Last Epoch

Nearing Ninety

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Good Morning Folks! This weekend was a weekend where I pretty much played nothing but Last Epoch. Given how much I focus in on a single game and then just beat the crap out of it… this should shock no one. What might shock some players however is that I was able to play Last Epoch without a ton of issues in spite of all of the server issues. Unfortunately, this is a side effect of me being in the “endgame” and essentially once you are in Monoliths the game is perfectly fine. The problem that seems to plague players is zoning in and out of shared social hub towns, and the beginning of the game sees you bouncing back and forth from quest zones to the town hub three or four times in a row. This means that without a lot of patience, a lot of players are just hitting a brick wall.

Last Epoch has had over 1000% growth in player numbers since the beginning of this launch. Ultimately the day one numbers blew out of the water any preplanning that had been done for the game, and the Game Director said that his pre-launch comments have aged like milk. Last Epoch has bypassed the highest peak concurrency numbers for Path of Exile on Steam which took place during the Crucible league. I am not sure how this compares to lifetime numbers for Path of Exile as there is no real way to quantify players who use the standalone client. I know they have said most of their player growth was on Steam and that the console player base only represents about 10% of the total. So Last Epoch probably does not have more concurrent users than the entirety of Path of Exile, but it is still impressive to see it pass the Steam numbers.

Another impressive stat is that currently, Last Epoch is number three on the global top sellers list on Steam. Essentially you can count this as the second highest-selling game because number two is Counter Strike 2 a free game, and also given that CS has massive ban waves… it is likely a fair number of those are new account sign-ups involved in the RMT trade. Coincidentally Helldivers 2… the number one game is also having massive issues keeping up with the player growth and keeping their servers online. Both games are in similar situations, from Indie studios that have never had this level of growth. In the case of Last Epoch, its previous peak was around 40k players, and even back then it struggled… and I assume that they planned for maybe seeing 100k players… not over 250k. I am not sure if we have seek the true peak yet, but things are at least getting better. Each day has been a bit more easy to get into game and into monoliths, and last night things were comfortable enough that I actually rolled my first alt.

On Friday I finished up the campaign and started in on Monoliths and by about mid-day on Saturday I had reached Empowered Monoliths. From that point forward I have been working on farming some specific gear pieces. Originally I needed a chestpiece from the boss at the end of the Stolen Lance timeline, but I’ve kept doing it because I have my corruption up there. One of the drops that I need from Orobyss only shows up once you have at least 120 Corruption Level. In theory I should shift over to do another timeline that actually drops gear slots that I care about, but I have not wanted to put in the work to get the corruption level to the sweet spot again. I had allowed my corruption to get up to around 150… which is way too high for the current state of my build and had to lower it a bit.

As far as “gear for my build” goes I have picked up four pieces. Darkstride boots I got from my friend Ace and it allowed us to test out the trade resonance system. Shortly after that, I picked up a Siphon of Anguish which is a common drop from any corruption-level version of Orobyss, and have since upgraded that to an LP2 version. I’m just hunting for a good ring to try and smash onto it before converting it into a legendary. Apathy’s Maw dropped pretty quickly once I got into Empowered Monoliths but I am obviously hunting for a version of it with legendary potential so I can hopefully add some crit to it. The last item that I picked up is the Wings of Argentus which drops from God Hunter Argentus in the empowered version of The Stolen Lance timeline. I’ve done the fight six times I believe and it is one of the most technical fights I have experienced in the game so far, but unfortunately, I’ve not seen any more chestpieces let alone any with legendary potential. The last chase unique would be Shattered Chains which can drop from Orobyss in any timeline that is at a minimum of 120 Corruption.

As far as the rest of my gear… I’ve mostly been looking for survival stats… resists, health, armor and then anything that can increase either void damage or void melee damage. My worst pair of gear is my gloves, but I have yet to find anything that I can reasonably slot in without giving up my health. I am already teetering on the edge of 2000 hitpoints and I don’t want to drop much lower. The second “worst” item that I am using is my relic… which has two stats on it that are completely useless… but also gives me the needed 43% to All Resistances while Channeling which allows me to pretty much hit the resistance cap on everything. My second ring is something that I picked up while leveling and just have not found anything worth replacing it but I did pick up a LP1 Liath’s Signet if I can find anything to smash into it to gain a bit of health. That would allow me to back off on some of the resistances that I have in my idols since it gives me 75% to all elemental resistances while channeling, and due to Warpath, I am always channeling.

Since Last Epoch lacks any sort of API system that allows for a way to view your build and gear offline… I figured I would take a screenshot and then highlight the tooltip for my main damage-dealing ability. I feel pretty squishy now that I am raising my corruption levels. When I was up around 150, it felt like I was teetering on the brink of oblivion pretty much all of the time. Now that I have dialed things back to around 120, it seems more reasonable. I think once I get better gear though I should be able to push up to 200 without much issue. The big problem that I have is when I have a bunch of rares stacked on top of each other, and it becomes very hard to see the visualizations for all of their big attacks. If any two attacks are stacked on top of each other… I am dead and my leech just cannot keep up with it. At 150… it was enough for a Rogue Mage to one-shot me at times if their mechanics landed just right.

All of this… is why yesterday I decided that I needed to “alt” a bit. I did find out something really cool. Once you have chosen a faction on your first character, there is an NPC for each faction in the very first town so you can choose your faction for your alts easily. I had wondered how all of the gear I have been collecting that is tied to Circle of Fortune would work out, because most of it is great for alts. Once I picked my faction I could equip all of it just fine and was up and running quickly. For the moment I am going for a bleed wolves build on my Primalist, but might shift that up later as I get different gear. I pretty much had all of the uniques needed for bleed wolves sitting in my bank, so that was a no-brainer.

I am still having a freaking blast and the prophecy system is so damned good. For example, this is a screenshot of me killing a mob that triggered two different prophecies… one to drop 5 pairs of unique boots and another to drop a unique bow. I love that you can stack them up like this and then when they trigger get a massive loot fiesta. All told I am very happy with the current state of Last Epoch and once the servers calm down and they manage to work out the kinks around “matchmaking” aka zoning in or out of social hub towns… I think the game is going to be in a phenomenal state. I played with my friend Ace quite a bit this weekend and it was so much fun. Very chill hanging out with friends and gameplay time, and I am there for it. For reference, it took roughly an hour to get a resonance, and I am hoping in the coming days/weeks to get some game time in with all of my circle of friends playing this game so I can build up resonances with them as well.

Are you playing Last Epoch? Have you been able to fight the servers and get some leveling in? What are your thoughts? Drop me a line below.

AggroChat #468 – Accessible Design Is Important

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We are back after taking a break last week due to the limited number of folks available.  This week we start off with a topic that has bounced around a bit on our docket.  Namely, we marvel at just how balanced City of Heroes/City of Villians is and what a pinnacle of system design it really is.  Bel spent a bit of time playing Nightingale now that is available in early access, and talks about the mess of a game that it is.  Finally, we dive into our primary topic this week and talk about the Last Epoch 1.0 launch and how phenomenal the game feels right now despite all of the server-side woes.

Topics Discussed

  • City of Heroes/City of Villains
    • How is the design so balanced?
  • Nightingale
    • Not a Bad Game, but Not a Great One Either
  • Last Epoch
    • The 1.0 Launch Woes
    • The Massive Graphical Overhaul
    • Why we love the game
    • Accessible Design Matters

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Circle of Fortune

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Good Morning Friends! I am nearing the end of the campaign. Last night before I finished up for the evening I got to the beginning of Chapter 9 and I believe level 55. This morning before sitting down to write I made it into Majelka in the Divine Era and apparently, you don’t have to finish the campaign to join a faction. Once you zone into town one of the quest givers will offer you access to either the Bazaar or the Observatory aka the headquarters for each faction. I joined the Circle of Fortune because in truth my preferred method of play is “Guild SSF” where you are mostly SSF but have a group of friends that you trade among. Trading feels like a necessary part of playing Path of Exile, and I am hoping that is not really the case in Last Epoch.

So far faction gains seem pretty quick. I did a single quest after joining the faction and am already sitting at rank 2. Upon joining the faction you immediately get a 35% additional chance at loot drops which seems pretty solid, and in theory, should make up for the general nerfs in loot drops that took place between 0.9.2 and 1.0. I am really happy that I managed to join so easily because as I started grinding out monoliths I really wanted it to count towards faction progress. I did have around 400 Favor but I spent some of it on my very first prophecy.

Once you enter the observatory, there are four telescopes that you can use to purchase prophecies. Each gives you access to a type of loot… Armor, Jewelry, Weapons, or Idols. Each prophecy has a favor cost associated with it, and has some specific parameters that will trigger the drop. The one I purchased was for a pair of rare crusader gloves, that will drop whenever I kill a boss. Since I have not finished the campaign I am hoping that this will trigger when I fight the final boss of the game if not sooner on an individual zone mini-boss. The one I have highlighted is for clearing Soulfire Bastion and will reward an exalted ring.

The prophecy seems to narrow down the type of loot that can drop, and then you can purchase lenses from another vendor that socket into the telescope further limiting the specificity of the drop. For example, the one I have highlighted gives you a 20% chance of a prophecy rewarding a one-handed axe. So in theory, if you have a prophecy that rewards a unique weapon, you might be able to skew the results to potentially drop one from the pool of available axes or hammers etc. I’ve not seen evidence yet of a prophecy specifically indicating that a named unique item will drop, but it at least might allow you to put your thumb on the scale to skew it in that direction. When combined with the existing methods of targeting specific slots via the monoliths… it might be enough to allow one to target farm specific gear.

When you start a character, you have a tag on your character sheet indicating that you are “Deathless” and I officially lost mine last night. I was playing from the couch with a laptop and at some point during Chapter 8, Josie decided to crawl out onto my chest and block my ability to see the screen. She is my baby girl and I did not want to disturb her because if she wanted attention… she was going to get attention. However, before she left I apparently managed to get killed by something that was near where I was idling. Kind of a bummer but I had to die at some point, and at least I can’t be blamed for this one. My cats have been the cause of many deaths, and I can’t get too worked up about it.

I continue to be overwhelmed by just how many facelifts the game got. For example, this abattoir in the Imperial undead area used to just be this hallway with grinders on either side. Now there is this whole raised catwalk and such with mood lighting, and it looks so much better. The sewers similarly in the same region got a massive rework and I will be playing along and just be struck with how good the game looks now. Maybe this doesn’t mean anything to someone who has not been playing this game for a few years but so much work went into the 1.0 release and I can see it clearly.

There are still plenty of problems though with servers and connections. Yesterday the game hit a new peak for concurrent players, and I imagine over the weekend this number is going to raise considerably higher. All in all though I knew what I was getting in for when they announced that they had passed a million copies sold. I am still able to play, the zone times just take for freaking ever. I am hoping they manage to scale things up and iron out the bugs and get everything nice and stable within a week. Right now the core problem seems to be surrounding the multiplayer nature of towns… because the only real issues that I have are either zoning into a town or zoning out of a town. When I am bouncing between single player quest instances, everything seems pretty solid.

The team at EHG is still doing a phenomenal job of communicating with the players and really, that is all I can ask of them. This is their first major launch and most of them did not come from the games industry at all. I think in the grand scheme of things they are doing pretty good for their first time dealing with the massive onslaught of players trying to play their game at the same time.

Rough but Stabilizing

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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.