Hello, Travelers!
Wow, what an opening week for Last Epoch. We are absolutely floored by the turnout and response to the game. Having started as an after-hours passion project from die-hard ARPG fans, we’re in awe that Last Epoch reached 265,000 players online at one time this weekend, the #39 highest concurrent user count recorded on Steam - ever. We appreciate you all bearing with us as the load initially gave us trouble for online gameplay, but we’re happy to say that we’re holding mostly steady above 200,000 players in-game and have made improvements each day in the backend infrastructure to support the demand. We’ll continue to monitor and address any issues that crop up.
I want to take a moment to talk to you all about what’s coming next.
INCOMING HOTFIXES/POST 1.0 PATCHES
We have a good sized bugs fixing and quality-of-live improvements patch that we’re hoping to deliver this week, and plan to continue releasing weekly patches. In addition to weekly patches, the team will be actively monitoring services and applying hotfixes as needed.
Thank you for taking the time to report issues you’ve found in-game with the in-game bug reporting tool. This is the most optimal way to report issues as it also sends us your player logs and a screenshot if you choose to include it, which helps us diagnose and address issues much more rapidly. Forums and third-party sites are a much less ideal way to submit reports as we don’t get this information, and it’s not immediately tracked in our internal systems.
ONLINE SERVICES
We are excited to see the servers holding above the 200,000 CCU mark (concurrent users in the game at one time), and that scene transitions and queue times have gotten much shorter. There may still be shorter periods of downtime as we roll out updates to improve the reliability after our turbulent first weekend, where we had some unanticipated bottlenecks in our backend architecture. We will continue to make improvements here, including making social services (like adding friends) even snappier, focusing on scene-to-scene transition times, ensuring in-game chat is stable, making queues continue to flow smoother and faster, and more.
We’re going to put out some information about what happened at launch that caused the instability under load, but we want to focus our backend team on improvements for a while longer before we pull them off to help us write this up - and also give them some much-deserved rest after working through the weekend.
LOCALIZATION
Localization improvements are ongoing as we focus on the quality of our translations and further coordinate with native speakers and quality assurance testing teams. We will be releasing improvements with our weekly hotfixes to address the feedback we have received so far, including quality fixes to all languages, menus, affixes, and UI errors reported for Russian, Korean and Chinese. We ask for your continued support in improving our experience in all languages by submitting reports to us by via the official Last Epoch Discord in the Localization/Translation Forum located in the Feedback and Reports section under feedback-forums or by utilizing our in-game support tool, and choosing the category “Feedback”
FUTURE CONTENT
We’re excited to start to share with you the future content plans we have for Last Epoch, including our next major Cycle patch, 1.1.
The content coming for Patch 1.1 is designed specifically in two parts. The first, and most important part is focusing on and committing time to act on player feedback. We are wholly committed to making the best ARPG in the genre, and listening to our amazing community is a big part of that. In addition, throughout the 1.0 Cycle we intend to release quality of life and bug fix patches regularly.
Secondly, as you all may know, we’re going to have a heavy emphasis on expanding end-game content now that we’ve released 1.0. For future patches we have plans to expand the monolith, bring great new itemization options, add more boss content, class and balance updates, campaign content, etc. For 1.1 specifically we’ll be focusing on bringing some “pinnacle” content, or very hard fights that will give you challenges to aspire to. We’ll be sharing more on this and more of what’s to come in 1.1 in the not too distant future.
It’s worth emphasizing that EHG has a strong focus on listening to the community, as it’s where our team came from, and we want to hear what you want to see in the future. We are active in our forums, Reddit, and social channels, so if you want to see something, please do voice it! You are not shouting into the void, nor do you have to amass an army to get us to take notice. We’re there and ready to have conversations with you all.
SENTIMENT & REVIEWS
While we’re continuing to receive high praise about the game itself, Steam reviews and sentiment took a heavy hit due to the initial turbulence of online services at launch. We are committed to regaining that trust by making improvements to our backend infrastructure for this amount of load and providing a great experience for online play.
We take time to read your reviews and feedback on Steam, socials, and our forum and take swift action to improve the areas that we see players are dissatisfied with. We know that seeing our Steam reviews lower than they’ve ever been is concerning to players who are looking forward to the future of Last Epoch, but we want to assure you that the team has always been committed to making a game you can enjoy and expect updates from for years to come. We’ve seen that passion reflected back at us in the community this past week, and it has bolstered our resolve to that goal even further.
Last Epoch is here to stay.
GAMEPAD SUPPORT
We’re thrilled to see many of you enjoying the immense amount of gamepad updates we’ve brought for 1.0, and we have a lot of updates coming before 1.1 that will improve the experience even further, including better navigation of certain panels. We aim to release LE on console in the future so making sure that the gamepad experience is top notch is a focus for us.
Thank you all for your amazing support and excitement of Last Epoch. There’s so much more to come and we’re thrilled to build this game for all of us ARPG fans. We’ll keep you all posted with more news, patches, insights, and plans shortly.
- Judd | Founder & Game Director