[2023] Last Epoch 1.0 launches Feb 21st, 2024!

Travelers,

I’m thrilled to announce that Eleventh Hour Games is launching the long-awaited 1.0 version of Last Epoch on February 21st, 2024. After a journey that started with the dream of uniting genre enthusiasts to create the next great ARPG and forming an after-hours team through Reddit, to holding a successful Kickstarter 18 months later, and then building Last Epoch alongside our passionate community throughout Early Access… we’re confident in saying that we’ve made something truly special.

Last Epoch’s 1.0 launch will mark a new beginning for Eterra, and will set a new bar for quality, polish, gameplay feel, and visual excellence. Beyond 1.0, Eleventh Hour Games will bring substantial new content to Last Epoch every few months in what we call “Cycles”. These releases will contain additions and refinements to many aspects of the game, such as end-game content, skills, unique items, gameplay systems, quality-of-life features, etc.

We understand that February is later than we had initially targeted for this release; however, our original December timeline became a bit crowded with other studios’ releases, and we didn’t want to force the ARPG community to have to choose. By moving our date, we’ll also be able to take advantage of a few more months of polish for our new systems and classes, complete more bug-fixing, and reinforce our team with a restful and well-deserved holiday break.

We thank you all for your unwavering support and enthusiasm that has allowed Eleventh Hour Games to make this game for all of us. We hope you will join us in Eterra this February and invite your friends to join in a new co-op hack-and-slash experience!

- Judd Cobler
Game Director, Last Epoch

That’s right, it will just be a detailed look at the upcoming system.

Please remember to keep conversations Civil. Player harassment is not acceptable. Real World Politics, Religion, and Ideology are not appropriate topics for discussion in Last Epoch spaces.

Our responses concerning character customization have not changed, the responses Andrew linked earlier are still applicable, including that it’s something we would look at after 1.0. The reasoning for this is still correct, in that we designed Last Epoch to place significance on each character’s silhouette to make them visually distinct, and that character customization is a ‘very’ large task which was not budgeted to take place for 1.0 as it requires double the amount of work with models, animation, rigging, voice acting, armor and weapon fitting, cosmetics fitting, and more.

I think one key piece of information that might be missing here is that we created the current version of our playable characters to be specific characters, not a blank slate to be molded. So what we’re actually saying is that this one specific person is a rogue and this one specific person is a mage and this one specific person is an acolyte. The acolyte character was originally a disciple of the mage and left him to pursue different types of magic. They aren’t inherently evil magics either. The mages viewed them as unsavory but that’s just their views on it. The Acolyte has gone on to be a very successful master of those different magics and save the world just the same. She is still very much a hero. The Knight character, back in like 2018 before it was changed to be the sentinel, was actually female and she is also still in the game at the End of Time to talk to. I think the biggest disconnect here is that we let you name the character. This immediately gives a sense of creation and ownership to the character. That it is uniquely yours. If you were starting a new “Frank the Sentinel” instead of making “a Sentinel” that you got to name, I think it would probably help this be a lot more intuitive too.

Now, at the same time, we have received a ton of feedback from a lot of different players with a lot of different opinions on the matter. The general feeling that I get from most people is either that gender locked classes is terrible and needs to be fixed or apathy. We do intend to add character customization to the game, including body type selection. It just won’t be a 1.0 feature. The dev time to payoff ratio isn’t good enough to make the cut at this time. That is because the dev time is high, not that the payoff is low. It is a very unassuming feature that would take a lot more dev time than you might think.

Well, they mostly weren’t before and you’ve got quite a lot of things on that list but some of that, yea.

We do not officially support the Steam Deck platform. However, I have seen several reddit posts where people have got it working pretty easily. We aren’t prepared to officially start supporting any more platforms for 1.0.

I just helped resolve a merge conflict to finish setting up the UI for it.