Last Epoch News

Hello Travelers,

As much of our community is aware, every Friday one of our game designers - Mike, hosts a dev stream. This stream is an opportunity for us to hang out with our community, play some Last Epoch, answer community questions, and maybe, reveal a teaser or two about upcoming content.

What many people might not be aware of is that each month we pick a charity which all proceeds from the dev stream are donated. For the months of January and February, we were contributing dev stream proceeds to Save the Children. Save the Children is an organization which works to improve the lives of children through better education, health care, and economic opportunities, as well as providing emergency aid in natural disasters, war, and other conflicts.

Last Friday, our Lead Game Director Judd posted a statement concerning the happenings involving Ukraine and Russia, and the relations to the Eleventh Hour Games studio having team members in both countries.

As part of our response to this, for the month of March, Eleventh Hour Games will be donating all dev stream proceeds to UNICEF’s Ukraine relief fund. Further, **Eleventh hour games is also committing to match all community proceeds and donations for the month of March up to $10,000.** All subs, donations, and bits will be going to this cause.

We appreciate all of our community member’s support, and look forward to seeing you during the dev streams, even if just to watch us play some Last Epoch or try to catch some teasers.

[h2]Stream Schedule:[/h2]

March 4th: 15:00 - 17:00 CST (22:00 - 00:00 BST)
March 11th: 15:00 - 17:00 CST (22:00 - 00:00 BST)
March 18th: 15:00 - 17:00 CST (22:00 - 00:00 BST)
March 25th: 15:00 - 17:00 CST (22:00 - 00:00 BST)

[h2]Charity Information:[/h2]

Save the Children - https://www.savethechildren.org/
UNICEF - https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/unicef-children-crossfire-ukraine-crisis/
Stream Donations - https://streamlabs.com/lastepochgame/tip

Hello all, and welcome to the second multiplayer blog of 2022!

If you checked out Ross’ post last month, we took a break from all my techno babble to break down our various social features. We’re now using a number of these changes in internal multiplayer testing. But you’re not here for that - you’re here for a progress update!

I’m pleased to say that we’re now making major progress in every avenue of multiplayer development. It was a very challenging process to migrate a large chunk of our backend features to be more self-owned, something I spoke about in our November update. Now that we’re through the major migration, we’ve been able to return to core game design and preparing multiplayer for our Community Testers.

For this update I am going to speak directly to our status from what I discussed in December, and mention a few exciting game design tidbits.




We’ve finished all of our preliminary work here. Which means... we have multiplayer crafting!



Having crafting for our daily multiplayer testing has been a gamechanger for the multiplayer experience, and we’re starting to get a really clear vision of how Last Epoch is going to be played online together with friends.

We have a lot more work here to do to ensure data integrity; that is, making sure all your characters and crafting endeavours can be saved and backed up safely, addressing any potential points of failure or game exploitation. This will be ongoing up and through our multiplayer betas and 1.0 release.


While we’ve been working diligently on core multiplayer features, we’ve seen a natural increase to the complexity of the processes of creating and releasing Last Epoch builds.

What does this mean? The automated system we use to build the game has become more complicated to maintain, as we now have two major clients (single player and multiplayer), as well as our game servers. We have the skills to address this all ourselves, and this is a normal part of game development, it’s something that will take a fraction of our attention to address whenever given issues come up. This will also become much easier once we’re only developing and releasing Last Epoch as an online game.

With that said, we’re still hiring for more hands to manage the multiplayer release of Last Epoch!


We’re still continuing to use our new account system internally, and we have determined that its current state will be shippable to our Community Testers when we get there.

A full account migration of our now-large player base will be something we perform a bit later, closer to when we release a public multiplayer beta. It’s a complex process and will require a very thorough plan to execute, so we are focused for now on delivering a testable multiplayer experience instead.


We actually have our new chat service nearly fully complete and ready to integrate into Last Epoch. This is quite exciting, as our issues with our current chat have been well known. Right now, because we have another single-player release looming, we cannot yet add it into our multiplayer environment as it’s a complicated process. We will have to wait until our 0.8.5 release to bring this into our internal multiplayer build, test and make fixes, and have it available for when we release multiplayer to Community Testers. This new chat won’t be publicly available until we release a wider multiplayer beta.


We are now ready for all of these to be tested at a larger scale, and are continuing to work at ensuring we remove as many risks to our game’s online stability as possible. This still remains one of the most important things we need to get right to give you all a high quality multiplayer release, so we’re going to always be making consistent progress here.

Also, a gentle reminder that for us, “Matchmaking” is a more technical term that describes how you and your parties will request and receive servers, rather than some sort of party matchmaking system, which is not something we are developing at this time.


Our main goals for March are to ensure we are able to diagnose and debug core problems quickly, and add the last remaining game content to the multiplayer version of Last Epoch. Once we have these closed out, we’re going to have a pretty high confidence in releasing an alpha multiplayer version to our Community Testers, and other players soon after that.

[h2]Multiplayer Monolith[/h2]
Developing the multiplayer version of the Monolith of Fate is a far larger undertaking than adding the campaign (which is already fully complete). We’ve already fully designed and are executing our plan here, and this will be something I will share updates on in great detail in next month’s post.

An exciting part of this plan is that we’re also going to be optimizing a number of parts about how our game loads, and overall performance, so we’re quite excited about this!

[h2]Diagnostics / Fixing multiplayer bugs fast[/h2]
With our team size growing and with so many complex bugs and systems to have to be able to manage when we go online, it’s important we can read all of the information we receive quickly. We’ve recognized a need to reduce the amount of noise we get in all of our logging, as well as start to mature our tools to give each of our teams the data they’ll need to make good decisions.

This may not sound glamorous, but it’s of vital importance for us to be able to diagnose problems as quickly as possible, so you’re never waiting for a hotfix to a problem, or a game update.

[h2]Remaining Game Content[/h2]
Outside of the Monolith, we’ll be adding the remaining game content we don’t have yet online. We’re now happy to say we have enough support to be able to make progress on most of this at once. We’re also nearing the finish line.

Some of the main areas we’ll target: updates to the technical aspects of channeled and shapeshifting abilities, cleaning up some other elements of the endgame such as the Arena group experience, and starting to plan out what our Leaderboard will look like on our new backend. There are a few other features that could be included here, but we’re starting to close it all out!


When contemplating the question “when will multiplayer be released for testing?” I’ve learned to ask myself another question: “What are we looking for with a public test?” The answer to that is pretty simple.

We want the experience to be mostly focused on players being able to give us feedback about Last Epoch’s online experience, rather than technical bugs. Our last pushes before releasing multiplayer to Community Testers will now be focused on that philosophy: when we reach a threshold that we feel we’ll get consistent game design feedback to improve our game’s multiplayer experience, we’ll release it. I’ve started to build the plan with our lead network engineer to get us there.

Next month we’ll be excited to share with you some more status updates, a more technical breakdown of how the multiplayer monolith will work, as well as any reveals about our Community Testing plan if we’re ready.

Thanks again for all of your patience and support, and like always I’ll be hanging out in the comments sections to answer questions. See you next month!

Good day Travelers!

We wanted to take an opportunity to discuss a sometimes controversial topic, but a very important one. Moderation. This is normally a daunting topic, however we don’t think it should be. Rather, it should be something we are open about. In that spirit, we wanted to spend a little bit of time to discuss how we handle moderation, and what our plans are concerning it going forward.

Alongside this I also want to provide a big shout out to all of the community members who make up our community moderator team, and all the work they’ve been doing to help out with our community. Thank you for all of your hard work with us helping out all the players, and working to keep a great environment for players to learn and have fun in Last Epoch!


In many games and communities, moderators are scary people who tend to lurk in the background, hammer ready to punish those who fall out of line. That’s not what we want within our community. We have three core principles we follow when it comes to moderation within Last Epoch:

[h2]Setting the stage[/h2]
Our moderators are not passive, lurking in the shadows. Our moderators are community guides and helpers first, moderators second. Moderators lead by example within the community. By actively setting the stage, moderation action becomes much less necessary as more players will become willing to adopt the positive environment being set. Our goal is to strive to help the community grow in a positive way, rather than simply address negative actions.

[h2]Guiding the conversations[/h2]
Our moderators engage the community, not shut down the community. If a conversation starts becoming abusive, excessively vulgar, or otherwise becomes too “hot”, moderators will try to step in and reign in the conversation by changing the topic, or if necessary asking players to change topics.

[h2]Moderation action[/h2]
Our moderators strive to be fair and unbiased in action. We provide coaching and guidance towards this goal, as well as providing full opportunity for peer discussion of events. We try to avoid implementing action whenever possible, preferring to provide players the opportunity to chose to be part of a healthy community. However, sometimes conversations can simply get a bit too heated, or a player goes too far in violation of the Code of Conduct. If this occurs, our moderators will take all reasonable steps to ensure fair warning is provided, and that they do not participate in any bias if action is required.


[h3]Community Moderator Program - Codename “Beesfriends”[/h3]
We’ve mentioned in posts a few times in the past helpful community members who help us out. We refer to this as our “Community Moderation Team and Beesfriends” (name to be finalized). This team is comprised of handpicked players who have gone above and beyond within the community to make it a great place for new and experienced players alike. These players operate on a completely volunteer basis, out of their passion for the game and its community. Because of this, we do have zero tolerance for any abuse targeting these volunteer members (as we do any players).

These community members often already follow the first two principles of our moderation principles before joining the team, and are then empowered to implement short actions in the third principle when necessary. Whenever an action is taken by one of or moderators, a report is automatically generated and submitted to us so we can provide oversight and guidance to our moderation team. Any time a more severe moderation action may be required, it is discussed with EHG staff and implemented directly by EHG if deemed necessary. Though because we’ve had such a great community with all of you, this has rarely been necessary.

[h3]Empowering players to be involved in moderation[/h3]
Currently, for all players, to report another player it requires directly submitting a support ticket with information regarding the event. Going forward, we want to provide all players more power in shaping their community. With the new chat system being developed alongside multiplayer, all players will have the power to report users in game. This chat system will also provide further utility for our team in regards to moderation such as helping clarify when someone is an appointed community moderator or a member of the EHG team.

Further, we provide a route for all players to be able to dispute a moderation action. If you believe an action was taken against you incorrectly, you can submit a support ticket and the action will be reviewed directly by EHG staff. Even in the event it was a staff member who implemented the action, it will not be touched by the person who implemented the action to ensure a fair review.

[h2]Why this style of moderation?[/h2]
By having a community moderation team rather than solely an in house moderation team, we also help ensure that we are never ‘pushing an agenda’, or biasing our community’s conversations. Moderation action is never taken for criticizing EHG or our policies. This allows for a healthy community in which all members feel welcome and able to participate in. Our community moderators are also allowed to put forward other community members to join the team, helping to keep this self regulation within moderation to prevent a overarching bias to actions.

However, this is not to say that the community moderation team is completely autonomous. All community moderators are expected to follow the same Code of Conduct as all other players, and do have a set of guidelines to follow in their actions. The team is provided support directly by us here at EHG, providing oversight as well to ensure there’s no abuse of power within the community moderation team, and that the three core principles are being maintained.

Most Importantly, this approach to moderation is that the first two core principles don’t require any sort of special power. It’s something any community member going above and beyond is capable of. It is important to us to be involved in the community, and the community involved with us, as all of us not only come from it, but are still a part of it.

[h2]Joining the Beesfriends[/h2]
As the player base continues to expand, so will our efforts in this. With multiplayer on the not so distant horizon, we are looking to expand our community moderation team including in game, Discord, Steam, Forums, and on our official Reddit. Reddit in particular we want to be as hands off in moderation as possible to ensure the integrity of discourse there, that it is always fair, and completely unbiased. For in game, we’re looking to expand our roster of community moderators to assist our global community in different languages.

If you’re interested in joining our community moderation team, here’s a general outline of what we would be looking for:

• No history of moderation actions in the LE community
  
• Preference given to players with longer tenure / more consistent activity within the community
  
• Either generally helpful within the community such as answering questions for new players, or discussing friendly topics in chat without pushing the Code of Conduct. Let us know how you participate in the community!
  
• Preference would be given to players which are online with a regular frequency. There are no obligations or schedules for our moderation team, but we would be looking for members who will be able to regularly help with the community.
  

If you feel like you would make a good fit for our community moderation team, please submit your application as a support ticket.

Looking forward to seeing you all in game, and may the bees guide your drops!

Hello all, happy new year, and welcome to the first multiplayer dev blog of 2022!

I’m Ross, Creative Director at Eleventh Hour games, and as Dan mentioned in our previous multiplayer progress update, this month we’ll be taking a break from covering the more technical aspects of Multiplayer implementation and instead are discussing the interface and user experience elements involved in partying up and playing multiplayer with your friends in Last Epoch!

Rest assured the development team is continuing to make good progress on core multiplayer development. We’re growing the multiplayer team and have been hard at work implementing our final core systems such as Item Crafting and the Monolith. There will be more on that in the next progress update.


The Social Panel is the heart of the multiplayer experience in Last Epoch and will be how you’ll add new friends, send party invites, and manage your current party.

We’re in the process of replacing our placeholder social UI in our current multiplayer builds with redesigned panels that are easier to use, more consistent with the rest of our UI, and have better gamepad support.
The Friends tab of our new Social Panel

The Friends tab within the Social Panel has the majority of the features you’d expect, including:

• Listing and grouping your friends via their status
  
• Displaying friend requests (incoming and outgoing)
  
• Blocked player management
  
• Visibility settings
  
• A custom Status message
  
• Displaying each player’s portrait and frame. Currently, we’re defaulting to showing a user’s base class for the portrait, in however longer term we’re aiming to add more options in addition to that, including mastery specific portraits, and other portraits unlocked by Challenges
  The Party Tab shows an overview of your current party, showing each party member’s status, and allows the Party Leader to remove players from the group. Currently, any player in the party can invite other players to join the group, but only the leader can kick people from the party. [Dan] - check this is correct.
  

The Party tab will also show all of your pending party invites in case you are popular and receive multiple invites at once! [Dan] This doesn’t exist, but has been brought up by QA as a requested feature which I’m planning to add.

The Party Tab shows an overview of your current party, showing each party member’s status, and allows the Party Leader to remove players from the group. Currently, any player in the party can invite other players to join the group, but only the leader can kick people from the party. [Dan] - check this is correct.

The Party tab will also show all of your pending party invites in case you are popular and receive multiple invites at once!

The Party tab of our new Social Panel


Players can be added to your friends’ list by entering their username via the Social Panel, right-clicking the user’s name in the chat UI, or right-clicking a player in the World/a Town Hub.

We’re currently still working on specifics around how many players you’ll see in Town Hubs during the campaign and at end game, we’ll release more specifics on that at a later date.

When you’re partied up with your friends, you’ll see their player card at the top left of your HUD. This shows their class, frame, level, and a button to open a portal directly to them.

The context menu for party cards provides other options for interacting with that player, including muting and whispering.




Our current chat system is enjoyed by many of our players and is a great way to ask or answer questions from other players or get advice on your build.

That being said, we’re aware of the issues and missing functionality within the system and are doing a full revamp of chat functionality for Multiplayer, in addition to building out and improving our moderation tools to provide an enjoyable and welcoming environment to our players.

We’re hard at work developing this new chat system using a third-party chat provider that will scale better from our current numbers up to launch, and will have several new core features compared to our current system, allowing you to customize your chat experience.

Our redesigned Chat UI

[h2]Customizing tabs[/h2]
Our updated chat UI has a custom tab system allowing you to create and rename chat tabs, controlling which specific channels you are interested in displaying messages from within that tab. Our current chat system is limited on that front and only has one Global channel, however as we scale the system up for multiplayer launch, we’re adding more specific channels for players to chat in.

For example, you may configure your “Main” tab to be connected to channels that relate specifically to your current class, or you may just want to be connected to Global chat for casual conversation.

You’ll also be able to configure individual tabs to show/disable Local Chat, Party Chat, and to display NPC subtitles.

If you’re in a Party, a tab will automatically appear to display chat within your Party.

We’re also implementing an alert system where we’ll be able to inform players via the Chat UI of any announcements, maintenance, or downtime that may occur from time to time.

Configuring a Chat Tab


A common request from players has been to allow linking items in Chat. We’re pleased to say that this functionality is being added to our chat UI, and you’ll be able to show off or ask questions relating to your specific items, linking them in chat so that other people can hover over the link and view the full tooltip.

We are also looking at other systems that could be integrated with chat linking, such as the ability to link to specific sections of the in-game guide.

[h3]What aspects of multiplayer UX are we focusing on now?[/h3]
We’re currently working on ensuring our systems and flow for informing the user of their connection status is working well. That includes how disconnections are handled, how we’re communicating various errors states, announcements, player ping, and so on. [Dan] I believe we’re planning to add a “ping display” within the Action Bar HUD, assuming that’s fine/doable.

That’s all for this month’s Multiplayer Update. Let us know what Social features you’d be excited for when Multiplayer drops!

As mentioned above, next month we’ll be back with Dan, focusing on covering how core multiplayer development is progressing. Stay tuned!

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.

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