Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Last Epoch - time travel action-RPG

cyborgboy95

News Cyborg
Joined
Aug 24, 2019
Messages
2,735
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/899770/view/3147451816479923289

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.

Party / Friends / Gameplay

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 {LINK REMOVED} - 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.

Characters

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.

Deployment

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.

Users / Game Access

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.

Chat

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.

Login / Game Server / Matchmaking

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.

Goals for January

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

Planning for Community Testing
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.

Growing the Multiplayer Team
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.

Becoming “Production Ready"
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.

Monolith/Crafting Ready
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.

Final Thoughts

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!
 

cyborgboy95

News Cyborg
Joined
Aug 24, 2019
Messages
2,735
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/899770/view/4468135672847827838

Development Update
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.

Forecast Update
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.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

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.

New Dungeons
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.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

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.

Arena Champions
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?

New 3D models for several Unique Weapons
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.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

[forum.lastepoch.com]

[forum.lastepoch.com]

[forum.lastepoch.com]

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

[forum.lastepoch.com]

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

[forum.lastepoch.com]

[forum.lastepoch.com]

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

And much more…
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.
 

cyborgboy95

News Cyborg
Joined
Aug 24, 2019
Messages
2,735
https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/multiplayer-progress-update-january-2022/47678

Multiplayer Progress Update - January 2022


Multiplayer Progress Update
Hello all, happy new year, an
d 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 18, this month we’ll be taking a break from covering the more technical aspects of Multiplayer implementation and instead will discuss 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.

Partying up
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 (
    green_circle.png
    Online,
    black_circle.png
    Offline,
    orange_circle.png
    Busy)
  • 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, 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.

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
Adding Players to your party
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.

16577b0edc4a9b1418804d1febb8279ca21f5166.png


Chat Improvements
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

Customizing tabs
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

Chat and Item linking
A common request from players has been to allow linking items in chat. We’re pleased to say that this functionality is being added, 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.

What aspects of multiplayer UX are we focusing on now?
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.

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!
 

cyborgboy95

News Cyborg
Joined
Aug 24, 2019
Messages
2,735
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/899770/view/4468135672863830485

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!

What moderation means to us
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:

Setting the stage
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.

Guiding the conversations
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.

Moderation action
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.

How we plan to implement this style of moderation
Community Moderator Program - Codename “Beesfriends”

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.

Empowering players to be involved in moderation
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[support.lastepoch.com] 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.

Why this style of moderation?
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.

Joining the Beesfriends
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.[support.lastepoch.com]

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

cyborgboy95

News Cyborg
Joined
Aug 24, 2019
Messages
2,735
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/899770/view/3138450510780518476

Multiplayer Progress Update - February 2022
Hello all, and welcome to the second multiplayer blog of 2022!

If you checked out Ross’ post last month[forum.lastepoch.com], 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[forum.lastepoch.com]. 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[forum.lastepoch.com], and mention a few exciting game design tidbits


[thumbs.gfycat.com]
Characters / Crafting
We’ve finished all of our preliminary work here. Which means... we have multiplayer crafting!

[forum.lastepoch.com]

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.

Deployment
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[eleventhhour.games] for more hands to manage the multiplayer release of Last Epoch!

Users / Game Access
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.

Chat
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.

Login / Game Server / Matchmaking
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.

Goals for March
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.

Multiplayer Monolith
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!

Diagnostics / Fixing multiplayer bugs fast
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.

Remaining Game Content
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!

Final Thoughts
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!
 

cyborgboy95

News Cyborg
Joined
Aug 24, 2019
Messages
2,735
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/899770/view/3138451598563985683

Depths of Eterra Update (0.8.5) - Coming March 18th
Today is an exciting day to be part of the Last Epoch community!

First off, thank you for being so patient while waiting to hear what is in store for our next big update. That wait is now over, and your patience is about to be rewarded.

Today we are revealing that patch 0.8.5 - Depths of Eterra is only 9 days away, releasing on March 18th. WHAT? 9 DAYS? Fire up the hype train!? We hear you, and we agree. This patch cycle we decided to take a different approach in the way we announce all the cool new things that are coming: We’ve packed them all into a Non-stop, 9 day, Extended Hype Week, Patch Extravaganza *TM. Ok, we are still working on the name.

What does this mean for you? It means that starting today, you’ll get new updates, features, or reveals everyday for 9 days until we hit patch release! To kick off this Non-stop, 9 day, Extended Hype Week, Patch Spectacular *TM we are starting with an overview of patch highlights, and when you can expect more details on each of these highlights.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

The Depths of Eterra hold many slumbering secrets and waking dreams. On March 18th, new passages open filled with bellowing fires and necrotic energies, the mountains themselves seem to quake to life, and amongst the chaos, those focused on fame and glory within the walls of the arena will find fierce new foes staking their rights to the name Arena Champions.

In patch 0.8.5 join us in exploring two new dungeons, and face down the fierce new Arena Champions for fame, glory, and well earned rewards.

Dungeons Overview
As patch 0.8.5, Depths of Eterra, is introducing the second and third dungeon to Last Epoch, we want to go over what makes a dungeon a dungeon, what the goals of the dungeon system are, and the future of dungeons in Last Epoch. Our goal with dungeons is to provide repeatable endgame content that exists within the world of the campaign. This means dungeons can, and will, be added to all sorts of areas within the campaign, and you may even be able to encounter dungeons fairly early on.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

With dungeons being designed to show up throughout the campaign in Last Epoch, each one is also created with the ability to scale multiple tiers, starting from whenever they first appear in the campaign, all the way to level 100. This allows us to add, through playable content, more lore to the world, as well as provide challenges and rewards for new and experienced players alike.

As these dungeons are added as part of the core world of Eterra rather than being a “side mechanic”, and their lore true to the timeline of the campaign, these dungeons also allow players to play through the campaign using different paths. Rather than each character always following the same quest-to-quest path to get through the campaign reach the “end game”, with the right keys subsequent characters can instead enter a dungeon at one point during the campaign, and end up at a different part of the campaign. This results in an opportunity to have unique and customizable playthrough experiences.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

Each dungeon is designed to have its own unique mechanic as well as its own unique rewards. While not all of these rewards may be as “game changing” as Temporal Sanctum’s Eternity Cache, each reward mechanic will provide a distinct method to fuel your character’s progression.

We plan to continue to add dungeons to Last Epoch for as long as we feel there is a good place for them in the world, and we feel we have a good way to implement a new mechanic and reward. However, enough dev talk, we know you’re eager to hear about the new content to explore in patch 0.8.5, and we’re exited to share.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

March 10th: New Uniques
With 0.8.5 we’re going to be adding a number of new Uniques to Last Epoch, continuing to bolster the existing roster. Make sure to keep an eye out for this post to get a peek at some of the new unique items!

[forum.lastepoch.com]

March 11th: Dungeon - Soulfire Bastion
North of Lake Liath in the Imperial Era, a Lich of the Immortal Empire has unearthed the remains of an old Osprix battleground. Here he has discovered countless Solarum-made constructs and dangerous supply of potent elemental fire. Understanding the power of what he has discovered, he now works endlessly repurposing the constructs for use by the empire and experimenting with the elemental fire to create a destructive resource know as Soul Embers.

Explore the dangerous excavations of Soulfire Bastion. Put an end to Fire Lich Cremorus’s destructive intent, and don’t forget to fill your boots full of Soul Embers for your trouble. There is more than one individual in Eterra that sees the value in what has been discovered here.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

March 12th: Catalysts Rework
Catalysts have been reworked, both visually and mechanically. These changes present a significant improvement to equipped item rigging, and provide more versatility within the catalyst item type. There is now more options within Catalysts for implicit selection, as well as helping provide for a better gearing system with more options when comparing with other weapon setups.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

March 13th: New Unique Models
We know you want to look as powerful as you feel out there in Eterra, and we are committed to that goal. We are introducing updated 3D models for 25 existing Uniques! Join us March 13th to see your favorite Unique items that are being brought to life in-game!

[forum.lastepoch.com]

(Also) March 13th: New Wraith Models
All Wraiths throughout Eterra have received a significant visual update. This includes both Necromancer’s Summon Wraith skill, as well as the various Wraiths found throughout Eterra.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

March 14th: New Armor Models
0.8.5 - Depths of Eterra will continue to add to our roster of distinct armor designs. Keep an eye out for this post to get a nice view of some of the new armor sets you can collect for your favorite class.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

March 15th: Arena Champions
Jormun’s Fortress, once abandoned for years, has seen renewed activity in the Divine Era. A mysterious portal has opened within its walls, taking brave explorers to arenas around the world to face hordes of deadly enemies. While feared at first, these Arenas quickly became a way to prove one’s ability in combat, and with that it drew the attention of the most talented fighters across Eterra. Over time the fortress adopted a new, more fitting name: Champion’s Gate.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

The thrill of the Arena is a calling that speaks to each of us differently. Competition. Glory. Renown. Respect. While some can not hear the call, others in Eterra believe it to be an essential path of growth and a way of life. Others though, are drawn even further towards the calling and the quest for glory is all they now see. They remain within the Champions Gate, refusing to return to Eterra, waiting to finally find a worthy opponent who is capable of a proper fight, and a proper death.

March 16th: Dungeon - The Lightless Arbor
Eterra’s history holds many secrets - some stretching so far back that they fade into myth. Such is is the case of The Lightless Arbor and The Mountain Beneath. Now, deep in the Ruined Era, during Eterra’s darkest hours, humanity will have to pay the price for that lost knowledge. Deep under the mountains that house the Last Refuge, there is an underground forest which has hidden away creatures and relics dating as far back as before the Ancient Era. One of these creatures - a massive construct made of plant and stone, has awoken - his lumbering beneath the Last Refuge threatens to cause a cave-in that would bury humanity’s last light.

Venture deep into The Lightless Arbor, walking paths untouched by sunlight for over a thousand years. Find safe passage through the dark forgotten forests and caverns, eventually confronting The Mountain Beneath. Within these depths, discover a mysterious vault; which unknown to the world for so long, still holds vast stores of unknown treasures.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

March 17th: Patch Notes
On the 17th you’ll be able to get your hands on all of the juicy details of changes coming in patch 0.8.5 Depths of Eterra.

March 18th: Patch Day!
On the 18th, the passages open, the mountains lurch to life, and the champions stand awaiting challengers. Get into Last Epoch and discover these challenges, as well as their rewards.

[forum.lastepoch.com]

With this patch preview concluded, we come to an end for today’s news and announcement the Unbroken 9 day, Extended Hype Week, Patch Spectacular *TM kickoff! Make sure to keep your eyes on our socials, as we will be continuing with tomorrow’s post on new Uniques in 0.8.5 - Depths of Eterra!

Here’s a summary of what you have to look forward to for the next 9 days. See you then Travelers!

March 9th - Depths of Eterra Update Announcement
March 10th - New Uniques
March 11th - Dungeon - Soulfire Bastion
March 12th - Catalyst Rework
March 13th - New Unique Models
March 13th - New Wraith Models
March 14th - New Armor Set Models
March 15th - Arena Champions
March 16th - Dungeon - The Lightless Arbor
March 17th - Patch Notes & Video Overview
March 18th - Depths of Eterra Launch Day!
 

cyborgboy95

News Cyborg
Joined
Aug 24, 2019
Messages
2,735
https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/new-dungeon-soulfire-bastion/47990

SoulFire Bastion
Welcome Travelers to the third day, and first dungeon reveal of the Unbroken, 9 day, Sequential Hype Week, Patch Extravaganza*TM! In this news post we’re going to be covering the first of the two new dungeons coming in patch 0.8.5 - Depths of Eterra: its lore, mechanics, and unique dungeon reward.
Soulfire Bastion Lore
North of Lake Liath in the Imperial Era, a Lich in the service of the Immortal Empire has unearthed the remains of an Osprix battleground containing countless Solarum made constructs and potent elemental fire. This Lich is now repurposing the constructs for use by the empire and experimenting with elemental fire to create a force known as Soul Embers, threatening to spread fire and destruction. An unlikely ally has made himself known in the form of an unscrupulous imperial agent who seeks to sabotage the operations here under the orders of a rival within the empire - his name: Grin.




SB_KeyScreen1920×800 104 KB



Grin is an experienced agent for the Immortal Empire, a faction of undead humans who control most of the world. While Grin could easily rise as high in the ranks of the Empire’s espionage wing as he wanted, he prefers to keep a low profile. Grin makes a habit of making himself an invaluable asset to Imperial Officers of higher rank, getting paid with as many souls as possible by doing their dirty work, and being ready to stab them in the back when better opportunities present themselves.

Grin currently finds himself working for an Imperial Lich of the Immortal Empire and aiding in his attempts to sabotage another commander of the Empire. He wants to keep as low of a profile on this mission as possible, so he has taken to hiring living adventurers to attack his target for him. You are that adventurer. Your task is to explore the depths of this Osprix battleground turned imperial facility known as the Soulfire Bastion, collect as many of these powerful resources called “Soul Embers” within, and face the ferocity of the Fire Lich inside.

Unique Mechanic: Soulfire Shield & Soul Embers
In Soulfire Bastion, you will find yourself within a conflux of the Immortal Empire’s vile necrotic energies, and Solarum’s searing fire elements. Any normal adventurer would find themselves quickly torn apart by these energies. However in Soulfire Bastion you will be granted a new ability, courtesy of the imperial agent Grin, to help you survive. Of course, being Grin, the knowledge he shares may have been obtained somewhat recently, and perhaps, without the owner’s knowledge.

53727c71c860be033a594cc6a73e7855bfbc2cc8.png


Using the Fire Lich’s own research against him you will have at your disposal the Soulfire Shield. The results of the Fire Lich’s research is great, and the Soulfire Shield is impenetrable to the element it is deflecting, no matter the magnitude. This power comes at a cost however - it must be fed additional Soul Embers in order to change attunements between fire and necrotic. As you face the alternating elements within the dungeon, both from the environment and from enemies within, you will need to decide when the cost must be paid and feed more Soul Embers to the shield to protect yourself.

While progressing through Soulfire Bastion, you will gain Soul Embers by destroying various constructs of the Fire Lich, with more powerful enemies granting additional Soul Embers. Use your Soul Embers to continue fueling your Soulfire Shield, but don’t spend them carelessly, these embers are a highly valuable resource to the right buyer.

Fire Lich Cremorus
A petty and jealous commander in the Immortal Empire’s forces, he finds the culture and history of the long dead Osprix fascinating. Cremorus has chanced upon a Solarum battleground that has been buried and ignored for centuries. Overwhelmed with excitement at his discovery, he devoted his entire regiment’s forces to the excavation and restoration for use by the empire.




FireLich1400×1131 94.1 KB



He feels a sharp jealousy towards a particular rival, whose recent campaigns in the frozen north have won him recognition by the Immortal Emperor himself. He channels this jealousy into his work, embracing the burning hatred he feels into his creation of a new form of soul magic he is calling Soul Embers. This discovery has afforded Cremorus an opportunity to finally overtake his rival’s glory, and he’ll not be so quick to let it slip from his fingers.

The Soul Gambler
Should you find yourself having defeated Fire Lich Cremorus, and pockets heavy with Soul Embers, you’ll have the opportunity to speak with one of the parties interested in helping you lighten the load. The Soul Gambler will trade his items for soul embers you’ve acquired by slaying enemies in the dungeon. He’s willing to trade and trade “fairly”. Though, still an imperial at heart, he’s not willing to tell you exactly what you’re buying.

With the Soul Gambler, you’ll have the ability to trade for a specific item type, such as “helmet” or “shield” with the possibility of it being any subtype. However these items are much more powerful than those any regular gambler would offer, with chances of being items no other gambler would dare to offer. As he’s located within enemy lines, he doesn’t have any backroom stores to change stock while you browse, and you only have at your disposal the Soul Embers from your recent conquest, so choose wisely.

This brings to a conclusion today’s news for the Ceaseless, 9 day, Continued Hype Week, Patch Spectacular *TM! Make sure to keep your eyes on our socials, even through the weekend, as we will be continuing the pre-patch hype with tomorrow’s post on the Catalyst Rework!
 

Eisen

Learned
Joined
Apr 21, 2020
Messages
591
Bought by Tencent it seems
EDIT: Or not, but some influence from Tencent?
 

ADL

Prophet
Joined
Oct 23, 2017
Messages
3,679
Location
Nantucket
Seems like Tencent is hedging their bets between all the loot games. They have stakes in Activision Blizzard, Fatshark, Last Epoch, Path of Exile, Ubisoft, Warframe, Wolcen and acquired a studio founded by former IOI/Ubisoft Massive developers presumably working on some sort of GaaS loot game as well.
 

Tacgnol

Shitlord
Patron
Joined
Oct 12, 2010
Messages
1,871,734
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth
Bought by Tencent it seems
EDIT: Or not, but some influence from Tencent?

Tencent is a low equity partner now.

Still bad, as they wield influence even if they can't actually make outright decisions.
 

ADL

Prophet
Joined
Oct 23, 2017
Messages
3,679
Location
Nantucket
ad7b979b6919dd61aaabe8e082fa3f7e7ca194aa_2_812x456.jpeg

Welcome Travelers to our May Development Update for Last Epoch. It has been a little while since our last post, so oh boy, do we have a lot to share with you today. We are going to be sharing our progress on several big initiatives we’ve been working on, including multiplayer, visual and combat polish, and performance. We are also excited to announce that today marks the first day of our closed community testing for Multiplayer in Last Epoch.
083f1bdc99078677c4d18974dd70230e1ab8309e.png

e1617e92c9f77848ff038153528535a718fd75b9.jpeg

a31a5088ec34e35c19d0e9c6be3b59b0034a2c22.jpeg

We may have hinted at it throughout this post here and there, but some big things are starting to hit full sprint here at Eleventh Hour Games. Today is the first day anyone outside of our own team is accessing multiplayer which is incredibly exciting for us. We’re also revisiting some of our earlier work and moving it up to current standards to get everything ready for a goal that was once a Kickstarter dream. Thank you to all of our community members for your continued support, as we continue towards the Last Epoch we’ve always dreamed of making!
https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/closed-multiplayer-testing-begins-development-update/48809
 

Cryomancer

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Jul 11, 2019
Messages
14,468
Location
Frostfell
Does have retarded spells scaling with weapons mechanics?
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom