Hello Travelers!
Today is an oddly special day for Last Epoch: World Bee Day.
On the 20th of December, 2017, the UN General Assembly officially declared May 20th “World Bee Day” in observation of the role bees play within our world’s ecosystem as a pollinator. This day of recognition aims to increase awareness of the critical part they play in everything from food production to medicine production, and to provide information to help protect these critical creatures from the decline they have been facing.
While this is an important topic in general, you may feel it’s odd for a game company such as ourselves to be talking about and promoting it. However, those who have been with us for a while may have recognized that bees have found a special place within our hearts, game, and community. As such, today is a day of celebration.
To our Community
Eleventh Hour Games started its days as a single post on reddit, asking “Who wants to make an ARPG?”. This thread brought together a number of hardcore fans , who then got together after work to produce a demo late into the night (part of the reason for “Eleventh Hour” Games). With this Demo, they went to Kickstarter to try to get funding to make the ARPG they wanted. From this Kickstarter, EHG has continued to expand, to date releasing 18 major patches, and numerous smaller patches, with a vision for a long continued life cycle for Last Epoch.
All of this is thanks to our community. From those that directly backed the game, to build guide creators, content creators doing showcases, and members of the community simply having conversations in chat, on discord, and on the forums all help to build the community to what it is.
As the original founding of EHG started with hardcore members of the ARPG fan community, we intend to always keep that close to our hearts as we continue to create the game we’ve always dreamt about building. We strive to be open and communicative with our community, to listen to our community’s feedback and incorporate it, and make sure we prioritize our community; as we are all members of that self-same community. Many of our expanded team members even started out as dedicated members of the Last Epoch community specifically, including myself. So to all of you: Thank you for all of your support up to today, and we hope to continue our great relationship and community as we keep going into the future of Last Epoch (or any other timelines that it may take).
Bees?
Now, this post may raise the question of “why bees?”. Well… we honestly don’t know. We know where it started. Early on in Last Epoch we released Keeper’s Gloves and Keeper’s Idols. These were the first (and to date only) methods of generating bees as minions within Last Epoch. However, there was a couple of bugs with these bugs, which allowed significant quantities of bees to be summoned. This was corrected in subsequent smaller patches, but the legend of the bees carried on.
Though we’re not quite sure why it grew into what it is today, I know I for one fully embrace our new bee overlords. The community attachment to bees is certainly something we intend to support so long as the community desires it. On that note: We have a couple of items we’d like to share today.
We’ve had two of our backers recently finish working on their Unique Designs with our production team. These Uniques are both aimed at increasing the diversity and availability of bee related builds, and have some really exciting opportunities.
Bloodkeeper’s Nest
The first Creator Unique we’d like to show is the new “Bloodkeeper’s Nest” created with Hunter. This unique Primalist relic focuses on directly buffing bees to use them as a primary source of damage combined alongside other Spriggan Form abilities - primarily Thorn Shield.
Hive Mind
The second Creator Unique we’d like to show is the “Hive Mind” created with K1ngisback. This unique Rogue helm focuses on hybridizing the rogue’s specialty with throwing skills, poison damage, and adding more bees to the build, allowing either a focus on minions, or using the bees as support. With this unique, you’ll also convert your Decoys into Beecoys, causing them to generate a swarm of bees when they detonate, keeping the swarm strong.
Make sure to hold onto those Keeper’s Gloves, and Keeper’s Idols, because both of these new Uniques will be released with the next major update! I know I’m very excited to have more bee swarm viability. If you’re interested in World Bee Day initiatives, you can find more information here: https://www.un.org/en/observances/bee-day and https://www.worldbeeday.org.
As with every Friday, we’ll be hosting our dev stream Today (Friday the 20th) at 3:00PM CDT. Mike might have also something special prepared for this stream as well for this day. So if you’re interested in asking any questions about the game, watching a developer play the game, or just hang out with some of the developers, make sure to swing by for the stream!
Thank you once again, to all of our amazing community members, and may the bees be with you!