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To get this out of the way: The game in its current state is amazing. For the point in development it's at, it's hard to overstate how much it gets right. Please take the criticism and feedback with that as a frame of reference.
What the loot system gets right
- The loot itself, while very barebones, is good. Stat growth is kept in check with interesting implicits that may warrant going one or two tiers low to fill a niche, support items are meaningful and gold is kept in check with good currency sinks.
- The crafting system is a fantastic base to work from. At this time it's trivially easy to craft very powerful items, but I expect this to change over time as the crafting system is refined with further mechanics, glyphs and runes.
- Uniques and sets seem to be in a healthy spot in terms of rarity and... uniqueness. As build enablers, I'm glad they're not extremely hard to find as that would restrict experimentation.
Problem 1: Managing the attention budget
The first problem with the loot system is not to do with the loot itself but with the process of acquiring it. The crux of the issue is that item value is impossible to discern from looking at the item name alone, which means optimal play consist of constant, tedious quick reading of full item descriptions. There are two reasons for this:
- Gear implicits seem to be very important in Last Epoch and tend to have very wide ranges. The value of a high end item will depend massively on implicits, which aren't reflected on the name. While you could argue this is the case too on games like PoE, it's important to remember that PoE has Blessed Orbs for exactly this reason, to combat the importance of implicit-checking all trash loot.
- The naming system for magics and rares is odd. Magic items may have a double suffix or a double prefix, in which case only one of the names will apply. Rares can have up to two of each, but they're still named as magic items. I don't know if it's temporary, but the end result is that visual identification of dropped items is not enough to guarantee they have the desired mods.
The combination of the two points above means that, for a player to approach the end game optimally, a significant portion of their attention budget needs to be spent on quickly scanning dropped items, reading their real affixes and implicits. This is not fun. And before you argue that it's the player's choice how to engage with the game, a reality of reward-centric game development is that players will naturally converge towards the approach that maximizes rewards and will judge the quality of the game based on how fun it is to engage with it that way.
Possible solutions:
- Add an identification system. I get that identification systems are controversial: I think it mostly stems from the fact they're often implemented clunkily. Identification scrolls are usually at fault here, they're a corruption of the original Rogue idea of a limited resource, and they mostly make sense in a game where you can use unidentified items at a risk (e.g. a curse system). For a game like LE instead, identification could be implemented differently, for example in town. The bottom line is that identification is invaluable as a tool to manage player attention by limiting the information overload. In LE's case, I'd go as far as saying that implicits should be hidden behind identification too.
- Refine the naming system and the loot filter to ensure things like implicit ranges and "hidden" affixes are clearly labeled and conveyed.
- Possibly rework idols to have multiple tiers with lower ranges, rather than single tiers with huge ranges, so that idol value is more obvious without requiring constant reading and alt+ctrl range checking.
Problem 2: Too many non-choices
There are two item classes that you must always pick up, no questions asked; gold and crafting materials. There is no decision involved, other than the occasional judgement call of whether it's worth spending the second it takes to get to a particular pile of gold.
It's not necessarily bad to have must-picks, and most ARPGs have them. However, they should likely be infrequent and valuable, so the brainlessness of the choice gets compensated by the dopamine rush of finding the item. The problem in LE's case is that neither gold nor crafting materials are rare enough to elicit any joy when picked up, but they must be picked up. And sure, there's mechanical help (gold auto-pickup and crafting materials group pickup) but they still lead to a lot of idle clicks and don't feel like they fully solve the problem.
Possible solutions:
- Expand the range of gold auto-pickup significantly, and make crafting materials auto-pickup too. If they're weightless, endlessly stackable must-picks, they're basically gold, so make them act like it.
- Alternatively, remove the lower rarity tier of crafting materials altogether, simply making them available to players for free (stuff like resistances, elemental damage, etc), making the higher tier crafting materials a more eventful drop. Something similar could be done with gold, with fewer, larger drops.
Those are my two cents on the current state of loot, and things that could be done a bit better. Thanks for the hard work so far, the game is shaping up great!
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