Diablo 4, Path of Exile, and the rest of the ARPG genre has competition in the mega-ambitious Last Epoch, built by its Reddit community and heading towards 1.0.
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).
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.
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