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Hey all, so I finally got around to trying and completing Last Epoch so I wanted to give my own two cents about my thoughts on the game. I won’t claim to be an expert or anything but I have been playing primarily ARPGs since Diablo 2 and have put thousands of hours into basically every other ARPG under the sun. My most played by far at this point is Path of Exile (I’m even a moderator on the sub) which is what I would consider the standard to beat at this point, and what I’ll be comparing Last Epoch to in this review. But I’ll also preface this review by saying that regardless of all the critiques below, I really enjoyed playing and cannot wait to see what else comes from the team. Much like when I first found myself on the beaches of Wraeclast sevenish years ago, I see enormous potential out of this game. But it ain’t perfect. I am also going to gloss over some of the performance items (clunky movement, areas of lag, etc.) I noticed throughout my playtime, at this point y’all are certainly aware and it would only be beating a dead horse. So with that…
Itemization
There are things I love and things I hate about what you’ve done to loot in Last Epoch. On one hand, I adore how “underpowered” everything seems as compared to many other ARPGs on the market. I wasn’t looking to get a boost of 100 strength or stack 150% attributes, I was just looking to get +3 or +4 with at least 2 other good stats. On the other hand, very little is explained without wandering through multiple extended descriptions for skills or attributes. For example, I had no clue what attunement was or did until I started comparing spells I did not have to my stats and then the greater descriptions in their associated skill tree. There also seemed to be weird inconsistencies with what these stats added to skills where some would just take the main attribute, others would add attunement, and still more would do nothing at all but it wasn’t readily apparent until I compared these things.
Despite all this, unique design seems stellar in the current state and I’d love to see more out of the team. I’ve really got no complaints about uniques other than simply wanting to see more. They remind me exactly of classic POE where they had a distinct purpose as well as a downside, rather than simply being better rares. Just be careful how far down this path you go or you will run into GGG at some point.
Loot
Loot is the end all, be all for ARPGs. This genre would not exist without there being those delicious pieces of candy on the ground, convincing players that they would be the next perfect item. Unfortunately, this feels like the absolute weakest part of Last Epoch. There’s a few key qualities in the game right now which lead me to believe this: mobs, barrels/chests, and gambling. These three things all have issues which unfortunately exacerbate the others deficiencies making the entire system feel bad. From my playthrough of the storyline, it felt like mobs dropped basically nothing outside of the bosses in rifts which led me to focus almost entirely on barrels/chests. Barrels were everywhere and dropped a lot but I felt the desire to always hunt chests as they dropped more. Chests were basically always in the optional path of a map but when they weren’t, it felt even worse because the mobs on the way dropped nothing and my reward for this grind was, well, nothing. Which brings me to gambling which was the most consistent source of upgrades for me along the way until I got into crafting. This really shouldn’t be the case because it resulted in me only picking up rares to barely look at before gambling the bases I wanted.
So what is there to fix? Mobs should be more rewarding. Your biggest focus in ARPGs should be slaying mobs and collecting loot but right now it’s more of a barrel smashing simulator that just happens to have swords and spells. Fixing this cuts down the entire insidious cycle a lot but we can also take it a step further by having irregular and random chests instead of purposefully placed ones. Chests should just be an uncommon occurrence that is nice to see rather than the reward you know is down that optional path. I had this exact same issue with Grim Dawn which is so predictable that it’s boring, loot-wise.
Descriptions
I talked about this briefly under itemization but it deserves more of a rant. This is also a greater complaint rather than a specific one about a single system so I won’t beat around the bushes here: your descriptions for everything sucks. A lot. I don’t know how much damage anything does, what benefits it gets from other stats, how long things last, where percentages or bonuses come from, or basically anything else because nothing is explained anywhere. To take an example, I played Warpath through a good portion of the game and all I knew about it was that it got a 4% bonus from my strength and (I assume) its damage was based on my weapon somehow. But there was nothing about how much of my weapon impacted it, whether the types of weapons would increase/decrease its radius, if procs worked, or really anything else. It was more a guessing game which really isn’t fun.
This is consistent throughout basically everything where there’s a fairly fluffy description of what a skill or attribute does (this is something I also hated in Grim Dawn, if you can’t tell) and nothing about how it does it. There’s also very weird inconsistencies about where these occasional descriptions even are, in my case it was around Abyssal Orbs. The game didn’t tell me a thing about what these orbs did outside of dealing void damage until you went all the way down the tree into a slot which modifies how orbs behave. You need to tell the player how the game works. Path of Exile does this extremely well by giving us the tags, damage effectiveness, potential cooldowns, sizes (radius, range, etc.), and more depending on the skill. I know this is a pain in the ass to add but if you want your ARPG to have reasonable depth without third party applications akin to Path of Building, it’s required.
The Environment
I enjoyed the gameplay overall but one thing I noticed was that everything felt both bare and artificial. While there was no lacking of mobs, these enemies felt like they were dropped into this unrelated environment and played around on top of a boardgame rather than inside this desert or beach or anything else. I never believed an area could be potentially real. As an example from Path of Exile, look at the Riverways area in act 2. This place is gorgeous and is filled with trees, vines, winding rivers, broken paths, and so on but it all meshes together seamlessly, no matter how random the area generated is. Areas in ARPGs do not need to be procedurally generated akin to Path of Exile but if they aren’t (ESPECIALLY if they aren’t), they should feel real and there needs to be a lot of care into making sure the player can lose themselves in it. Instead, I had completely bare paths, little to no vegetation, no secondary sources of ambient sounds, or really anything else. This is going to sound harsh but it felt like I was fighting a kid’s playdough abominations on top of an offbrand lego set for the most part. I will say, however, that the two exceptions I found here were in the End of Time and rift areas. These are the only two places that felt more “complete”. They still weren’t perfect but they had a lot more going on.
Skills / Passives
I’ve already ranted about the lack of descriptions for anything so I’ll set that aside for now and hit the goods and bads here. I’ll say from the get-go that it’s obvious the team has a number of creative minds with very interesting ideas on how skills should work. I like this. There’s a number of concepts I see in different classes which are neat twists on how spellblades, summoners, and even your standard sword and board fighter should work. I do think that there’s probably too much summoner and not enough “other” going on right now but that can be fixed in time so I won’t harp on it too much.
What I was disappointed in though was the artificial depth in skill combinations and skill trees. From what I read about the game, it was supposed to have a system of similar complexity and customization to Path of Exile where I could make skills do neat things and combine them with passives and procs to do other neat things. What I got instead was clear paths for different build archetypes which honestly wasn’t that different than Diablo 3’s set + rune system. It certainly looks deeper but, in reality, it wasn’t. You’d choose whether you wanted to focus on your beasty friends or spinning to win or something else and there was a clear path for how to do that with little to no variation. This was especially apparent when looking at the current incarnation of classes/sub-classes where you have this seemingly large tree of passives and new skills but in reality, they all have singular focuses. Once you get past the amount of things that are available, there’s few choices to make.
But this is also something that I can see changing in time as we see more uniques, completed subclasses, and other additions. The concepts are there. The creative team is there. It’s just that the game is not quite there.
All this aside, I detest the current respeccing system, especially given its inconsistency between passives and skills. I do not think respeccing should be free, not by any means, but the requirement to reset a skill to zero (or just lose the skill points) with no way around it is silly. Even more so when you can pay gold to easily respect your passives without needing to gain those back. Whether it’s a gold cost or an alternative currency or something else, there should be some way to get around these resets. If you’re completely against a way to buy it, I think a good compromise would be giving already-leveled skills an experience bonus up to where you respecced them before. For example, let’s say you leveled hammer throw to 10 but wanted to give warpath a try. Hammers would still be reset to 1 but, next time you grabbed them, experience for them would be doubled or something up until they reach level 10, at which point it starts leveling as normal.
There should be something there to ease players into swapping skills out.
Crafting
Much like skills, I think the foundation for a spectacular system is there, it’s just not quite where I’d like to see it. Once you fix the descriptions on things and portions of the itemization, I think this system will shine more but for now my experience mostly revolved around gambling for bases which had good implicits plus at least one other good stat, and then just tacking on a few more. I really like the idea of fractures and the difficulties in getting tier 5 stats, much less an item with four of them, so kudos for doing something different. I’d like to be able to reroll the implicits of uniques (equivalent to Blessed Orb in Path of Exile) but that’s just a personal thing. What else can be done here? I’d like to see more interesting mechanics on rares. Right now it’s mostly resists, glancing blows, block, and attack/spell stats. Once you figure out your build, there’s no thinking about where you want to go with it for these stats on rares. In POE, on the other hand, you have damage conversion, alternative sources of defense, oddball resource generation methods, skills which are available nowhere else, and so on. The system itself wouldn’t need to change, I’d just like to see more out of it.
Anyway, this critique ended up being a lot longer than expected with a lot more negative than positive, but I’ll reiterate that I did truly enjoy my time playing Last Epoch. There’s a lot going in the game that is unique and a ton of fun so I’m looking forward to the future of the game. As it is now, I think I’d give the game a 5/10 for its current state (which I recognize is early access) but a solid 9/10 for potential available. I’ll certainly have my calendar marked for the full release so I can see everything that has been improved, finished, and added.
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