New Hack and Slash ARPG Last Epoch KickStarter April 2018

OMG you guys will have pvp? PVP with cosmetics????? fucking hell, I sign right away if pvp is really ingame!

Can we know more about pvp? how you will balance it and what to expect?

I'm hooked and i only played like 20min lol. When i see dat skill tree for each skill i just want more.

Too bad i'm in a broke as hell period, shit i don't even have any money whatsoever left this month, not even for eating but i'll send some your way once that changes.

I like this D1 atmosphere in the first town haha. Crows, simple guitar music and such.

Guys i am impressed. Now i have two potentially super great ARPG's to look forward to! Life is grand!

Finally got around to playing demo last weekend and I think it looks great so far! No question. Took only half hour or so to play through but arena was fun a la Crucible.

I like it so far!

This caught my eyes recently. Will be checking it out :)

Today Japan celebrates Shōwa Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dwa_Day, so I spent most of the the day, off and on, playing through the Last Epoch demo and arena (up to about Wave 50, then an annoying sound bug cropped up and so I quit). I've never joined a Kickstarter project before, but I'm seriously tempted.


Some things I like better than PoE:

1. No flask management. Seriously. GGG got a lot of praise for its flask system in early days, but that was before utility flasks came to rule the roost. Everyone loves the power they provide, but can anyone honestly say that managing and tracking timer expirations and flask upkeep is a compelling addition to gameplay? I'm glad you didn't copy this.

2. A more robust and interesting approach to trash items. The crafting system rewards picking up and examining trash items for the mods that can potentially be extracted. Item redundancy in late-game is a perennial problem for ARPGs, and this solves it gracefully, so please make sure you don't lose this aspect in your final product.

3. Scalable upgrading of items with increased risk. Like Vaal orbs, but more interesting. Like Essences, but with less RNG and therefore more interesting there as well.

4. No ID or TP scrolls. Ugh. 'Nuff said.

5. More linear gameplay areas. Now, I realize that this detracts from immersion to a degree, but the problem with wide-open spaces is that players infected with "the exploration bug" will end up criss-crossing that entire area anyhow, which is simply less fun, imo. As one of the aforementioned infected individuals, I consider a reasonable degree of linearity to be a plus in ARPGs, since the genre does not lend itself to exploring the world in random directions in the vein of Skyrim.

6. The training dummy. This is such an obvious nod to the years of people requesting GGG do this; it gave me a good chuckle to see it. It's little things like this that will ultimately force GGG to step up its game or be left behind. The report of exactly what killed you is a similar thing people have been requesting from GGG for years. I'm glad to see you are paying attention.


Some things I like less than PoE:

1. Because of the fixed nature of skills and their supports, the game rewards creativity less. This will impact Last Epoch's long-term appeal, I expect.

2. Waypoint placement. PoE used to suffer from this more, but I repeatedly insisted in feedback threads that if the point of a waypoint was (in GGG's own words, in one of their load screen hints) to save a player's progress (and indeed I agree that it is!), then why make the player hunt for the save point? I didn't see anyone else complaining about this, so either they eventually decided to take my suggestion seriously, or they circumstantially came to the same conclusion on their own, because they changed the positions of many waypoints to be right next to area transitions (sometimes before, sometimes after). LE's linearity makes searching for waypoints unnecessary, but putting them in the middle of an area is a poor choice: Upon starting the game again, the player has no way of knowing, without remembering or having taken notes, in which direction to go.

3. All the uniques I found were crap. Granted, I only found 3 on the way to level 43 (Calamity, Bleeding Heart, and Arboreal Circuit). But all of them had significant tradeoffs to the feature they provided. I can see you are trying to copy PoE here, but you have to remember that using a unique without the 4 affixes found on a rare is already a significant tradeoff. Giving players a double-tradeoff made all three of those items trash. You need to either give them additional stats or tone down the tradeoff, imo.

4. Lots of bugs and assorted clunkiness. Par for an alpha, so I give you a pass on this one.


Some things to keep in mind, since you are still early in development:

1. I put this first because it is the most important: Whatever you do, do NOT charge real-life money for stash space. I do appreciate how tempting it will be to do so, especially in light of how profitable those tabs are for GGG. But for anyone who defines any sort of in-game advantage in exchange for real-life money to be a form of pay2win (and not everyone does, but there is a significant portion of gamers who do), any addition of time-saving conveniences in the game will be regarded as pay2win, and rightly so. Those who consider scalable pay2win (= the more you pay, the more powerful you become) to be the only "real" pay2win will not care, of course. But they definitely don't represent all gamers, which can be confirmed on GGG's own forums via a quick search: https://www.pathofexile.com/search/results/pay2win.

2. Copy PoE's recent minimap overhaul, which makes it easy to see where you have and have not explored (it didn't use to). This is an important yet oft-overlooked aspect of the gameplay experience in an ARPG.

3. Since you are early in development, there is still time: Please support stereo 3D. ARPGs are an awesome genre for this technology, because you feel like you are controlling little toy action figures. PoE is not currently compatible with stereo 3D despite being 99% of the way there, because of the cursor and UI overlays, which are not projected in 3D space. If they were, in 3D Vision, Tridef, etc. they would be made to "float" naturally. Because they're not, they appear to be at maximum closeness, making it jarring unless you're looking up close, at a high zoom level. It appears that your game may be headed in the same unfortunate direction; unfortunate because the effort necessary to create this support may be less than you realize. More info here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/460142/page/1#p4097454

That's all I have for now. Thanks for the fun demo and good luck with development!

I really liked the demo. It shows a lot of promise. I hope you reach your KS goal.

Getting the "main game" right is obviously a prerequisite for success. But, I'd also suggest care and caution in the placement of out-of-genre mini-games. GGG has struggled with this, as evidenced by ...

1. The mixed response to Forgotten Masters (it pigeonholed character types, the MMO-style daily quests are not loved by all)

2. Widespread dislike / hate and frustration about labyrinth (GGG went to platform / adventure gaming, a genre where their design skills weren't the best and where the engine doesn't perform particularly well, lab came out as an "early release" league, it's been changed multiple times, and yet over two years later it's still gets dismissed as unenjoyable by multiple streamers and also by lots of players on the forums)

3. Beastiary came out as an "early release" league and frustrated and disappointed a lot of players (Also, many don't find it enjoyable to mix in netting and capturing mobs with killing them, plus beast crafting seems overly complicated and kind of redundant given other game systems already in place)

What GGG has done in such cases is "bake in" each out-of-genre mini-game with such high rewards that players are gimping themselves quite badly if they ignore it. It's probably worth at least considering keeping out-of-genre mini-games as optional content or, at least, not asking players to accept a beta-testing role if an out-of-genre minigame is integrated into the main game (ie: especially after the game's initial release).

Hey all, I'm really happy to hear that most of you are thoroughly enjoying the demo client. We have some big updates coming soon including a launcher/patcher, the Necromancer, keybinds, a LOT of lore put on the wiki, a race event May 2nd, and more. At this moment we're 91.5k into our 210k goal with 16 days to go - it's going to be a nail biter.

Thank you for those who are giving extensive feedback - Gibbo looking at you! Will follow up via Discord.
And thanks 鬼殺し for pointing him to our Discord server.

Sorry that I'm not checking this thread often, I can't even begin to explain how time consuming running a Kickstarter campaign is, haha! If you join our Discord I'm very responsive to DMs.

If any of you haven't had the chance to check out the demo yet be sure to visit the KS page. If you like it please consider donating and helping the genre thrive :) its an exciting time for ARPGs!

I rly hope they reach the goal. I think the first tier for a copy has a too low cost.

Btw, I remember some other (Arpg) devs supported path of exile in 2012-2013. But I dont see GGG supporting Last Epoch :(

Such is life

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wsbisev wrote:

Btw, I remember some other (Arpg) devs supported path of exile in 2012-2013. But I dont see GGG supporting Last Epoch :(

Such is life

1>you don t know that, maybe they do but are silent about it. Anyway you won t know it until you play a released version probably.

2> GGG might not be interested anymore into arpgs, Seems they prefer touhous now.