[2020] An Update on Our Road to 1.0

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Hello Travelers,

There’s some important news concerning Last Epoch’s launch I’d like to share with you. Before I get into the latest phase of our journey, I’d like to briefly cover how we got here.

For those that don’t know, we first started work on Last Epoch in mid-2017; the first pieces of concept art, the first lines of code were created in May of that year. We began releasing playable demos of the game toward the end of that year, and in April 2018 we brought the game to Kickstarter where Last Epoch would go on to have a successful campaign.

Eleventh Hour Games is an indie studio - while many of us have experience working on other games, Last Epoch is the first game we have worked on together. Our initial ambitions for 1.0 were therefore humble - we hoped to release an initially niche title that would be met with sufficient interest from the ARPG community that we would have enough funding to continue to develop and polish the game so that it would begin to attract more mainstream attention.

As Last Epoch has continued through development, as more and more of you have generously decided to join and support us on this journey, and as we continue to expand the team here at Eleventh Hour Games, we have been continually revising the quality and the level of polish we desire to have for our official release. As this has led to us investing more time into aspects of the game than previously anticipated, Last Epoch will not be leaving Early Access in 2020. While I know you are eager to know when we’ll release 1.0, for now we are only prepared to say that this will happen when the game is ready. We will be continuing to act on your feedback regularly in content patches between now and our official 1.0 launch.

Thanks to your support, when Last Epoch leaves Early Access it will have more content, better fleshed-out systems, and greater post-launch support than we could ever have imagined when we first began working on the game in evenings and on weekends back in 2017.

Starting next week we will be reaching out to members of the community we wish to involve in internal testing. This group will initially be helping us to test content coming in our next patch, and in future will be included in multiplayer testing as a stepping stone between Friends & Family testing and us releasing multiplayer-enabled builds to the community at large. We know that many of you are eager to learn more about it, and we’ll have a dedicated post on multiplayer development before the end of the year.

As we continue to raise our standards for the game, increase the content available, and recruit additional staff, I also wish to inform you of another change to our plans for the game’s launch. Last Epoch will maintain its current price at release. Looking at our plans for both launch and post-release support, we are confident that a one-time fee of $35 represents great value. I want to be clear that this change will not impact those of you who previously obtained copies of the game for less than this, such as at Kickstarter. Your early support was invaluable, and we are deeply grateful to you.

Thank you for your enthusiasm and your patience - and as always, we’ll see you in Eterra.

Judd Cobler
Game Director

I’m sorry to hear you’re disappointed. As previously announced, we’re presently preparing to completely replace our website, and also plan to replace our launcher. We released a content patch last month, and will be releasing another next month. There hasn’t been any significant changes to our release cadence. We’re busier than usual, which means less time for talking.

Can I ask what this is based on?

Thank you for your response.

I’m not sure where the impression that we are replacing our website for marketing purposes came from. The current website dates all the way back to May 2017. This was the same month as the creation of our first concept art and us writing our first lines of code. Back then the team was much smaller than it is now and was completely self-funded. The goals for our website, and the resources we had to invest in it, were markedly different than they are today.

Our website has received significantly more traffic this month than throughout the entirety of 2017. While we have been able to scale it up to meet the additional demand, we are approaching the limits of what is possible. Quite simply, there is nothing optional about us transitioning to a new tech stack. We cannot release 1.0 (and, likely, even multiplayer) with our current website. It simply could not deal with the increase in traffic it would see when we do.

There are a number of services we provide manually that we wish to automate - and this isn’t feasible on our present website. Them being available as automated services will not just free our staff up to work on other things, but will also improve the user experience by removing the need to wait for staff to respond. (I might note only our customers use these services.)

Starting from scratch is also an opportunity to make some fundamental decisions regarding our website with much better insight into how it will be used. The new website will be powered by more APIs, will have more features (and be designed to facilitate those features), and will be much more mobile-friendly. Using the two websites should feel like night and day.