Funding this game on Kickstarter I had very little hope, since many like it existed back then.
I'm very happy to note that Last Epoch is a truly interesting ARPG, and a very cool middle ground between casual and tryhard.

While not as polished in some parts as very rich studios do, a lot of passion went into Last Epoch. I really hope 1.0 launch will be a relatively new one, and that the following content will provide serious gameplay benefits.

So far, only particular cosmetics that don't effect gameplay are offered in the shop and I really hope they stick to their promise and keep it that way.

LIKE ALWAYS NO PRE-ORDER, WAIT FOR TEST SUB... REVIEWERS :)

2024-2025 ARPG :love: ( :shadedshu: Diablo IV not invited to the party)
store.steampowered.com/app/899770/Last_Epoch/

store.steampowered.com/app/2694490/Path_of_Exile_2/

store.steampowered.com/app/1154030/Titan_Quest_II/

i went through almost all existing ARPGs and Last Epoch was by far my favourite.
i bought it twice and refunded it twice because i never was able to get beyond the intro without literally non stop disconnects, lags and even progress loss.

IMO best skill system in any ARPG so far.

I was an early adopter and played this game extensively.

The game was enjoyable, and visually appealing. It got a lot right with initiall impressions and with the rogue gameplay/style, and in terms of the pleasing look and feel.

The story was even engaging at first, as it has a very similar feel and progression that mirrors Chrono Trigger, but as you progress and learn how their systems work the cracks really start to appear and by the time you reach the end of the story, it really starts to crumble. What doesn't help matters is that in many different respects the developers really shoot themselves in the foot in preventable ways from a management point of view.

I honestly didn't think this game would ever actually make it to a full release.

They have many times completely failed to even attempt at capitalizing on broad failures of competitors in the same market space. For example, when PoE had that massive Nemesis league exodus, and other failures such as Diablo Immortal, D4 and others. If you can't attract people and compete when there's a lot of movement already as a result of a competitor's major failure, you can't really expect anything, let alone something that will wow and entertain you for a significant amount of time.

Failure to deploy wouldn't be so bad but the ecosystem lack of any trade (which they said will change in the future, but that was several years ago) makes the everything RNG-trope traumatizing.

A fully randomized craft system wouldn't be bad if you could get the components to try multiple times and hammer the distribution curve to get what you need in a semi-non-deterministic way but the failure rates; conflicting skills; and lack of control, etc; you might spend 100 hours and still not get usable gear, or a drop that's labelled as common according to others. Some have gone as long as 400 hours without seeing any progression.

The monotony of running the same echoes to get components needed to unlock dungeons or other items, over and over in the hopes of a progression pathforward for the character class, is not respective of player time.
Compared to PoE, the time and resources wasted crafting mirror tier items is more cost effective and beats Lost Epoch hands down in time-spent vs reward. You don't get loot explosions or fungible items for progression, you are at the mercy of what appears to be a bad RNG seed that doesn't change unless you rolled a character with a good seed by complete chance.
The result ends up not being in a progressive, fun, or any sense of accomplishment for the time spent. Most people don't enjoy doing the same repetitive work over hundreds of hours for no suitable reward, let alone paying for that privilege.

The rational support and feedback provided to the developer team/staff often went on completely deaf ears. The developer team/staff seemed to be incapable of learning basic lessons from past game release failures, repeating the same cursed problems that they would often claim was a new innovative approach, but which had clearly been tried before and had already failed as those companies failed. They have a vision, but its a magical vision similar to a utopia that likely will never come into being because they can't address or overcome the obstacles and other preventable detractors.

The mandated ill-conceived 'profanity filter' that checks all submission before sending to chat/private message, that would regex match onto parts of unrelated words, and which included an undisclosed banned word list that did not include profanity.... This was and remains monumentally stupid. Stupid, and maddening when you try to communicate or explain basic game mechanics to a newer person where it would automatically squelch/muzzle you on a context-dependent word without telling you why or what word, instead claiming you violated the profanity policy with a timeout preventing any communication. Their staff response was you should just follow policy, my response was I'll just find another game.

Being unable to determine how much actual damage was being done was also a big issue; it made it very difficult to discover workable builds for the content. Unsure how much of this is an issue as I stopped playing at 0.9; it may still be an issue where the displayed onscreen damage often doesn't reflect the actual damage being done for indirect skills.

Memory leak issues would often cause the game to crash for longer play sessions (2-4 hours) unexpectedly, and crashes would punish those who happened to be in an echo; removing all prospective rewards.

Mistakes in choosing the wrong path for a talent tree/build, or wrong skills would often be extremely time consuming to remedy, or require rerolling a new character. Re-allocating points would often require completely unallocating every subsequent node along the path taken, manually, one node at a time; where dependencies were not clear, and you couldn't unallocate nodes that had a dependency allocated.

Overall, the game has a number of self-inflicted problems. It doesn't provide the same sense of accomplishment or progression as other games; it isn't very rewarding and requires a scaling factor that is an order of magnitude more time for the same marginal gains. It might be worthy as only a minor diversion going through the story if you have nothing else, but once you complete the story and start echoes there's really nothing left except to redo the campaign as another class.

The time commitment for many builds after that point is the equivalent of obtaining an eyepatch of plunder in EQ with a very low chance in a pool of possibilities but in fairness its all RNG. Some people end up with the blessed loot seeds; others don't, and there are few if any redemption mechanisms.

Anyone who gamed at the time knows exactly what happened with that item, average investment was 150 consecutive hours but it was deterministic once a mob popped but that mob had a 6 hour respawn from last kill, with a 85% chance at skipping, and you never knew when the last kill was. Unlike that, there is almost no determinism in Last Epoch; and that item was made worthless without notice retroactively by the EQ devs. That's what this looks like, and you often only need to hear about someone being burned once like this to never fall for it again. There's a lot about the game, and resulting interactions by game staff that I find unacceptable, delusional, or irrational.

In my opinion it would be better to spend the time,attention, and funds on something with a better rate of return on enjoyment and reward developers that sufficiently meet that criteria.
Currently, it looks like Last Epoch is just trying to copy-cat PoE without really understanding why people keep coming back.

In case it wasn't clear; I'm not a big fan of PoE either, some leagues at first blush look decent but often the only reason for that is to distract from the purpose of taking something away later.
They only make things very rewarding so they can take something that has been semi-permanent away from the player base at the conclusion of the cycle. The norm is struggle, and that gets old when its meaningless.

Phil_FrenchyLIKE ALWAYS NO PRE-ORDER, WAIT FOR TEST SUB... REVIEWERS :)

2024-2025 ARPG :love: ( :shadedshu: Diablo IV not invited to the party)
store.steampowered.com/app/899770/Last_Epoch/

store.steampowered.com/app/2694490/Path_of_Exile_2/

store.steampowered.com/app/1154030/Titan_Quest_II/

You forgot one

forums.crateentertainment.com/t/announcing-fangs-of-asterkarn/129879

GerKNGi went through almost all existing ARPGs and Last Epoch was by far my favourite.
i bought it twice and refunded it twice because i never was able to get beyond the intro without literally non stop disconnects, lags and even progress loss.

So this Last Epoch is always online?

That's some serious penalty points

than3I was an early adopter and played this game extensively.

The game was enjoyable, and visually appealing. It got a lot right with initiall impressions and with the rogue gameplay/style, and in terms of the pleasing look and feel.

The story was even engaging at first, as it has a very similar feel and progression that mirrors Chrono Trigger, but as you progress and learn how their systems work the cracks really start to appear and by the time you reach the end of the story, it really starts to crumble. What doesn't help matters is that in many different respects the developers really shoot themselves in the foot in preventable ways from a management point of view.

I honestly didn't think this game would ever actually make it to a full release.

They have many times completely failed to even attempt at capitalizing on broad failures of competitors in the same market space. For example, when PoE had that massive Nemesis league exodus, and other failures such as Diablo Immortal, D4 and others. If you can't attract people and compete when there's a lot of movement already as a result of a competitor's major failure, you can't really expect anything, let alone something that will wow and entertain you for a significant amount of time.

Failure to deploy wouldn't be so bad but the ecosystem lack of any trade (which they said will change in the future, but that was several years ago) makes the everything RNG-trope traumatizing.

A fully randomized craft system wouldn't be bad if you could get the components to try multiple times and hammer the distribution curve to get what you need in a semi-non-deterministic way but the failure rates; conflicting skills; and lack of control, etc; you might spend 100 hours and still not get usable gear, or a drop that's labelled as common according to others. Some have gone as long as 400 hours without seeing any progression.

The monotony of running the same echoes to get components needed to unlock dungeons or other items, over and over in the hopes of a progression pathforward for the character class, is not respective of player time.
Compared to PoE, the time and resources wasted crafting mirror tier items is more cost effective and beats Lost Epoch hands down in time-spent vs reward. You don't get loot explosions or fungible items for progression, you are at the mercy of what appears to be a bad RNG seed that doesn't change unless you rolled a character with a good seed by complete chance.
The result ends up not being in a progressive, fun, or any sense of accomplishment for the time spent. Most people don't enjoy doing the same repetitive work over hundreds of hours for no suitable reward, let alone paying for that privilege.

The rational support and feedback provided to the developer team/staff often went on completely deaf ears. The developer team/staff seemed to be incapable of learning basic lessons from past game release failures, repeating the same cursed problems that they would often claim was a new innovative approach, but which had clearly been tried before and had already failed as those companies failed. They have a vision, but its a magical vision similar to a utopia that likely will never come into being because they can't address or overcome the obstacles and other preventable detractors.

The mandated ill-conceived 'profanity filter' that checks all submission before sending to chat/private message, that would regex match onto parts of unrelated words, and which included an undisclosed banned word list that did not include profanity.... This was and remains monumentally stupid. Stupid, and maddening when you try to communicate or explain basic game mechanics to a newer person where it would automatically squelch/muzzle you on a context-dependent word without telling you why or what word, instead claiming you violated the profanity policy with a timeout preventing any communication. Their staff response was you should just follow policy, my response was I'll just find another game.

Being unable to determine how much actual damage was being done was also a big issue; it made it very difficult to discover workable builds for the content. Unsure how much of this is an issue as I stopped playing at 0.9; it may still be an issue where the displayed onscreen damage often doesn't reflect the actual damage being done for indirect skills.

Memory leak issues would often cause the game to crash for longer play sessions (2-4 hours) unexpectedly, and crashes would punish those who happened to be in an echo; removing all prospective rewards.

Mistakes in choosing the wrong path for a talent tree/build, or wrong skills would often be extremely time consuming to remedy, or require rerolling a new character. Re-allocating points would often require completely unallocating every subsequent node along the path taken, manually, one node at a time; where dependencies were not clear, and you couldn't unallocate nodes that had a dependency allocated.

Overall, the game has a number of self-inflicted problems. It doesn't provide the same sense of accomplishment or progression as other games; it isn't very rewarding and requires a scaling factor that is an order of magnitude more time for the same marginal gains. It might be worthy as only a minor diversion going through the story if you have nothing else, but once you complete the story and start echoes there's really nothing left except to redo the campaign as another class.

The time commitment for many builds after that point is the equivalent of obtaining an eyepatch of plunder in EQ with a very low chance in a pool of possibilities but in fairness its all RNG. Some people end up with the blessed loot seeds; others don't, and there are few if any redemption mechanisms.

Anyone who gamed at the time knows exactly what happened with that item, average investment was 150 consecutive hours but it was deterministic once a mob popped but that mob had a 6 hour respawn from last kill, with a 85% chance at skipping, and you never knew when the last kill was. Unlike that, there is almost no determinism in Last Epoch; and that item was made worthless without notice retroactively by the EQ devs. That's what this looks like, and you often only need to hear about someone being burned once like this to never fall for it again. There's a lot about the game, and resulting interactions by game staff that I find unacceptable, delusional, or irrational.

In my opinion it would be better to spend the time,attention, and funds on something with a better rate of return on enjoyment and reward developers that sufficiently meet that criteria.
Currently, it looks like Last Epoch is just trying to copy-cat PoE without really understanding why people keep coming back.

In case it wasn't clear; I'm not a big fan of PoE either, some leagues at first blush look decent but often the only reason for that is to distract from the purpose of taking something away later.
They only make things very rewarding so they can take something that has been semi-permanent away from the player base at the conclusion of the cycle. The norm is struggle, and that gets old when its meaningless.

.....aaand this confirms I'm staying far away. Thanks! I'm not a hamster trying to conquer the hamster wheel anymore. Grim Dawn shows us a great ARPG can be done without that. I won't dive into more D4-styled 'rebalancing' every few months. An offline ARPG can just shower me with enjoyable loot and makes every half hour worthwhile. Heck, even online, PoE can do something similar if you're through the initial stages of your character's progression.

ARPG's walk a fine, fine line indeed between absolute horror show and gamur heaven.

Vayra86So this Last Epoch is always online?

That's some serious penalty points

it has a offline mode that works basically flawless. i just wanted to play with a friend and the servers are incredibly bad. and your characters are strictly split between offline and online and can only play in the mode they were made for.