Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Good Morning Friends! Lairs Day has come and gone, but for those of us recording the show… it was still happening and as a result, we talk a bit about that. From there we talk about the repeated death of E3 and why maybe they should just call it quits going forward. Thalen talks about the apparent fact that Crunchyroll is known for killing games. Bel and Kodra talk a bit about the Zelda Direct and how apparently Tears of the Kingdom is going to be even more sandboxy. Super Adventure Festival is going on in Guild Wars 2 and we talk about the quirky new Fashion Wars event happening in Lion’s Arch as well as the test release of World 3 of the Super Adventure Box. This past week the Crucible League announcement stream took place and the patch notes were released… frustrating a good number of players. From there Tam talks about Terra Nill an ecological world-building sim. Finally, we wrap up the show with some talk about the books we have been reading. Thalen talks about the Broken Earth series and Bel talks about Legends and Lattes and the Bloodsworn series.
Good Morning Friends! I freaking love Last Epoch. Back in 2018, I have to admit I did not see where this game would go but it has honestly become that happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile for me. As much as I love it though, there are still some features that I wish it had. This morning I am going to spitball a wishlist of features that I would love to see that I feel would turn this diamond in the rough into the perfect game. I feel like this is fair game since the group at Eleventh Hour Games seems to be constantly evolving the game to make it better. The multiplayer patch really brought Last Epoch into the pantheon of great ARPGs for me. That however is not to say that there cannot be improvements.
Guilds/Clans
With the drop of 0.90 we got the ability to group up with other people, which is really key for my long-term enjoyment of an ARPG. When this was implemented there were also some very basic social features, like the ability to add players to your friend list. This is sort of the bare minimum of required functionality, but I would love to see this expanded a bit more. I am very much a guild-minded person, and even in the largely throw-away Open Beta weekend, I created a branch of Greysky Armada in Diablo IV. Guilds are many things, but at their most simple level, they are an easier way of meeting up with your friends rather than having to trade dozens of individual account ids. Even if we got nothing more than the ability to join a guild and the ability to have a guild chat channel, I would be happy enough.
I mean ultimately that is the only functionality that we have within Diablo III, but it is important enough to me that I consider it on the “should haves” if not on the “must haves” list when approaching a long-term social ARPG. I mean I did not play Path of Exile very long without going through the process of creating a guild.
Guild Bank/Trading/Locking
Surrounding the announcement of the multiplayer patch there was a lot of discussion surrounding trade. Right now it is extremely simple and follows something akin to the rules of Diablo III. If you are with a player when an item drops, you can gift the item to another player. However, I believe with the 1.0 patch, they will be working in a brilliant compromise to the debate of no public trade or a full-on POE-style trading economy with APIs supporting it. Essentially every player will have the choice of either joining the Merchants’ Guild and eventually receiving access to full trading including a public auction house system or joining the Circle of Fortune and receiving improved drop rates but losing the ability to publicly trade items. Circle of Fortune players will be able to build up a currency with another player and then use that to gift items to them, pending they are also a member of the Circle of Fortune. Merchants’ Guild players will never have access to items dropped by folks on the Fortune side.
I would love to see this tweaked a bit to add a new classification to the item locking. I would love to have something similar to the guild bank from Path of Exile. As we work our way through a new league, we are often dropping items that look decent for folks coming up behind us. I would love for some way to have “guild locking” for lack of a better term so that if you donate an item to the guild bank, it can only be used by members of that guild. This would keep those items from ever making it to the trade economy but also increase the social aspect of the gameplay. Maybe even create a “guild currency” that you gain from spending time grouped with guild members, which you can then spend to remove items from the guild bank. Granted there would need to be some administrative level that allows folks to clean out the bank and dump unneeded items straight to gold or shattering, but I am certain Eleventh Hour Games could reach a good compromise for how all of that might work.
Adventure Mode/Bounties
The worst part about leveling a new character in both Path of Exile and Last Epoch is the fact that you need to go through the story content again. One of the systems that work brilliantly is Adventure Mode from Diablo III, and I am somewhat shocked that no other game has implemented something similar to this. Essentially in Diablo III, once you have finished the campaign one time (and I believe now it is just immediately open to everyone), you get access to adventure mode which allows you to freely move between all waypoints available in the game and choose your own path to leveling.
Given that the Last Epoch map feels pretty similar to the Diablo III one, I could see this sort of system working beautifully. Another aspect of Adventure Mode that I really enjoy is doing Bounties for Bounty Caches. I get that for many players these are not exactly the highlight of their gaming experience, and they are often much maligned by more hardcore players as being a “requirement” of the seasonal journey there. I personally like them because it gives me a clear micro objective that is broader than running a single map, but less time-consuming than completing an entire quest sequence. There are lots of generally useful resources that already drop like candy, that I could see rolling up into specific bounty caches. You could have a cache of crafting resources, a cache of idols, or even a cache of rare gear with the very limited ability to drop uniques or set pieces. More paths to the same result is always a good thing as far as I am concerned because it allows folks to vary up their gameplay.
Unstable Echoes
This idea goes somewhat hand in hand with the opening of an alternative leveling mode like Diablo III’s adventure mode. Right now you can technically start the Monolith when you reach the End of Time zone for the very first time. Whether or not you can actually do that is another question, because the Monolith system as it exists today is at a fixed level and requires you to be able to survive a level 55 map. What I would propose is something akin to the Nephalem Rift/Greater Rift system from Diablo III. The idea I had is to call them “Unstable Echoes” and effectively zone into a random echo map with random objectives and random rewards. Much like players enjoy leveling through doing Rifts in Diablo III, it would be awesome if we could just start doing Monoliths in a random system independent from the ACTUAL Monolith progression.
I mean if Eleventh Hour Games wanted to go for the gold, it would be neat if these Unstable Echoes had a sequence of objectives that ultimately led to fighting a miniboss similar to a Rift Guardian. That however isn’t necessary, and I would honestly be perfectly happy with just randomly spawning one of the existing Monolith Echoes at a level that scaled to the player. Bonus points would be if the system allowed players to choose what level of Monolith they wanted to tackle. This could even be spun into a completely unique progression system that worked kinda like Greater Rift progression so as you passed level 100, you were gaining a certain amount of corruption as well to keep making harder and more rewarding singleton Echoes.
Hideouts/Housing
Right from the start I know this request is a bit out there because player housing is an exceptionally expensive system to implement. It is one of those systems that can have some extremely solid returns when it comes to selling cosmetics, but a massive initial outlay of work to put even the most basic version in the game. That said… I love the Hideout/Guild Hideout system from Path of Exile and I would love to see something like this implemented at some point in the future in Last Epoch. I mean these really don’t serve a purpose other than allowing players to have a trophy hall of sorts and a shared communal space. This is definitely on the long-term “wouldn’t it be cool” list.
Appearance Collection/Wardrobe
I love cosmetics and wardrobe systems, and right now Last Epoch already has the most basic version stubbed out. Currently, if you have one of the pets gained through backing the game at various times during its development process, you can have them follow you around. In-game there is an Appearance tab for your character and it has slots similar to Path of Exile where you can in theory modify the visual appearance of every item you have equipped. I would assume that the idea as it stands to have a similar cosmetic shop to Path of Exile where you can buy an appearance and then wear that as a sort of visual override to what you actually have equipped.
This is a good start for certain, but what I would love to see as the final implementation is something akin to games like Guild Wars 2 where every item that drops saves a copy of that appearance to your wardrobe. Then when you click on a slot you see every appearance that has dropped along with every appearance that you have purchased. This sort of system just feels better than a cash-shop-only system, because it allows everyone to participate and also… gives folks options if nothing available through the cash-shop really interests them. Sometimes you just want to wear something that matches and don’t necessarily want to be blinged out. Cosmetic systems are great, but the systems that blend in world drops with purchased appearances are always the best ones.
Character Creator/Gender Options
Last Epoch suffers from the same problem that a lot of older ARPGs have, where when you choose your character class you are also locking in gender and a specific appearance. At this point, I am mostly numb to this construct as I have dealt with it over and over in these games. Diablo III has a slightly improved system where when you choose your class you are still locking in a specific appearance, but you get to choose between a male and female option. Mike one of the developers from Eleventh Hour Games regularly hosts a Friday live stream over on Twitch where he fields questions from the audience, and this has come up multiple times. Each time he gives essentially the same answer… that they would like to do this but they have not felt they could devote the budget to it yet.
On some level this makes sense. In development, especially when you are working on missing features… you often end up with a mindset of “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” and right now they have a functional character system. However at some point, I would love to see them address this, and they have at least shown some modicum of interest in it as a long-range goal. When they do rework the character creation system, I would love to see them at least have some basic appearance options as well. Diablo IV did not have necessarily the most amazing character creation system, but you at least felt like you could put your own mark on what the character looks like and I would love to see them implement at least something along those lines. Not every character creator has to be something that you are going to spend literal hours on perfecting, but it would be nice to have options.
Account-Based Monolith Progression
The Monolith Timeline and Echo system feels really good. It is a fun endgame that sees your character zipping around the end of time collecting resources and fighting interesting bosses. The problem is when approaching a seasonal progression arc… you are quickly locked into making a hard choice of what character you want to play because progressing this system on multiple characters is a huge ask. I’ve been chewing away at this for weeks, and I’ve still not entered the “true” endgame of Empowered Monoliths. I’ve been interested in trying out a primalist character, but it feels like the idea of progressing another character to this point is a massive outlay of time. Sure you can get a friend to somewhat cheat your way into empowered monoliths… but even that feels super janky.
What I would love to see is something akin to the Atlas of Worlds in Path of Exile, where your progress is tied to your account and not any individual character. Alting is healthy in an ARPG, and I feel like right now… Last Epoch is not terribly alt friendly. A good number of the suggestions that I have made above are to make a variety of ways that you can interact with the game on different characters, and having account-based progression is quite possibly the most important of these. I am hoping that internally Eleventh Hour Games already realizes this is a problem and is working on its own solution.
Seasonal Expansions
Eleventh Hour Games has already announced that they do have a seasonal mechanic planned at some point called “Cycles” and that they plan on these being pretty basic resets. This is fine, and I would expect them to stay basic for a while. However, I do hope at some point the door is open to using this seasonal cadence as the introduction of entirely new game modes. While I feel like maybe the Path of Exile seasonal mechanic system is a bit much for any other game, I would love to see some new game mode added each year or so. I love Delve and Heist in Path of Exile and they wildly change the enjoyment of that game for me. Eleventh Hour Games has already had some pretty brilliant solutions to classical ARPG problems, and I would love to see the sort of game modes they can come up with to expand the base of the game. I am not saying we need the expansion every three months cadence of Path of Exile, but I would love to see something eventually.
Wrapping Up
Last Epoch is a phenomenal game, and so far has been the game I always wished for… something that kinda splits the difference between the overwhelming complexity of Path of Exile and the quick simple joy of Diablo III. That said it can always be improved and my goal of this morning was to lay out some of my ideas for things I would love to see. Do I think anyone from Eleventh Hour Games is even going to see this? No not really. I realize I very small voice from a very small corner of the internet, but I think more than anything I did this for my own benefit to get this nonsense out of my head. I am going to keep playing Last Epoch and enjoying myself, but also going to keep playing Path of Exile and other ARPGs to keep collecting “wouldn’t it be cool” ideas. I love where the ARPG genre is right now and how many different expressions of it exist, but as with MMORPGs, there are always things I would love to see from one game to another game.
Do you agree with some of my assessments? Did I completely get this all wrong? Drop me a line below and tell me your own thoughts.
I have this weird superstition when it comes to computers. I will never name the same build the same thing twice. It is almost as though each machine that gets a fresh install is its own “being”, because yes I suffer from the personification of machinery. Generally speaking, the machine gets named after something that I am engaged with at the time. My current gaming desktop is named NormandySR2 and my laptop is named NightCity. My gaming desktop before that was named Serenity, and when I rebuilt the gaming desktop before that into a Plex Server I named it Merigold as I was playing through Witcher 2 and 3 at the time and Triss is legitimately the correct choice. Over the weekend that machine gave up the ghost, and while I could potentially resurrect it with a new system build… I’ve decided to move on. Another proud tradition of mine is to turn my previous gaming desktop into my new “fuck around and find out” system. Merigold was my old AMD FX-6300-based system and when I upgraded to my current i7-10700K-based system a few years ago, I left my previous x99-based i7-5820k system largely sitting there dormant.
The plan is to build this into a Linux Mint based system. Why that distro? Largely it is a case of comfort and familiarity. I’ve built up a few past laptops using it and felt good about it. In theory, I could just run a more server-ly distribution on it, but I often like to use this machine as a secondary desktop. I’ve always built my second machine as a Windows machine, so this is going to be a bit of a first for me. This is going to mean that I will be using Linux a heck of a lot more than I normally do. For decades I’ve had a Linux box as a “toy” machine, that I fiddle with for a few days and then forget about it… and by the time I need it again, I often burn it down and start from scratch. The fediverse however has immersed me more into open source culture… and I am thinking it might be time to test drive actually running one of my primary machines as Linux. I mean I will still likely run Plex on it, but I am also really interested in trying to figure out the best use of it as a remote machine given that I never actually use my second machine with a proper monitor/keyboard/mouse. Previously I had used Parsec as my remote tool of choice, but there is no Linux hosting option for that sadly. In the short term, I will probably use VNC, which I have never loved… but it is functional and easy enough to set up.
I popped in for a little bit yesterday before Diablo IV Beta came to a close and finished leveling to 25, the level cap for that test. I am still a bit “up in my feels” about what I really think about that game. I was honestly not expecting “Blizzard Does Lost Ark” and since I bounced so phenomenally hard from that game I guess I understand the dissonance that I am going through regarding that. Diablo Immortal is also somewhat of a version of that experience, and I liked it just fine because I entered into that with very low expectations. Diablo IV however had been a game I had whether or not I wanted to… been pinning my hopes on as the last chance for Blizzard to really grab me. I’ve always cared far more about the Diablo franchise than anything else that the company has put out, and slowly over the years, I have peeled away from the other franchises. I did not really want to also feel like I had moved on past Diablo as well. I mean I have a copy of it now, so I might sit and watch and see what it evolves into over time.
The experience of the Diablo IV Beta has had the effect of causing me to pour my heart and soul back into Last Epoch. This is honestly the sort of experience I was hoping Diablo IV was going to be. For all of the talk of a return to Diablo 2 from the devs… I sort of expected something that would straddle the gap between Path of Exile and Diablo 3. That is ultimately what Last Epoch feels like, a happy medium between those two games. I got my Sentinel/Paladin up to fairly high levels and while I enjoy it… I also was not really feeling it. So instead this weekend I started pushing up my Necromancer and have now almost gotten up to the same levels that I was sitting at on my Paladin. I’ve not started the Monoliths yet but am working my way through the final chapter of content that is currently in the game. I think I have effectively a fully fleshed-out “kit” at this point and it is just a matter of getting levels and getting better gear.
I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time in Guild Wars 2. Here is one of those Legendary bosses that I compared Diablo IV bosses to. I legitimately hate the Legendary rogues that spawn after you have defeated a Champion rogue. I largely stick around to help fight them because they are such pains in the butt… and I know they can wipe an entire field’s worth of unsuspecting open-world players. It always feels like I spend most of my time resurrecting other players. It is more a case that I don’t want to damn anyone to do this horrible encounter alone, as opposed to actually wanting to fight it myself. That is the weird thing about Guild Wars 2… it makes me want to take action to help other players because it seems like it is the right and proper thing to do. I have a post in me about how Guild Wars 2 is the best game that the mainstream isn’t taking seriously… but that is going to have to wait for another day. The annoying thing about Guild Wars 2 is that it is so good… that it turns players into evangelists for it… which only ends up pissing off the unindoctrinated.
So the goal for today is to finish the installation of whatever I end up naming the new box. I spent most of yesterday furiously copying files from a machine that I have not touched in two years… and probably didn’t actually need anything from… but felt like I had to back up “just in case”. I’m currently running it off the bootable image and am just about ready to do the proper install. Linux “live” images are really a godsend, especially given that they just sort of “work” now to let you copy files off an otherwise dead system. That whole world has evolved so far since the first time I installed RedHat in the late 90s.
Good Morning Friends! If you have read my blog for any length of time you will understand that I truly and deeply love Diablo-style Action Roleplaying Games, or ARPGs as the genre tends to be collectively referred to. Even a good deal of my current love of Guild Wars 2 is rooted in the fact that for the most part, it owes way more lineage to Diablo than it does World of Warcraft. The only problem with all of this is that the older I have gotten, the less forgiving the deeply repetitive process of clicking to move and attack has become on my hands. At this point, I am on the late side of 40 sliding over forward towards 50, and after decades of heavy computer usage, I just can’t handle spamming the mouse button in quite the same way that I used to. For many, this has meant a shift to controller gaming for their ARPG fix which tends to be considerably more forgiving. However for me… I still deeply prefer the mouse and keyboard experience and have landed on a control scheme that works for me. I thought this morning I would share some of this wisdom for anyone looking for a way to play these games without killing your hands in the process.
Generally speaking, the ARPG is a genre that allows for quite a bit of customization of your keybinds. So far I have figured out a way to configure pretty much every game I have played in this manner. I can’t take full credit for this because my good friend Ace set me on this path some years back, but I have adapted their processes and made them my own over the course of adapting them to several different games. Essentially to understand this process you need to understand two common concepts within ARPGs.
Force Move – This keybind will be called different things in different games, for example in Last Epoch that I have been playing most recently it is just called “Move”. Conceptually what this does is start your character moving to a point defined by where your mouse cursor is sitting on the screen. So if you drag your mouse all the way to the other side of the screen and tap force move, your character will path in a straight line to your cursor.
Force Attack – This keybind is the opposite of force move, and it will stop all motion and cause you to execute a basic attack regardless of whatever movement inputs were in progress. While I am not actively using it, it can be important to know what this keybind is for the game you are playing in case you need to immediately stop executing a movement command.
One of the quirks of Force Move is if you hold the button down it will be constantly executing a move command toward wherever your mouse cursor is pointing. So effectively it is like your character’s movement is tied to the heading of your mouse cursor allowing you to “steer” the character by moving your mouse. In truth, once you have started doing this it feels way more intuitive than it sounds because your character goes where your mouse cursor goes, and once you are comfortable with it can execute some tight turns as a result.
Because my fingers are already very comfortable in the traditional WASD configuration, I opt for using W as my “Force Move” key allowing me to place my fingers in that orientation and then map other important buttons to be comfortably pressed within the orbit of the W key. There might be some variance between games depending on what is supported but effectively I tend to follow the same configuration setup when possible. It will depend slightly upon the abilities you have access to on a given “class”/build but my standard process follows something like this:
W – Force Move – The button I am holding pretty much at all times to allow me to steer my character with my mouse.
Right Mouse – Primary Attack – This is the button that I bind my primary attack to that I am executing the most often.
Spacebar – Movement Ability – This is the key that I will tap when I need to execute whatever movement ability my character has. If it has no movement abilities I tend to bind a reactional ability to it that I might need to hit on a moment’s notice.
E – Secondary Attack – This one is going to vary quite a bit, but if I need to hit an ability periodically other than my primary attack it is going to go on this key. For example, if I am placing totems or mines or something of the sort, it goes on this key because I find it most comfortable to press while holding W.
Q – Primary Cooldown – This one also varies quite a bit, but if I have some sort of a survival cooldown I generally put it on this key. This is in part because Diablo III trained this to be my potion hotkey so mentally I associate it with survival.
R – Situational Attack/Cooldown – Since this key is further away, I tend to place whatever I need to use that infrequently.
1-5 – Potions – You can blame Path of Exile for this shift, but effectively if there is a health potion button I place it on 1, and if there are other kinds of potions I place them on 2-5. I am very used to reaching up to hit 1 when things are going poorly at this point.
Left Shift – Force Attack – If the game offers some sort of force attack key, I tend to put it on left shift so that when I press it, my movement will be canceled for the moment. This is useful for situations where you might need to pause on a moment’s notice to avoid getting into an area effect for a trap.
I’ve pretty much been able to adapt every game I have played over the last handful of years to some version of this keybinding system. You might have to dig around a bit, but almost every game seems to have some version of “Force Move”. In Path of Exile unfortunately I have to sacrifice a possible keybind, because they do not have a separate button that I could bind to it independent of the hotbar. The only game that I have not been able to configure in this manner was Lost Ark, which is probably in part why I never spent much time playing that game. That game had some very specific opinions on what you should be doing gameplay-wise with your keys. I don’t feel like I am losing much of anything though because there are other things about that game that did not exactly jive with me either.
So as we approach the early access testing period of Diablo IV, the very first thing I will be doing is configuring my keybinds to match something akin to the process I just highlighted above. This is what works for me personally, but I suggest it as a less damaging alternative to spamming your mouse click constantly to keep registering a movement input. I had a copy of the game gifted to me, so I will be checking it out along with everyone else when the early access period opens. I am not entirely certain it is going to be my jam, but I am willing to give it a shot. At the moment, however, I am very much enjoying my time in Last Epoch. I am sure tomorrow I will have a post talking about my experience playing it with friends.
