Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the 1.0 launch for Last Epoch and it was a bit of a wild ride. The servers came online at 11 am CST, and the 7.32 GB Steam patch showed up a bit later. Most folks had to exit out of Steam entirely to get it to show up correctly. After loading in I got a weird blank character creator screen and had to crash out to the desktop, but after coming back things seemed normal. That was until we tried to exit the first town. Last Epoch experienced its very own Raubahn Savage moment as folks were stuck trying to load into The Fortress Gardens. Essentially everyone was getting the [LE-61] Failed to Matchmake issue as the EHG servers were struggling under the load to spin up enough instances for the influx of players.
I eventually managed to get into an instance and moved forward with gameplay… that is until I reached the point in the story quest where it asked me to go back into town. Essentially I was stuck in this quest instance loop where I could not leave it, but because of the way the sequence of zones landed… could keep bouncing between two maps and resetting the mobs. So I decided to record some gameplay for future generations of that time when I was able to farm “SouthPark boars” style and get to level 11 by just resetting the same few screens worth of mobs over and over. Eventually, I attempted to invite my friend to the nonsense, and when they zoned in… it broke the quest instance causing us both to be locked out of the content.
As much as I do not love that Discord has become the replacement for forums… I have to give the EHG team and specifically Judd aka MoxJet for keeping the lines of communication wide open. In the news channel there was a series of scrolling updates starting out with individual messages and then eventually landing on just updating the same message over and over with news updates. I attempted to copy/paste the majority of the thread into an image. By around 4pm CST things hard largely stabilized and as a result, I was able to play all night with minimal interruptions. Sure there were the occasional flareups of LE-61 but after a few attempts to zone they went away. What I was most impressed by however was the general lack of lag. All of the issues that were happening were due to congestion and trying to spin up instances, and not server connectivity.
This screenshot was taken from SteamCharts this morning around 7 am showing that Last Epoch is having near-peak concurrent numbers. Yesterday they hit just over 148k players when the previous peak was around 40k. That is a lot of new players and while I think they made an attempt to scale quickly… that is still a lot for any company to handle, let alone an indie dev. I was really happy to see that Judd sent folks home early in the evening to get some rest because I am sure it was one hell of a day for their ops folks. For the most part ARPG players took it in stride, but there were a handful of toxic folks as you would expect. For years during ARPG launches players have been wailing on the point that games should have an “offline mode” so that even if the servers are down the game could still be enjoyed. Last Epoch absolutely has a fully playable offline mode… but that didn’t really stop the complaints telling me that folks are just going to be angry when they can’t do whatever they want to do whenever they want to do it.
Once the servers stabilized though… it was on like Donkey Kong. I managed to get to level 28 and the beginning of Chapter 4 in the main story quest before calling it a night. I had a heck of a lot of fun and other than minor hiccups here and there was able to play without issue from about 5 pm CST onwards. I have to say the first thing that hit me with this 1.0 release is just how much better everything looks. This was especially noticeable during the world of ruin sections fighting void mobs in void-infested areas. These were originally some of the first areas in the game and they got a massive glow-up both in mob appearance and all of the set dressing of the world. Everything looks and feels so damned good and I am a huge fan of their new custom font that they integrated into the game showcased in the name bar of the elite mob in the above screenshot.
It also feels like they made some significant changes to the base character models. The sentinel for example no longer feels quite so “thicc” as he once was and the new armor set that you start the game in looks gorgeous. As I have pushed through the levels and swapped gearsets they all continue to look better than they did before. The thing that I was enjoying the most though were all of the “Deckard Cain” moments where they added a bunch of books into the game with voice-over dialog. As a whole the story feels so much more cohesive and comprehensible. Like before I knew there was some “timey wimey bullshit” happening but everything is coming together into a proper lore.
I’ve really enjoyed the chapter-end cutscenes that bring home the key events that are taking place. The artwork is gorgeous, and while it largely is a slide show with voice-over dialog it still feels awesome. I’m very proud of how far Last Epoch has come since the first time I screwed around with it. I first started playing the game periodically in 2018 and at that point, I was not too hip to what it was doing. Now however I consider it one of my “main” games along with Path of Exile, and Diablo III. Even over the last few years, it has improved massively and I look forward to seeing what all gets added now that they are over this massive 1.0 hump. I can only imagine how many resources went into getting the game from 0.9.2 to this point because it is immediately noticeable how much better everything looks and feels.
I’ve found zero of the uniques that I was hoping to find, and have not seen any runes of ascension to even try gambling for one. I think I will probably go after boots first as the movement speed boost from those is massive. The above screenshot is the assortment of five unique that I have found. The only one that I am actually using right now is the weavers will ring, and only then because it is giving me a massive chunk of elemental resistance. I screwed up and chose the wrong NPC and wound up with the crit neck instead of the elemental resistance gloves. Mostly I just forgot which one gave which reward. All in all though I have not seemed to really need the uniques, because I am clearing content and surviving very well as a spin to win Void Knight.
The other cool thing that was added to the game is a refer-a-friend program. Instead of needing to click a link and do some nonsense before you buy the game, you just go into the social menu (H key), click the referrals tab, and there you can find your code to share with folks. You can type the name of a player account that referred you, and they will get a bee pet. You can collect up to three referrals and each time you get a different more nonsensical pet… with the highest form being this swarm of 12 bees. If you don’t have anyone to refer might I suggest my friends Alzbeta or Dominia. Like admittedly this is an awful pyramid scheme since there are going to be a lot of folks who never get a bee pet. You can only enter one name for referral and I used mine already. I just wish it told me who all added me as their referrer so I could thank them directly.
We are not entirely out of the woods. This morning when I popped in to collect a few screenshots, I hit this weird bug where I was in the End of Time zone and able to move around, interact with NPCs, and my Stash tab… but had a purplish grey dimming overlay and the floating prompt “connecting”. I got past this by walking over to the monolith zone boundary and leaving the End of Time. It only happened that one time, but suffice to say there are still going to be bugs that need squashed. For those interested you can get the latest news about Last Epoch stability from the official discord. The team generally does a great job of keeping everyone informed with what is going on, even when there is not a major crisis. I am very curious to see as we get into the weekend if those concurrent numbers on Steam Charts go up significantly. I’m hoping to get through the campaign tonight and start chipping away at normal monoliths.
Are you playing? Are you enjoying yourself? What sorts of issues did you run into? Drop me a line below.