content updates for the next cycle.
I guess PoE isn’t good, then. Because that’s what happens every single league. Regularly, after one month, the playerbase drops to less than half.
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Without full context of what Mike said and his full response this is just conjecture.
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Right, for me it isn’t.
Possibly, such games are also consumed by a large number of players who have 10 hours a day to play.
Well, if a game that is widely regarded as the best ARPG isn’t a good game for you, then maybe you don’t like ARPGs?
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I liked Titan Quest, I liked and still like D2. I like Grim Dawn.
I don’t care what the crowd says. I’m not a sheep who follows the crowd.
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Character level is only one of many branches of progression. And one of the least important for the very top end (lvl 95-100).
It is simply nice to have, but no way mandatory and it is entirely ok that this takes a long time.
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I mean, D2 was a lot harder than LE or PoE. You had to use a bot to realistically get to level 99. In fact, it was flooded with bots and RMT (one might even say D2 was the first “top game” that caused RMT market to grow). The best crafted gear was way rarer than a 4LP ring. It always had balance issues that were never addressed and it always had bugs that were never fixed (some not even in D2R).
I’m not saying PoE or LE are better than D2. I also love D2 and it remains my favorite game ever, which I still play regularly. Just that complaining about those things in regards to LE while ignoring that they also existed in those games is a biased position.
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I played D2 when it was released in 2000 and two or three years later. So completely offline. There were no bots yet. I may be wrong but I can’t remember any bugs or even many bugs. Of course the complexity is different today.
Which raises the question for me as to whether it has to be that way. Since many people still play D2 after almost 24 years, maybe it doesn’t have to be that way to have fun.
And in my opinion EHG won’t be able to do it, not because I want it to, but because they are too small and they don’t have the manpower. I don’t believe it, even from the experience of the beta. If I’m wrong, I’d be happy.
And yet they were there. For example, a bug that was only solved with D2R was that minions that strayed too far back in the map sometimes were just unsummoned. It was the reason no one ran an iron golem before getting an enigma.
Fun is totally subjective. It’s a completely valid reason for not liking a game but you can’t quantify it or target it. Some players have fun with D2, some with D3/D4/LE/PoE. That’s why there are many different games in the same genre.
Personally, I have fun in LE despite its flaws, just like in D2. I also had fun in PoE before the optimal grind burned me out. And I didn’t have fun with D3. It improved with RoS, but ultimately not enough to keep me engaged. Which is fine, since they were clearly targetting casuals and I wasn’t their target.
In fact, they could just abandon the game as is and I’d still have fun with it every now and then for years and consider my 35€ as well spent.
I don’t know if EHG will be able to do it or not. People said the same thing about Larian when they were working in BG3 and it worked fine for them. I don’t know if LE will ever reach top ARPG.
I don’t even know if that matters, tbh. As long as they have a relevant playerbase that has fun playing it, that’s all that matters. They have their own game identity, they have some really good ideas, as can be seen by the fact that GGG and Blizzard are already adopting some of them.
They don’t always get things right but they are open and honest about things and they stick to their vision of the game (unlike D4 which is a game that doesn’t really know what it wants to be yet).
The basic point I’m trying to make is that it’s ok if you don’t like LE because you’re not having fun. Or even because you feel you’re not having enough fun when you compare your experience with other similar games.
But many players have fun with it, me included. And all a game needs for longevity is a playerbase that’s having fun. It’s a tight balance that might change when they add new things (or even when they don’t), so we’ll see what the future brings.
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I agree with you. Tastes are different and everyone should of course decide according to their taste. For me that’s not the point as it should be self-evident.
I just wanted to raise the question of whether it is necessary to complicate games with tons of affixes. Do we need “Attunement”? I’m certainly not an expert on this, but from a logic point of view, I think the fewer things that affect a game, the fewer problems (bugs) there should be.
I don’t know if a player base of 2-3k outside or at the end of a season is enough to keep a game alive, without p2w, without subscriptions, without expansions that cost money. But you’re right. The time will tell.
Bugs will always happen. You can’t even make a simple calculator without them. The biggest issue is whether bugs have an impact on the purpose of the software (in this case, having fun).
Some people like more complicated games. It adds to their fun. It’s like a puzzle to solve. It adds variety. Others don’t, which are the ones D3 tried to target. There really is no right way or wrong way to address this. Simply which players are you targetting.
LE currently has about 70k players still. It’s still a very healthy number, especially considering it was just released (unlike regular games, live service games tend to have higher playerbases over time, assuming they’re doing things right, rather than just at launch).
If we compare with PoE (using steamcharts, so the real numbers will be higher because many use their client and not steam, but the trend should be similar anyway), they currently have 9k players vs 170k at league start (again, just from steam, but the trend is noticeable).
It’s just how seasonal games work these days. You have a huge influx of players in the first month, it drops off massively after that and then steadily drops at a slower rate until the season end, where the whole thing repeats once more.
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Mike was talking about the very last couple of levels, and not leveling in general.
There’s no special power in the last couple of passive points and they don’t make that big a difference in terms of power. A level 100 character is not that much stronger than a level 98 character, just because of those last 2 passive points, and there’s nothing a level 100 character can equip that a level 98 character can’t.
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If there is no special power in these levels then why change it?
I think he wants it to be more aspirational. It was his personal opinion he was expressing and not the policy of EHG.
Here’s the link to the VOD. I remember the discussion, but can’t recall at what point it came up.
Last Epoch Q&A Dev Stream - Twitch
To give players a sense of achievement if they decide to chase it. To add another goal because players like to go up in numbers and reach caps.
As it is, level 100 in LE is still easier than in PoE, because no XP penalty, and than in D2, because no ridiculous hundreds of hours required for a single level.
Thanks for the context!
Was he talking about making it more difficult in the future? Such as when they’ve added pinnacle bosses and other challenging content at the end game where those additional levels may actually have some relevance? That I could see and that’s a valid design philosophy.