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Last Epoch Revisited

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So recently I have been on an ARPG kick and quite honestly… while I am most known for being an MMORPG player, I was an ARPG player first. I love Diablo and have loved it since getting my hands on the pre-release test of the first game back in college. When confronted with the decision of which game to buy… because Icewind Dale and Diablo II came out on the same day… I of course bought Diablo II. Years later I was STILL playing Diablo II as my primary reprieve from playing Everquest, and keeping a server running with friends. As such I have always bought and tried out pretty much every new ARPG that comes down the pipe, and Last Epoch was no exception. I did not like this game when I first tried it… but given that I also did not like Path of Exile when I first tried it I figured it might be worth a revisit.

Sometimes when you try out a new game there is one small thing that destroys the experience. If you search google on “Last epoch move and attack” you will find a litany of people who have requested the ability to bind move and attack to the same key, which is admittedly the post-Diablo ARPG standard. For whatever reason be it technical or philosophical… the Last Epoch team seems diametrically opposed to actually doing this. So when I found out that this was not a thing that I could do in this game, and that it did not have Controller support to fall back upon… I uninstalled it and moved on. Then I had a bit of a revelation last week while playing Path of Exile and on the podcast that changed my perspective a bit.

While Click to Move is a concept I am deeply comfortable with and fall back upon… I don’t actually play games in that manner if I can help it. Some years ago my friend Grace got me hooked on another control scheme for Diablo III, where I bind “Force Move” to W and then essentially “steer” my character while moving my mouse cursor around the screen. When I got into Path of Exile recently, this is one of the first things that I did and I am annoyed at that game that I had to give up a functional skill slot in order to make this happen. It turns out that I can in fact do this same sort of mechanic in Last Epoch and after some careful keybind swaps I was able to land on a gameplay structure that more or less maps to what I am familiar with in Diablo III, where I hit Q for the potion, 7/8/9 for some of my abilities because they are comfortable to hit on my g600 mouse, and spacebar for my “charge” ability. Once the mechanical aspect of playing the game was solved… it is actually a pretty solid option.

Last night I created a fresh Sentinel because I had no clue what I was doing the last time I had attempted to play this game. Essentially you choose a base class and then that can morph over time into one of three masteries. For Sentinel, I get the choice of Paladin, Forge Guard, and Void Knight currently I am leaning heavily towards Forge Guard.

This is the class wheel from the wiki, and gives a pretty good representation of your options. The only traditional “Diablo” archetype that seems to be missing is that of the Barbarian/Brawler type character. While Sentinel looks like a Paladin/Crusader it does have a lot of the same tropes that you might find from a Barbarian including the very spin-to-win playstyle of “Whirlwind”. I noticed last night that a few of these mastery classes exist in the interface, but are not something you can choose. I am guessing since this game is still in active development that there just has not been time to complete them.

I think the thing that honestly impresses me the most so far is the fact that at level 7, I feel like I have a pretty complete package of abilities. I have a big single target attack, my default attack has been replaced by a three-hit combo, I have a ranged throw ability, I can charge at packs of mobs, and I can whirlwind down large packs of enemies. This is something that I would have expected to arrive at far later in the game, and quite honestly… reminds me a bit of how good Diablo Immortal felt at low levels. It seems like I am going to continue to get more abilities than I have room for, and as a result, will have to tailor my build looking for more direct synergies.

Please note that I have only the most shallow of understanding this game right now. However once I have arrived at a place where the controls felt playable, it is something I want to explore further. Essentially as far as I can tell character progression goes down two lines at the start. The first is a series of passive talent choices, with additional trees for the three master class choices. I greatly appreciate that it seems like I can just come in here and respec at will. That is deeply refreshing coming from Path of Exile where I am scared to death I am going to screw up and choose the wrong thing.

The next progression system seems to allow you to specialize in five different class abilities, with additional slots unlocking as you level. Right now I have spent some points specializing in my three-hit combo primary attack, and my lunging charge attack. I feel like no matter where I go skill-wise I am probably going to keep using these because they feel great. All in all the structure of this game feels something more closely related to Diablo III than the Diablo II roots that games like Path of Exile or Grimdawn have. I honestly appreciate the more hand-holding given in the talent trees and the ability to just respec everything at will. I always hated the need to roll a new character if you wanted to try something different in ARPGs and consider the freeform nature of Diablo III to be a benefit to the genre.

While I was able to get past the control scheme boss, many of my past complaints still exist. Classes are gender locked and there appears to be no manner of character customization. Mage is always going to be an old man with a book, which admittedly is better than the old man in a diaper look that Diablo III gives the male Barbarian. So depending upon your personal preferences here, you might end up having to play a character that does not suit your representation choices. Admittedly this is a problem in general with ARPGs, but one that I keep hoping someone realizes IS a problem. I cannot tell you just how refreshing the character creation system was in Diablo Immortal. Too bad that game is a dumpster fire for other reasons.

I’ve not spent much time honestly in Last Epoch but it is already something that I want to explore a bit further. The lack of multiplayer play was always a bit of a bummer as well with Last Epoch, but more of an “in development” thing than a willful omission. It seems that Multiplayer is currently in closed testing and planned to be opened up to all players “soon”. I think ultimately more than anything that is going to determine how engaged I become with this game, is whether or not it can scratch the same multiplayer fun itches that Diablo III has for many seasons. The design of the end game is extremely important for long-term replayability. In the meantime, however, I am preparing myself for the launch of the new Path of Exile league and getting in truly on the ground floor of that experience. It launches on a Friday night, which hopefully can give the same sort of vibes as a Diablo III seasonal launch.

Welcome Home Gracie

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This probably comes as a bit of a surprise given that I posted on the 24th about being torn up about the disappearance of the barn kitten that we were going to adopt. I am still kinda torn up about that to be honest, and none of the three kittens have shown up. My wife did in fact immediately return to bombarding me with kittens, but that is probably a good thing in the long run. Our local animal welfare shelter is full to the point of overflowing, and as a result, had waived all adoption fees. After work on Friday, I agreed that we should probably go out there and at least take a look because saving an animal from a Shelter is always a good thing. My adorable Josie butt came from this same Animal Welfare, so we had good luck before… what is to say we would not have good luck again.

We were not there for very long before Miss Gracie stole my heart. This is a picture of her that I snapped as we were on our way up to the front office to adopt her. She was the runt of a litter of kittens that had come into the shelter the same day we came by to look. One of the four was already adopted, but I have a serious bone to pick with whoever decided to name this group. You had Porkchop, Potato Salad, Fruit Salad, and Carrot Cake… so I am guessing either someone was planning for a picnic or they were just hungry. Miss Gracie was originally referred to as Fruit Salad… and there is no way we are actually going to keep calling her that. The funny thing is that my wife landed on the name Gracie, but in my headcanon, we named her after my good friend Grace. Both are “smol” and fiesty, so it works.

Right now she is sequestered in my wife’s office, as we usually do with a new cat for at least a few days before introducing them to the rest of the family. It was hilarious last night, that as we lay in bed… we could hear her running laps around the office and randomly pouncing on things. For being as tiny as she is… she certainly SOUNDS like a much bigger cat. The sheet on her cage at the shelter said that she was 4 months old, but when we got the official paperwork… it was more like 2 months. She is maybe the smallest cat that we have ever adopted… save for MAYBE Kenzie who did not go through a shelter system. She has very much not been weaned for very long… or was force weaned because of the loss of a mommy. Every time we love her she goes through the familiar behavior of trying to find a nipple. We went through this with Kenzie as well, and even years later she liked to go through a nursing behavior with a blanket for comfort.

Over the weekend we had a bit of a scramble for setting up the office for her. We technically adopted her on Friday, but could not pick her up until last night because she still needed to be spayed. Essentially we have plenty of toys around the house and even have them in a little toybox downstairs. However, we wanted to start Gracie out with some fresh toys of her own. Right now the clear winner is this little scratcher/playmat thing that we got for $4 at big lots. She loves pouncing on the little plastic rods with the doodads attached to them. We also got these adorable little fuzzy sloth toys that she likes throwing up and catching. Essentially they are about the size of your standard “mouse” toy, but much cuter. She has not really taken to the crinkle ball made out of like wadded-up iridescent mylar ribbon. I figure coming from the spartan confines of a shelter cage… she is maybe a little overstimulated.

Admittedly this post is largely just a vehicle for me to share a bunch of photos of Miss Gracie. Please love her as much as I already do. I hope she bonds with at least one of our two other cats, and the transition to the larger home environment goes smoothly.

Ineffective Emotional Hardware

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Sometimes in life, a sequence of events takes place… and you don’t really have the mental pathways prepared to process it. I am struggling with one of those right now and as a result, I am in a bit of a funk. The above picture is of a cat that is not ours… but the one on the left was going to be. We lost my baby Kenzie in December of last year, and it has taken me a long time to process that as well. Recently my wife has been on this kick of bombarding me with kittens and claiming that we need one. On one hand, I agree that Kittens are adorable and I love them all… and on the other hand I have been slowly trying to bring Mollie our exceptionally skittish cat out of her shell. The latter has made me extremely hesitant to do anything to upset the delicate balance, especially given that the death of Kenzie threw her into a bit of a tailspin.

I had finally come to terms with the idea of getting a cat, and one of our friends about an hour away had a litter of adorable babies. My wife drove up to visit them and the cat on the left pretty much adopted her. I would show you some much cuter pictures… but they also include my wife and she would probably kill me for publicly posting them. Essentially it was decided that we would end up with this baby and started going through the planning phase for a new kitten. We were effectively waiting until she was good and weaned, and had set a date for this last Wednesday. I had taken the afternoon off and we were going to go pick the kitten up and then take her back to our veterinarian where she would get tests and such to make sure she did not have anything communicable that could harm our existing babies.

We did not go to get a cat on Wednesday, because on that morning three of the kittens… were just missing. These babies were indoor/outdoor animals or as we generally refer to them in rural America “barn cats”. The problem with outdoor animals is sometimes things happen to them. I remember as a kid having plenty of barn cats that would occasionally disappear never to be heard from again. We don’t know what happened to them… we know that the kitten we were about to adopt is gone. At this point a few days later, we have to assume the worst. I am struggling with this a lot. I had gotten attached to the idea of us getting this kitten… that granted I had never actually met myself. I had been flooded with pictures of the said kitten… but never actually met her.

Now I find myself in the position of my wife starting up the kitten bombardment.. and talking about how we need to go to a local shelter that is at levels of overflow that might trigger euthanasia. I however find myself still mourning a cat that I never actually knew. It is like I don’t really have the emotional hardware to process this one. My wife is largely fine because she went into this with the logical realization that outdoor cats can and do disappear. I, on the other hand, am far too soft-hearted for this and while I can shrug off the loss of a human… animals are precious babies that need to be loved and protected. I know that I will probably concede to being drafted into this mission of kitten hunting this weekend, but for now, I am exceptionally melancholy about that prospect.

Respect Your Casuals

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So this is a bit of a weird tangent, and I am not even certain where it is going to end up… but here we go. I’ve been seeing sentiments for years expressed each time a game fails or a game flounders and I think in large part they point at a larger misunderstanding by a segment of the gaming community. More recently this has been happening quite a bit in the New World community, where everyone can for the most part agree now that the game is failing or is in a failed state… but no one can agree as to why. I’ve seen lots of people point at the game’s failure because one of several reasons… here are some summary takes that I have read:

The game is failing because…

  • it abandoned hardcore dark souls combat
  • it did not focus solely on open-world PVP
  • it did not focus solely on arena combat
  • there isn’t enough endgame PVE content

There are of course other takes that I could include, but I am largely focusing on these four takes because I have seen them the most. My feeling is that New World is failing because it did not create an ecosystem that was friendly to casual players and did not give them a reason to stick around. It launched with a poor server design that had a cap of 1500 players, making it deeply difficult for people to get logged in and actually play on the same server as the rest of their early adopter friends.

They created a dungeon design system that made it difficult for players to group up and do things together and a questing system that literally made it impossible to help someone out with key gating quests after you had completed it yourself. Then when the most hardcore of players had “finished the game” by rushing ahead in the first day or two… a patch was released that moved the goal posts for more casual players to where they might never be able to accomplish the same things actively breaking some of the most casual friendly content in the game.

Basically, my takeaway as to why the game failed is that it did not respect its casual population. Please note I am not a casual gamer. I spend a truly stupid amount of time playing whatever game I happen to be hyper-fixated on. I am no longer full-on Hardcore, but I live in a comfortably Mediumcore existence where I cherry-pick the activities that I care enough about to actually focus and gear for. However, one thing I have noticed over the years, is that that games that ultimately thrive… are the games that respect the casual player base the most.

What I mean by this is these are the games that make it easy for you to drop in, play with your friends if you have them, or still get content done if you are a purely solo player. As much as the more serious gamers lament the existence of LFR in World of Warcraft, it allows players to see end-game stories without having to deal with the treadmill of endgame progression. Similarly, I think the big open-world boss battles in Guild Wars 2 are a testament to just how good a game can feel when it has respect for its casual player population.

The problem here however is that the Hardcores are always a vocal minority in any game that they are playing, and they are ultimately trying to skew things towards their own demographic. I specifically called out Guild Wars 2 because that game implemented a very casual unfriendly world game event in the Dragon’s End zone, that also gates access to one of the key features of the End of Dragons expansion. This has started discussions within that community, specifically among the content creators about how exactly they can make players hardcore like themselves, and take all of the endgame progression seriously. The thing is… this is not a battle that they can win and if the game clamps down to focus more on serious content… the player numbers that they rely on will dwindle.

I feel like we have been watching this play out without realizing it in World of Warcraft. That game starting with Burning Crusade has become more and more a game that slowly pushes you onto one of several endgame onramps. You currently have three competitive communities of Raiding, PVP, and Mythic progression. I think there is a large group of players who come in at an expansion launch, play through the story, level a few alts, and are not seen again until the launch of the next expansion. What is left outside of the three competitive communities, is largely unrewarding and repetitive world content. Guild Wars 2 has shined in this department in that there are multiple paths to the best stuff in the game, one of which is a very serious crafting process that requires no endgame participation in order to accomplish it, just copious hours of gathering or gold.

Honestly, Final Fantasy XIV has the same problem of players bouncing when they complete the story content. I am very much one of these people, in spite also having been someone effectively playing the game many times in the past when it was considered to be in a content lull. The difference with FFXIV though is that they have a large number of systems not tied to the core game that folks seem to enjoy engaging with. You have the minigame-laden gold saucer, housing extreme if you can luck into winning a plot, the deep dungeon systems, and even the “limited job” of Blue Mage which effectively is a spell collection minigame. Even though there are still players that come and go with the content tides, there is way more content to keep folks engaged that is not directly tied to the core pillars of dungeons, raids, and ultimate.

The most thriving game is ultimately the one that respects its casual players the most and makes them feel like a part of the larger community… without asking them to conform to some specific ideas. I think the thing that the Hardcore player base needs to understand, is that they are very much in the minority and that not everyone views the games that they play as a competition. Please for the love of god let the casual players just enjoy the game, and stop trying to change them. This “change” takes place in two ways, indirectly by appealing constantly to the devs to make mechanics more punishing and more tailored to your specific interests. The other key way that change is invoked in a community is by creating an atmosphere that is hostile or toxic to anyone who does not perform in a specific manner under specific conditions.

I remember reading a specific article back in the day as to the small portion of the player base that ever experienced Naxxramas in World of Warcraft. While I could not find the specific article as I was writing this, I did find a YouTuber that tried to do some math on the percentage of players that saw a full clear of Naxxramas before Burning Crusade. This YouTuber clocks it at 0.07% of the total player population had a verified clear of Naxxramas before the Burning Crusade pre-patch. While raiding is significantly more popular today than it was at the time… you are still talking about a very small segment of the total player base that plays the game seriously enough to clear end-game content. I am not saying that end game content does not have a place, but the players who are actively engaged in it… need to understand the perspective that even today they represent a small minority of the total player base.

The success of a game over the long term… is in large part about the retention of your casual players. So when I read comments that a game is failing because it was not “hardcore enough” in one area or another I struggle to take them seriously. I’ve yet to see a game survive solely on their most hardcore players. If I could change anything about the larger community discourse, it would be to show a little respect for the players who are just playing the game to have fun. Maybe stop shaming them for not turning in the DPS you are expecting, or not having the right gear. Maybe just let them play the damned game and do whatever it is that is bringing them joy. The more welcoming the game is to casuals… the more casuals will ultimately decide on their own that they want to get serious about the game. Broadening the player base will also by side effect broaden the pool of players that eventually trickle up into the more serious content.

So again when I hear about some game failing, my takeaway is generally going to be that they did not support the more casual gamers enough. A game.. especially one with social aspects to it… needs to be super easy to engage with. Possibly even more important however is that games need to allow you to engage with your friends instantly. Too many games are situations where you need to get to some arbitrary objective where the “real game” begins before you can actually play with those who were early adopters. As someone who is often one of those early adopters, please give me ways to take my friends along in the journey rather than having to come up with ways to gently pressure them into focusing on leveling to the point where I can actually start helping them. I want my friends to love the game as much as I do… so please make it easy to love.

Anyways I have rambled enough for one post, and I am not sure I have a succinct point to wrap up. Basically, respect the casual gamers out there, and stop trying to change them. Let them engage with games in whatever method they choose, and stop shaming them along the way.