Last Epoch News

December saw the introduction of the Eternal Legends update. This introduced one of the new endgame Dungeons: Temporal Sanctum, Legendary Items, an overhaul to crafting, and an overhaul to the Druid mastery. We're happy to say this new endgame system, and the addition of legendary items to provide further solid goals for players has been very well received. This patch resulted in not only continual growth of player numbers over the first month following release but the highest overall retention we’ve seen to date.

Looking forward to patch 0.8.5, we have some exciting news to share with you today. 0.8.5 will bring an exciting batch of content into the game for players in Eterra to explore. From endgame content like two new dungeons and updates to our Arena system - to visual improvements across the game, like new 3D models, weapons, and combat VFX and feel. We are also putting a lot of effort into improving our tools to find, track and fix performance issues.

In addition to the new content above, behind the scenes our 0.8.5 development cycle has a massive focus on multiplayer. We have more dedicated developers devoted to multiplayer this year than at any time in Last Epoch’s history, and we are actively paving the way towards our first community test.

[h2]Forecast Update[/h2]
As our development path towards 1.0 comes closer into focus, we have an update to share on some of our longer-term development goals for Last Epoch.

We now have a better understanding of what our focuses need to be for 1.0 to ensure Epoch is ready for a large audience, and live operations development for years to come.

As we’ve continued to develop and shape Last Epoch around community feedback (thank you by the way), we have realized that some features have needed to be re-evaluated in how they fit into the world of Eterra, and thus removed from this development card. This does not mean we have plans for any less content for Last Epoch, just that these items no longer fit into the core experience in a fun and fluid way as they were envisioned.



Right now our efforts need to be focused on overall game quality, higher performance standards, server load, balance, story presentation, and more to ensure we’re on the right foot at 1.0 to give our community, and Last Epoch the successful launch it deserves.

We fully understand this message may come as disappointing news to some who were waiting for a specific feature to drop into an upcoming patch. We want you to know that we remain committed to our ongoing development of Last Epoch and in time we will deliver everything the game needs, and our passionate community deserves.

Two features we’re removing from the card are Gates of Memoriam, and the Epoch’s Call system. We have removed the Bazaar from the card and added player trading in its place.

Gates of Memoriam was planned as an endgame system that was more rooted in the world and timeline of the campaign, in contrast with the Monolith and Arena. However as we discussed and developed the idea more recently, we decided that the prospect of revisiting the actual campaign zones did not fit well into Last Epoch as it exists now or our visions for it in the future. We feel that the Dungeon system more effectively fulfills this role of a repeatable endgame system that takes place within the world of the campaign, and will be expanding on it in 0.8.5 with two new dungeons.

Epoch’s Call was intended as a mechanic for directing players towards specific randomised content in the Gates of Memoriam and the Monolith of Fate. However as we no longer plan to go ahead with the Gates of Memoriam and our vision of the Monolith of Fate has evolved a lot since 2018, Epoch’s Call as it was originally envisioned no longer has a clear place. With that said we are still dedicated to improving monolith randomisation. These sorts of missions that direct players towards specific pieces of content in endgame are still something we’re considering implementing. However, if implemented, they’re more likely to be a part of the Favour system rather than Epoch’s Call.

The final system we want to discuss is the Bazaar. We spoke to our ideas regarding the Bazaar in the Multiplayer FAQ in July of last year. Since then, we listened very carefully to all of the dialogue concerning trade and had a lot of conversations internally as a result.

After a lot of discussion about the various challenges to our proposed direction, we no longer feel that the Bazaar is the best way to go about player trading in Last Epoch. While player trading will still be a part of the game, we’re planning to take a different approach. We will be talking more about our reasoning here, as well as the future of trading in Last Epoch, in a dedicated post in the coming months.

[h2]New Dungeons[/h2]
Temporal Sanctum was the first dungeon we added to the game in the Eternal Legends Update. It offers the first iteration of map randomization, a unique mechanic, a boss encounter, and last but not least, its own reward. In the future, we plan to expand the Dungeon System, introduce new challenges, and make the end-game more diverse.



Patch 0.8.5 will bring two new dungeons with their own theme and mechanics to Last Epoch. Players will encounter two new terrifying bosses and after defeating them will get access to new rewards - the Vaults of Uncertain Fate and the Soul Gambler.

We’ll talk more about the mechanics and rewards in the coming weeks.

[h2]Arena Champions[/h2]
With 0.8.5, we’re going to be introducing a new arena mode. In this mode you’ll find yourself in the arena against a set number of waves, eventually coming face to face with one of the new Arena Champions. These champions have had their own fair share of experience in the gauntlet and know which way the pointy end goes - you may even find them using a trick or two of your own against you. You can defeat skullens, imperial commanders, and even dragons; but can you defeat another master of the arena?

[h2]New 3D models for several Unique Weapons[/h2]
Players can find hundreds of unique and set items in the game. And while the unique items have great 2D art, the vast majority of them don’t have 3D models to match. Patch 0.8.5 will bring the first batch of new 3D models for dozens of unique and set-based weapons and shields.









[h2]New Armor Sets, Catalysts, and new catalyst animations[/h2]
Adding new armor sets to the game is an ongoing process and patch 0.8.5 will bring several new ones.



In addition to the armor sets, Catalysts will get a complete overhaul with new implicit affixes and 2D/3D art.





We’ve also taken this opportunity to revise some animations, and our playable characters will get brand new animations when using Catalysts.

[h2]And much more…[/h2]
And this is not all. Behind the scenes we’re constantly working on many other smaller but important changes. With 0.8.5 we’ll see many of these game experience changes; including new enemies, improvements to animations of some of the older enemies, an improved dialog box, more voice-overs, and improvements to the visuals of some areas.

We can’t wait to share the details with you in the upcoming weeks, so keep your eyes on our socials. Patch 0.8.5 will be released this March.

Discord Facebook Twitter Reddit Youtube

EDIT 2: We've released a new update to correspond with some maintenance for our backend account services. You shouldn't see any changes in behavior. This new update has the same version number as this previously rolled back update due to an oversight. Our apologies for any confusion.

EDIT: We've reverted this update and re-deployed 0.8.4g for now as we had some new bugs reported to us which we did not encounter internally.

• Likely fixed a bug which would cause the LE-26 error to appear for new players.
  
• Fixed a bug where new players who logged in to an account they made via our website with an incorrect password would get an LE-24 error until they restarted the game.
  

• Fixed a bug where new players that bought the game on Steam but registered their account via our website would encounter an LE-24 error when first starting the game.
  
  • We’re still investigating other potential issues. Contact us at https://support.lastepoch.com if you need assistance.
• Fixed the Crafting Guide in the crafting window being outdated.
  
• Updated some error messages.
  

Hello all, Happy Holidays and welcome to the December Multiplayer update!

It’s been a fun month for us with our release of patch 0.8.4, Eternal Legends, and some developers taking some holiday time off to spend time with friends and loved ones before we dive in head first into getting Multiplayer into players’ hands in 2022.

We have quite a lot going on in our Multiplayer development and I’d like to break down some updates for the topics from last month, as well as talk about what is ahead of us in the next month.

Our feature list from last month:





We’re making continued progress polishing core gameplay and making sure the player experience feels great. There are a lot of decisions our team has made for the player experience for the single-player game that manifest themselves in very tiny ways, like how small details of a UI works or how group quests and party UIs will function. Our UX Director Ross (who designed our new website - PS we’re hiring!) will be a large part of our Multiplayer update next month to talk more about how we’ll realize player experience and UI when we go online.

We are making other progress here that is chiefly focused on fixing bugs, and most importantly reducing CPU costs for both our game servers, and your gameplay experience.



We’ve completed the initial stages of migrating our character save system to the more robust service mentioned last month. This coming month we’ll be digging into the fine details, such as ensuring our crafting and stash systems are as reliable as possible. This will involve things such as breaking down how often we save characters and world states, how to protect the integrity of characters, how to prevent items from disappearing or being duplicated, and much more. We want to catch as much of the easy-to-find issues here before we even release it to Community Testers, and make sure we can fix these kind of problems faster than anything else.



Since our current deployment environment is fairly efficient, and we’ve had other priorities, we didn’t place a huge emphasis on work here this month. We spent a bit of time targeting the specific improvements we need and we’re set to do some technical planning for this in January.



Last month we mentioned we were migrating our account system, and we have it functional internally now. We aren’t quite ready to roll it out to the public. The next month is focused on integrating this system with our website, and making sure we have the ability to observe important details that will allow us to fix account problems quickly when we see them. Unfortunately a number of players have run into login issues recently with our old system that’s currently live, and you can see why we’re eager to finish our work here to make sure nobody experiences this issue again, or we can create better fixes faster.



We’ve made massive progress here. We are happy with our new chat system and it will almost certainly be the one we release to 1.0. My update here is very “boring”, software development-related stuff; we are making a few minor refactors, and then planning a proper integration into our new backend systems. With this new chat system, we’re going to able to add a ton more moderation and Quality of Life features than ever before.



We mentioned last month that we have successfully implemented our matchmaker. And even better news is that we’ve tested its scalability up to ~1million concurrent users making matchmaking requests!

A new challenge ahead of us now is to build out more automated scale testing to try to ensure we’re also going to see those numbers in the game client itself; this tech will help us with every release we do and is something the other big Action RPGs give a lot of attention to.



Our main goals for January are very broad, but I can summarize some of my thoughts here:

[h3]Planning for Community Testing[/h3]
Focus on all of the elements we need from every part of both the game, and the platform we are building, to ensure that we can best make use of Community Tester feedback for multiplayer. This means a large focus on our ability to observe the health of the online game, as well as our ability to quickly fix any problems we find. This also implies a lot of other things: fixing bugs, having 24/7 support where possible, planning for how to suddenly increase our multiplayer playerbase by a large amount, and more.

[h3]Growing the Multiplayer Team[/h3]
We’re growing our team to build Last Epoch Multiplayer, and as one might guess it’s important to plan how to do that so we don’t slow down our ability to create work on the game.

[h3]Becoming “Production Ready"[/h3]
This is very much tied to planning for Community Testing but it’s worth breaking out on its own. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, a lot goes into making sure we’re a game company that can provide a great game service as well as a great game for years to come. We’re making sure we continue to put a lot of attention and love into building the departments we don’t already have that will help make this happen.

[h3]Monolith/Crafting Ready[/h3]
Some of our final core systems to fully implement are our Monolith and Crafting systems. Our crafting system is heavily reliant on a lot of complex database work and character saving, so there will be a lot of debugging to perform here. The Monolith of Fate is relatively straightforward to implement at its baseline, but there will be a lot of multiplayer considerations we need to address before we release it to Community Testers.



While we’re hard at work on getting multiplayer ready next month, we’ll change up this blog post a bit to allow our UX Director Ross to speak more to some of the ways we’re going to be improving Last Epoch to welcome a fully multiplayer experience.

Happy Holidays and New Years to everybody, it’s been an exciting year for Last Epoch and Eleventh Hour Games and 2022 will be our biggest year yet.

Like always, I’ll be around to answer questions below. Thank you so much for reading, and see you next month!

• Mitigated a problem that prevented login for some new players on Steam. If you encounter an LE-24 error or any other issues when logging in, please contact us at support.lastepoch.com and we will respond as soon as possible.