Good Morning Friends! I freaking love Last Epoch. Back in 2018, I have to admit I did not see where this game would go but it has honestly become that happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile for me. As much as I love it though, there are still some features that I wish it had. This morning I am going to spitball a wishlist of features that I would love to see that I feel would turn this diamond in the rough into the perfect game. I feel like this is fair game since the group at Eleventh Hour Games seems to be constantly evolving the game to make it better. The multiplayer patch really brought Last Epoch into the pantheon of great ARPGs for me. That however is not to say that there cannot be improvements.
Guilds/Clans
With the drop of 0.90 we got the ability to group up with other people, which is really key for my long-term enjoyment of an ARPG. When this was implemented there were also some very basic social features, like the ability to add players to your friend list. This is sort of the bare minimum of required functionality, but I would love to see this expanded a bit more. I am very much a guild-minded person, and even in the largely throw-away Open Beta weekend, I created a branch of Greysky Armada in Diablo IV. Guilds are many things, but at their most simple level, they are an easier way of meeting up with your friends rather than having to trade dozens of individual account ids. Even if we got nothing more than the ability to join a guild and the ability to have a guild chat channel, I would be happy enough.
I mean ultimately that is the only functionality that we have within Diablo III, but it is important enough to me that I consider it on the “should haves” if not on the “must haves” list when approaching a long-term social ARPG. I mean I did not play Path of Exile very long without going through the process of creating a guild.
Guild Bank/Trading/Locking
Surrounding the announcement of the multiplayer patch there was a lot of discussion surrounding trade. Right now it is extremely simple and follows something akin to the rules of Diablo III. If you are with a player when an item drops, you can gift the item to another player. However, I believe with the 1.0 patch, they will be working in a brilliant compromise to the debate of no public trade or a full-on POE-style trading economy with APIs supporting it. Essentially every player will have the choice of either joining the Merchants’ Guild and eventually receiving access to full trading including a public auction house system or joining the Circle of Fortune and receiving improved drop rates but losing the ability to publicly trade items. Circle of Fortune players will be able to build up a currency with another player and then use that to gift items to them, pending they are also a member of the Circle of Fortune. Merchants’ Guild players will never have access to items dropped by folks on the Fortune side.
I would love to see this tweaked a bit to add a new classification to the item locking. I would love to have something similar to the guild bank from Path of Exile. As we work our way through a new league, we are often dropping items that look decent for folks coming up behind us. I would love for some way to have “guild locking” for lack of a better term so that if you donate an item to the guild bank, it can only be used by members of that guild. This would keep those items from ever making it to the trade economy but also increase the social aspect of the gameplay. Maybe even create a “guild currency” that you gain from spending time grouped with guild members, which you can then spend to remove items from the guild bank. Granted there would need to be some administrative level that allows folks to clean out the bank and dump unneeded items straight to gold or shattering, but I am certain Eleventh Hour Games could reach a good compromise for how all of that might work.
Adventure Mode/Bounties
The worst part about leveling a new character in both Path of Exile and Last Epoch is the fact that you need to go through the story content again. One of the systems that work brilliantly is Adventure Mode from Diablo III, and I am somewhat shocked that no other game has implemented something similar to this. Essentially in Diablo III, once you have finished the campaign one time (and I believe now it is just immediately open to everyone), you get access to adventure mode which allows you to freely move between all waypoints available in the game and choose your own path to leveling.
Given that the Last Epoch map feels pretty similar to the Diablo III one, I could see this sort of system working beautifully. Another aspect of Adventure Mode that I really enjoy is doing Bounties for Bounty Caches. I get that for many players these are not exactly the highlight of their gaming experience, and they are often much maligned by more hardcore players as being a “requirement” of the seasonal journey there. I personally like them because it gives me a clear micro objective that is broader than running a single map, but less time-consuming than completing an entire quest sequence. There are lots of generally useful resources that already drop like candy, that I could see rolling up into specific bounty caches. You could have a cache of crafting resources, a cache of idols, or even a cache of rare gear with the very limited ability to drop uniques or set pieces. More paths to the same result is always a good thing as far as I am concerned because it allows folks to vary up their gameplay.
Unstable Echoes
This idea goes somewhat hand in hand with the opening of an alternative leveling mode like Diablo III’s adventure mode. Right now you can technically start the Monolith when you reach the End of Time zone for the very first time. Whether or not you can actually do that is another question, because the Monolith system as it exists today is at a fixed level and requires you to be able to survive a level 55 map. What I would propose is something akin to the Nephalem Rift/Greater Rift system from Diablo III. The idea I had is to call them “Unstable Echoes” and effectively zone into a random echo map with random objectives and random rewards. Much like players enjoy leveling through doing Rifts in Diablo III, it would be awesome if we could just start doing Monoliths in a random system independent from the ACTUAL Monolith progression.
I mean if Eleventh Hour Games wanted to go for the gold, it would be neat if these Unstable Echoes had a sequence of objectives that ultimately led to fighting a miniboss similar to a Rift Guardian. That however isn’t necessary, and I would honestly be perfectly happy with just randomly spawning one of the existing Monolith Echoes at a level that scaled to the player. Bonus points would be if the system allowed players to choose what level of Monolith they wanted to tackle. This could even be spun into a completely unique progression system that worked kinda like Greater Rift progression so as you passed level 100, you were gaining a certain amount of corruption as well to keep making harder and more rewarding singleton Echoes.
Hideouts/Housing
Right from the start I know this request is a bit out there because player housing is an exceptionally expensive system to implement. It is one of those systems that can have some extremely solid returns when it comes to selling cosmetics, but a massive initial outlay of work to put even the most basic version in the game. That said… I love the Hideout/Guild Hideout system from Path of Exile and I would love to see something like this implemented at some point in the future in Last Epoch. I mean these really don’t serve a purpose other than allowing players to have a trophy hall of sorts and a shared communal space. This is definitely on the long-term “wouldn’t it be cool” list.
Appearance Collection/Wardrobe
I love cosmetics and wardrobe systems, and right now Last Epoch already has the most basic version stubbed out. Currently, if you have one of the pets gained through backing the game at various times during its development process, you can have them follow you around. In-game there is an Appearance tab for your character and it has slots similar to Path of Exile where you can in theory modify the visual appearance of every item you have equipped. I would assume that the idea as it stands to have a similar cosmetic shop to Path of Exile where you can buy an appearance and then wear that as a sort of visual override to what you actually have equipped.
This is a good start for certain, but what I would love to see as the final implementation is something akin to games like Guild Wars 2 where every item that drops saves a copy of that appearance to your wardrobe. Then when you click on a slot you see every appearance that has dropped along with every appearance that you have purchased. This sort of system just feels better than a cash-shop-only system, because it allows everyone to participate and also… gives folks options if nothing available through the cash-shop really interests them. Sometimes you just want to wear something that matches and don’t necessarily want to be blinged out. Cosmetic systems are great, but the systems that blend in world drops with purchased appearances are always the best ones.
Character Creator/Gender Options
Last Epoch suffers from the same problem that a lot of older ARPGs have, where when you choose your character class you are also locking in gender and a specific appearance. At this point, I am mostly numb to this construct as I have dealt with it over and over in these games. Diablo III has a slightly improved system where when you choose your class you are still locking in a specific appearance, but you get to choose between a male and female option. Mike one of the developers from Eleventh Hour Games regularly hosts a Friday live stream over on Twitch where he fields questions from the audience, and this has come up multiple times. Each time he gives essentially the same answer… that they would like to do this but they have not felt they could devote the budget to it yet.
On some level this makes sense. In development, especially when you are working on missing features… you often end up with a mindset of “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” and right now they have a functional character system. However at some point, I would love to see them address this, and they have at least shown some modicum of interest in it as a long-range goal. When they do rework the character creation system, I would love to see them at least have some basic appearance options as well. Diablo IV did not have necessarily the most amazing character creation system, but you at least felt like you could put your own mark on what the character looks like and I would love to see them implement at least something along those lines. Not every character creator has to be something that you are going to spend literal hours on perfecting, but it would be nice to have options.
Account-Based Monolith Progression
The Monolith Timeline and Echo system feels really good. It is a fun endgame that sees your character zipping around the end of time collecting resources and fighting interesting bosses. The problem is when approaching a seasonal progression arc… you are quickly locked into making a hard choice of what character you want to play because progressing this system on multiple characters is a huge ask. I’ve been chewing away at this for weeks, and I’ve still not entered the “true” endgame of Empowered Monoliths. I’ve been interested in trying out a primalist character, but it feels like the idea of progressing another character to this point is a massive outlay of time. Sure you can get a friend to somewhat cheat your way into empowered monoliths… but even that feels super janky.
What I would love to see is something akin to the Atlas of Worlds in Path of Exile, where your progress is tied to your account and not any individual character. Alting is healthy in an ARPG, and I feel like right now… Last Epoch is not terribly alt friendly. A good number of the suggestions that I have made above are to make a variety of ways that you can interact with the game on different characters, and having account-based progression is quite possibly the most important of these. I am hoping that internally Eleventh Hour Games already realizes this is a problem and is working on its own solution.
Seasonal Expansions
Eleventh Hour Games has already announced that they do have a seasonal mechanic planned at some point called “Cycles” and that they plan on these being pretty basic resets. This is fine, and I would expect them to stay basic for a while. However, I do hope at some point the door is open to using this seasonal cadence as the introduction of entirely new game modes. While I feel like maybe the Path of Exile seasonal mechanic system is a bit much for any other game, I would love to see some new game mode added each year or so. I love Delve and Heist in Path of Exile and they wildly change the enjoyment of that game for me. Eleventh Hour Games has already had some pretty brilliant solutions to classical ARPG problems, and I would love to see the sort of game modes they can come up with to expand the base of the game. I am not saying we need the expansion every three months cadence of Path of Exile, but I would love to see something eventually.
Wrapping Up
Last Epoch is a phenomenal game, and so far has been the game I always wished for… something that kinda splits the difference between the overwhelming complexity of Path of Exile and the quick simple joy of Diablo III. That said it can always be improved and my goal of this morning was to lay out some of my ideas for things I would love to see. Do I think anyone from Eleventh Hour Games is even going to see this? No not really. I realize I very small voice from a very small corner of the internet, but I think more than anything I did this for my own benefit to get this nonsense out of my head. I am going to keep playing Last Epoch and enjoying myself, but also going to keep playing Path of Exile and other ARPGs to keep collecting “wouldn’t it be cool” ideas. I love where the ARPG genre is right now and how many different expressions of it exist, but as with MMORPGs, there are always things I would love to see from one game to another game.
Do you agree with some of my assessments? Did I completely get this all wrong? Drop me a line below and tell me your own thoughts.
The post Perfecting Last Epoch appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Right now I have to say I am thankful for Last Epoch. It is weird to me that this game that I had written off back in 2018, had morphed into almost exactly the game that I have always wanted. Granted I would still love to see more endgame options added in because effectively you have 3 wildly different dungeons, a horde-mode-like arena, and then monolith echos which are the equivalent of Path of Exile mapping. I would still love to see someone other than Diablo III implement the equivalent of bounties and an entirely alternate system for leveling other than doing the story. Last Epoch suffers from the same problem as Path of Exile where doing the acts over and over does tend to drag on a bit. I’ve been wanting to level up and try out a primalist and the only thing holding me back is needing to repeat all of the story content again. Even if they added an alternative step so that when you get to the first interaction with the Epoch, you had the alternative path shifting into effectively an endless version of the monolith echoes that dumped you out into the end of time.
Speaking of paths and timelines… I spent a lot of Tuesday night unlocking pathways that I had not opened up. There are still technically a few alternate paths between timelines that I have not unlocked but I at least have access to all of them directly now. Knowing what I know now… I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and could have taken a much shorter route to the final three. Essentially at a bare minimum, it seems like you have to clear seven timelines before being able to unlock the empowered monolith. The path I wound up taking would have put me through eight before I went on my side jaunt to unlock the rest of the timeline islands. The final three islands are a bit of a chore and I’ve actually taken a death in them so I am in no real rush to meet those bosses.
I honestly struggled a bit with the Emperor of Corpses in the level 85 timeline, in part because once again I was overthinking things. In the above screenshot, you see this giant hurricane attack with the area around the boss being the safe zone. Prior to that, the boss does a close AOE attack and I thought I would have to dance on the line between these two attacks. That meant that inevitably I would lose some minions because they would be slow getting out of the hurricane of death. What I finally realized is that I can stand in the small AOE without taking significant damage, so I could simply stay in close range at all times and just need to move away from the head of the dragon to avoid breath attacks. Again like the Rahyeh my interpretation of the fight was making everything much harder than it actually needed to be.
Last night I dinged 84 and have almost filled up enough Stability in The Last Ruin to start working on boss progress for that timeline. However, I think what I am going to do is fill up the bar past the third node, and then shift timelines and start working on another one to get it filled as well. The goal is to gain a few levels and be a bit closer to level 90 before I face any of the last three timeline bosses. I could probably yolo my way through the timelines and rush the final bosses, but I prefer to level and potentially gain a bit more gear before stepping into those fights. My tendency will always be to over level encounters because in truth I don’t really “crave” challenging fights in the same way some people do. I am fine with them if I have to deal with them, but I would rather “roflstomp” things when possible. I play ARPGs for the power fantasy achieved through leveling and gearing more than any sense of overcoming difficulty.
My gear is still a bit of a mess. Right now I have a lot of less-than-perfect items and still am wearing three slots that are yellow that I have not found a purple worth equipping yet. My resistances are still a mess with absolutely nothing in the poison and void category. I’ve heard that the real win here is to get resistance through blessings and that once you get access to empowered blessings these help significantly. I have a lot of minion health and less raw minion damage… because I’ve just happened into a few pieces with significant T6 minion health rolls on them. This makes my minions super tanky but maybe take a bit longer to shred bosses… but generally I am okay with that.
I realize that Last Epoch is still very much a pre-release game but I am anxious for them to implement some cosmetics other than pets, and the upcoming backpack. Like I am mostly fine with the way my character looks… but at some point would love to see something other than “Night Hag” has my graphical options. Maybe it is just the phenomenal necromancer graphics from Diablo IV coming into play here, but I would love to be able to equip a consistent look and stick with it all the way through leveling. I am always more than happy to spend money on making my character look cool while leveling rather than looking like an unmatched outlands era fury warrior. I am hoping that when 1.0 lands this is one of the systems that also open up because I am more than happy to give them more than my initial $30 to keep the game running and evolving.
The post Timeline Progression appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Happy Super Adventure Box! I have to be honest I am not nearly as nostalgic for the April Fools event in Guild Wars 2 as some folks are, but they did manage to pry some more money from my pocket with this amazing Siege Turtle skin. Really the price of admission is entirely worth it for the 1980s arcade sound effects while using it. I love the aesthetics of this event even if I don’t necessarily love grinding through the world. Essentially I tend to easily get up to the frog boss and then fail miserably. What I did not expect is that apparently unlocks for SAB are character bound instead of account bound, so I had to go through the process of rigging up all of the things like bombs and shovels on my Ranger since I prefer to be playing that character currently even though for the purposes of the Super Adventure Box it does not really matter.
For anyone who has no clue what I am talking about, the Super Adventure Box is this weird original one-off April Fool’s event where players could run around in a vaguely Super Mario 64 inspired map. This was so beloved by the player base that it ultimate became a permanent event coming back each year for a week or so around the beginning of April. I’ve talked about it before in the past and even have some screenshots of the world. Essentially you work your way through a series of challenges in a Mario-esc 1-1, 1-2 etc sequence. There are a number of achievements for you to get like finding green and red baubles and a whole slew of items available for purchase through Bauble Bubbles which you can purchase for every 250 baubles collected in the levels. It uses a Zelda-like mechanic where you keep having to purchase larger wallets in order to hold more Baubles through each trip into the zones.
Super Adventure Box requires a continue coin in order to play, and at the beginning of the festival, you are given five of these. They can then be purchased with baubles or I believe found in chests spread throughout the levels. Since I was already making a purchase, I decided to pick up the Super Adventure Pack which includes a convenience item called the Infinite Continue Coin. Essentially when you hit the game over screen, in lieu of inserting a continue coin… you can use your infinite continue coin which will then give you 99 lives to explore the level making the whole process way less tedious. This is essentially a one-time purchase and is only available during the Super Adventure Festival.
Now this is where we get into the long history of Guild Wars 2, because apparently as I understand it… there was a third world teased at one point but never actually delivered. I believe this is in part because all of Super Adventure Box was essentially a passion project of one of the devs, and when they left the company so left the motivation to keep making Super Adventure Box levels. So all of the achievement hunters are currently slavering over a playable “test” of the third world. Essentially this area is missing some of the final polish but allows folks to go through it and collect some of the achievements. I watched a live stream for a bit yesterday afternoon of one of the OG players hunting for the baubles that they were missing.
While the jumping puzzles are not necessarily my jam… I do love this time of year for the neat skins that you can get. For example yesterday out of one of my daily loot boxes from killing Champions, I got this Retro-Forged Rifle which sorta looks like a giant 8-bit era zapper gun. I’ve got a similar pixelated hammer and Legend of Zelda-looking short bow skin. There are also craftable skins for various bosses in the mini-game. I picked up the infinite continue coin because this year I would really like to finish the entire map, or at least beat all of the bosses. I might need to watch a strategy video because King Toad always kicks my ass. It feels like I should be able to dodge or jump over some of the mechanics but I never seem to be able to do so.
Are you participating in Super Adventure Festival? Were you also swayed by the low polygon turtle mount skin? Have you been anxiously awaiting World Three? Drop me a line below.
The post Low Polygon Turtle appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! Last night was absolutely a Last Epoch while listening to an audiobook and snuggling with cats type evening. I was not feeling great and I don’t think Josie has been either. She has been glued to me at every possible opportunity and even this morning she is already on the box beside me. As a result of this and the fact that Gracie was telling us it was bedtime at about 8:30 last night… I wound up going to bed significantly earlier than normal. This was probably a good call and other than waking up in the middle of the night to turn off the brightness of the muted television… I think I slept all of the ways through. My major accomplishment for last night is that I dinged 80 on my Necromancer which continues to feel pretty solid.
As far as the audiobook goes, I had originally intended to roll into the next book in the Iron Druid Chronicles series but wound up having the decision made for me. My hold for The Hunger of the Gods the next book in the series that I just finished the first book of came open. So I could either let it pass or roll on into this book knowing that my mind was already keyed up for that particular brand of norse nonsense. At this point, I am around 80% through the novel and should finish it up today… which I guess is a good thing because this morning I woke up to find that my hold for Legends & Lattes has just come open as well and I have three days to claim that. I suppose that my book nonsense is sorted for the next bit then, and that also probably means I am going to be playing a lot more Last Epoch given that ARPGs blend nicely with listening to an audiobook.
At this point, I am working on my fifth monolith. At some point, I should go back to the previous monoliths and unlock those while the experience gained from them would still be reasonable. Essentially when you get the endgame after defeating the boss of the first Monolith you are presented with a choice. Do you go down the level 62 monolith path or down the 66 monolith path? I went down the 66 path and then once I got to the level 75 monolith I was presented with another choice… whether or not to fight and ultimately kill Architect Liath. I did not realize this was making a path choice, because I decided to let her go which led me to the level 80 monolith. Had I chosen to fight and kill her I would have gotten the 85 monolith… but even though I made this decision it seems to have only delayed my progress not changed it significantly as I am now working on the 85 monolith.
Last night I began work on Reign of Dragons which is the level 85 web of echoes and I am nearing the point where I can challenge the boss. Ultimately I have decided that my preferred method for doing a monolith is to fill the bar, and then run through all of the quest’s echoes in order rather than filling to a quest echo and doing it, then filling again and doing the next one. Essentially my general path through an echo is to look for resource nodes, key nodes, and anything that rewards idols or set/unique items. Ultimately you end up having to take some of the crappier gold or rare item nodes in order to connect the dots to some of the nodes you actually want. Ace is already through the first pass of the monoliths and on to Empowered Monoliths so I am trying to play a bit of catch-up.
So I did a thing yesterday that was completely unplanned. I realized I had been talking about what I was not enjoying about Diablo IV Beta, but not really giving many examples of the sorts of things that I do enjoy. As a result, I recorded a quick video of me playing through a Monolith Echo and kind of talking through the process as I did it. It has been a really long time since I last recorded a video, but I think it came together well enough. I will never be a YouTuber in earnest, but I do like occasionally recording videos to share with my friends in order to illustrate a point. Some people write blog posts to back up their videos… and I record videos to back up my blog posts. It wildly has gotten quite a few views over the last twenty-four hours… at least a lot for one of my videos.
The post Reign of Dragons appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
