I always marvel at how Grim Dawn isn’t in the conversation. It’s easily top tier, has no microtransactions, is single player offline, but also supports co-op multiplayer. It features a full cosmetic system that is entirely in-game with no cash shop nonsense. There are so many skills and builds with an outstanding itemization system. Robust crafting system. Repeatable end game challenge content.
Also, it is just recieving another huge free patch, and another full expansion has just been announced.
It took me forever to actually try it, I thought it was going to be janky indie stuff etc. I’m closing on 3000 hours and still dropping back in with new build themes and ideas. I paid $35 for that 3000 hours in a Steam sale.
But yea, Last Epoch is ok I guess.
Edit: a word
Edit 2: just to add since I saw a comment about multiplayer, there is a community run seasonal ladder League as well. Grim League, for those interested.
Yeah so many people have missed out on Grim Dawn. It’s a bit sad it doesn’t have multiplayer but in the grand scale of things its what a lot of people wanted with D4. Let me play Singleplayer offline! This game does it. And boy does it do it well.
I played all current dlcs and the base game on separate occasions alone and with my friends and the game never really clicks for me. I don’t know what it is but it never got as fun as many other arpgs for me. Doubt that I will look at this new expansion as it feels I could have more fun spending my time with another game instead. Kind of weird as I have over a hundred hours and like the game genre but… Yeah.
It’s just old. People talked about it back when it came out. POE I think gets recognized because it’s free to play (with DLC/MTX). I’ve played every ARPG under the sun and Last Epoch is one of the best I’ve ever played. It feels like the real successor to Diablo II
The biggest difference is that PoE gets huge expansions every 3-4 months with new content while Grim Dawn only mostly gets numeric patches. Yeah there’s a new expansion on the horizon, but it’s been a good while…
I think this is an accurate way to put it. I happen to like that game but if it's not what you were expecting or you're tired of it you're not going to like the game.
I have to say the best change from FO4 is ditching the voiced protagonist. That was a big mistake at the time.
What a wierd take, given that people STILL play Skyrim, Morrowind, and Fallout games in droves to this day. And that there are a ton of YouTubers that have made careers exclusively off of Beth lore and build videos and such.
Also given the post is about the game shifting to “mostly positive” on Steam. Which means the vast majority of reviews on steam are actually positive. And a lot of the negative reviews have to do with performance and technical issues, not the gameplay itself.
Also the fact that other “open world story-based shooters with rpg and crafting mechanics” are actually really popular - you know like Cyberpunk, or Mass Effect, or RDR2, or arguably, Jedi Survivor.
If you don’t like Beth games, that’s fine. They’re not for everyone. But it doesn’t mean your opinion is universal.
Yeah, but the SEO rewards anything with the word “Starfield” in it at the moment and there’s enough people seemingly invested in putting down the game at every opportunity that they’ll share this around and drive clicks.
My google news feed is like all Starfield now - getting ridiculous and i’m expecting by tomorrow will be like “Should you make french toast and eat it while playing Starfield?”
There seems to be a bug with the main star/sun not showing up in some amd cards. I don’t recall if Xbox has this glitch, but it does use an amd card as well so seems possible. Hopefully Bethesda or amd or whoever is responsible for the bug can fix it soon.
I’m no gaming expert or Bethesda fanboy, but didn’t someone the other day confirm that there is actual space travel in the game, it just takes days to get to another planet?
The engine works by having square areas of playable in-game sections called cells. Unless the devs created enough cells between planets, and have them in the same world space, for a player to travel in that’s not possible.
I am curious and exited to hear what tricks they have used.
Theres nothing in the engine reqiring to fill every cell between two cells. Might as well be empty space, or cells with random generated terrain.
Also how are they doing the ship interior cell? Loading a cell without removing the old? Why aren’t they using the same thing for interior windows in houses then?
That sounds exactly like the old Morrowind loading system. It was relatively seamless at the time for traveling about outdoors, sans the mini loading between these cells. It used to take a few seconds back in the day it was released but with modern SSDs it takes a fraction of a second.
Oblivion and Skyrim made this for the most part invisible. But loading times for indoor transitions still existed.
I see. In that case I fully expect someone to make a ‘open cities’ mod for systems. If you can reach the billboards it should be possible to create a transition to planet space. Maybe.
But then we’d need something for faster flight inside a system. Like E:D does for example. I Won’t spend 7hrs traveling from planet to planet just for the immersion :D
Well you can already fast travel between planets. I’d be okay with the happy medium of intersystem travel if it meant I could actually land on a planet. The problem is the way Bethesda has set it up, the planets themselves aren’t real, there’s just a handful of zones around POIs.
You can fly in space towards the planets you can see. When you get there, you won't be able to land and will be able to fly straight through the planet itself.
Planets outside of the fast travel menu aren't really planets
If this game had dropped in 2016, I’d be ecstatic. But… I played Elden Ring & it felt a bit like a modded Skyrim, that was better than Skyrim. Now, Bethesda games feel stale.
As much as I want to be critical of it based on the cringelord description, the actual gameplay footage doesn't look awful at all. Of course, it's impossible to really judge an ARPG without seeing how the loot system feels as you play it. But at least visually, it looks pretty well fleshed out. Honestly, I hope they find success with this project.
I've played Last Epoch for ~250 hours (and counting) over the last year since I bought it, so I'll give a mini-review here. The TL;DR is that it feels like a brilliant middle ground between Path Of Exile and Diablo - it has depth and complexity but doesn't have the brutal learning curve that Path Of Exile does. It doesn't have the content variety that Path Of Exile has, but it's also an early access game right now so that's expected. It's a great foundation, their patches have been substantial, their communications tend to feel good, and I feel like they're a good development studio. A lot of the developer insights make it feel like they take very good approaches to problem-solving, too.
The combat feels absolutely fantastic. The animations are smooth and feel modern. It can feel a little "floaty" for some people, but personally I have no issues with the way it feels. It's paced in such a way that fighting regular enemies still feels engaging (unlike Path Of Exile's zoom- and dopamine-fest) but isn't a slog, and more powerful enemies can put up really good satisfying fights. There's a good variety of skills and the way you modify them with the skill tree system can change them significantly. The build depth isn't quite as crazy as Path Of Exile's, but considering most POE players just follow build guides rather than taking their own builds, I'd say that won't matter for most people. And for people who do like creating their own builds from scratch - which I do - there's still plenty of depth to Last Epoch's system.
It's very realistic (and encouraged) for new players to experiment and create their own builds. Respeccing is pretty simple, and the skill systems are simple enough that new players can work it out for themselves, but there are also some interesting combinations and min-maxy things for more advanced players can figure out and build around. Each skill has its own skill tree, and while the trees aren't super complex, there's a good variety of ways to modify each skill. Some of the skills also have interactions with other skills - for instance, Teleport has a modifier that means your next skill has no mana cost; Meteor has one where your Fireball has reduced mana cost for a few seconds after casting it. You can chain that into a skill rotation: Teleport > Meteor (which normally has a high mana cost) > Fireball spam and suddenly you're going to have a much better time with mana sustain, but perhaps need to work out a way to deal with the fact that your movement skill is being used offensively and won't be available for dodging. So the game sort of gently hints at some skill combos like that, but they never feel forced and you still feel smart when you put it all together yourself.
The loot system is good. It has the single best crafting system I've seen in any ARPG, and crafting is absolutely worth your time and a necessity if you're pushing your build as far as it goes. But you need good starting items to work with - you can't just take a terrible item and craft it into something amazing. Crafting lets you upgrade the tiers of modifiers, add new mods if there's space, and sometimes modify items in slightly more spicy ways if you're feeling brave. But items have a "crafting potential" which depletes as you craft on them, so looting items is important.
The legendary item system is also very good. Unique items have their usual fixed stats, but they can have something called "legendary potential", which rolls between 0 and 4. Legendary potential does nothing by itself, but it allows you to combine a purple-tier item with your unique item; the amount of legendary potential you have dictates the number of mods from your purple item that will be randomly added to your unique item. Non-unique items can have 4 modifiers, so being able to create legendary items with the unique stats and powerful regular item stats is a really good end-game chase.
Most unique items are target farmable in the end-game. That's not to say you can get them immediately, but you can target "unique rings" as a reward, for instance, or target a specific boss that can have a chance to drop the item you're looking for. So overall, I think it's a good item system!
I think they've taken a very good approach to problem-solving - their upcoming trade system, for instance, looks (on paper) like it'll fix the biggest issues with Path Of Exile's trade system and Diablo 3's auction house, while also having the benefits of both and while giving players an avenue to progress without engaging with trade at all. (Basically, players join either the trading guild or the "solo" guild. Traders can trade, solo players get a boost to their loot and can target farm things more easily. People can trade with their party/friends separately from this trading system so the whole guild system doesn't matter for co-op play.) It's smart, and that kind of thinking can be seen across multiple systems in the game.
Well damn, that all sounds very promising! I'm gonna have to look into this game a bit further, as this sounds like it has a lot of my favorite elements of the ARPGs from AAA studios that I love, but without the problems I often have with those games. Thanks for sharing this!
If you haven't already, I'd definitely recommend putting this up as a proper review somewhere, too. That's way too in-depth to just get lost in a random Lemmy thread over time!
You're welcome, of course! I'll definitely see about refining it and finding somewhere to post it, that's a good suggestion! It's given me some ideas to discuss in a more broad essay about complexity, depth and accessibility, too.
One criticism I'll add that I didn't mention in my above comment (because I ran out of characters and had to trim some stuff!) is the atmosphere of the game. It's not bad, and some of the level design is really nice, but the game doesn't have a strong tone, aesthetic or level of writing in the way Grim Dawn does, for example (although Grim Dawn is probably the peak as far as atmosphere and world-building in ARPGs goes, I think, so maybe that's not a fair comparison). Last Epoch has some interesting ideas relating to time travel, and it's pretty cool seeing some of the same areas in different eras (plus it's a clever way for them to reuse assets, I imagine), but I'd say it's weaker than other major ARPGs in the story/world-building/atmosphere department. Of course, most people tend to play ARPGs for the gameplay first and foremost, and LE does a great job with that, so it's a more minor criticism from me than it would be in other genres of game.
I am always tempted to try new ARPGs because games like D1, D2, Titan Quest, Dungeon Siege, Sacred etc. were my childhood but honestly I can't stand the grind and repetition anymore - I kinda want a good challenging combat system that makes me feel good, play the game through once or twice and be done with it, with as little pointless filler as possible.
Would you say Last Epoch can be played like this or is it more like PoE and D3/4 in the way that it's mostly about item grind and stat crunching? I do not expect it to be a game for me at all, and that's very okay, but with all the praise about combat and build variety I can't help but hope a little bit.
I have played last epoch for hundreds of hours as well, and I will say I really enjoy it. It’s my go-to ARPG because the skill system feels so damn good. It isn’t the mess of nodes that PoE is, and it isn’t the very braindead level of skills that Diablo 3 had (haven’t played 4 because blizzard). Pretty much every skill has its own skill tree, and you can often make skills cast other skills or find awesome synergies and the game excels at giving you the power to make your own build and have it actually work.
Other notes, the crafting system is absolutely fantastic. You will end up crafting all the time, not just at endgame and it feels so good, and is very easy to understand without being braindead.
Most of the endgame content is great, but it just needs more and extra of it. They have a few dungeons that do different specific things, so you don’t necessarily go there to farm, you go there because you want some feature or thing that place has. It’s a really fun system.
I will say at 0.9.2 there are still some issues with multiplayer sync, so if you want to wait til 1.0 to play it with bros then understandable. What a fun game IMO though.
They truly did pick the worst description for it possible. I’ve had a lot of fun with it, though. Pretty solid game for being in beta, and the devs seem decently in-tune with the community.
It was somewhat less of a knock when they first started making the game; it was a successful Kickstarter project ~5 years ago so it's been in development for a while. For what it's worth, I've got ~250 hours in the game and think it's shaping up really well (you can find my not-so-mini-review elsewhere in this thread).
Full model replacements are typically not hard, especially if theyre being used as a replacment for already existing assets vs creating a new asset and item id for.
Its like the modding scene for both brawl and umvc3.
It only starts off with replacing already exiting assets, but it wont explode till you figure out how to add custom assets. Brawls point was when project m devs found how to add character slots, umvc3 was when they figured out similar + making fully custom models/animations without having to borrow existing ones.
You need the tools to exist to get to the blowup point.
In-app purchases, requires 3rd party account, and no LAN. I think their biggest rivals are Grim Dawn still getting expansions and that new Titan Quest.
Give it a try on the high seas. I did and I ended up buying it because it really is that good. I never interacted with a cash shop in my entire time playing
… On the story. Their priority is the story. The cash shop is quite recent and the time it takes to develop isn’t even in the same universe as story content. Story content requires developing new zones, new enemy types, voice acting… They spent tons of time developing multiplayer, that’s a huge undertaking by itself where they are improving constantly. They just reworked some quests and remade the tylesets of some campaign zones. Developing the cash shop can’t have been more than 5% of the time they spent developing last year.
Either you don’t know about development in general, you are blinded by rage with the drama they had with the release of the cash shop (which they reworked) or you are being malicious. I’m guessing 1 or 2.
I’ve seen early access games that go their entire dev cycle without adding real-cash shops. this pervasive idea that microtransactions are just an acceptable thing in any new game has me absolutely incredulated.
it doesn’t matter how long it takes to develop, putting a cash shop in an unfinished game is a bad move optics wise.
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Aktywne