Virtual 100 – Game 25
Some of these ARPG’s are getting way too convoluted. Remember when you started one, hacked and slashed your way through it, and when it was done, it was done? I have to admit that’s one of the the things I enjoyed about Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance II, and while that game left a lot to be desired, at least the game was over when it was over. If I wanted to continue to play, I could import my character into a new game and keep going. I did that with the first BGDA back in the day. I played the hell out of it, and that was great. But then that thing happened to the industry, and “live service” games seemed to be the only way one of these things ever got made. Now every single one of these hack ‘n slash ARPG’s seems to be this on-going project that never seems to end. At what point are you supposed to say, “Okay I’m done with this one” and move on?
It seems as though the developers of Last Epoch made this decision for me, but not in the manner I would have preferred. I had my eye on Last Epoch for a while. It looked pretty cool, but it was still in Early Access— meaning the game wasn’t “done” yet. I prefer to wait for official 1.0 releases, which usually means that the core experience is complete, from start to finish, and the following updates are incremental additions that either improve quality of life or add endgame content. This is usually where the “live service” model kicks in and you see season passes and all that shit.
But in releasing 1.0— and at the time of this writing, the 1.2 patch is still in the works— the developers still have yet to finish the story. There is endgame content, and they’re doing live events. Right now it’s Harbingers of Ruin with the Imperial Uprising. But the story isn’t finished.
There is an endgame mode that they’ve implemented at the End of Time called the Monolith, and it’s essentially a large collection of challenges to complete in order to essentially grind your way to the level cap. That’s fine, in itself I don’t have a problem with that, but they’ve used it as a stop-gap between whatever they’re doing now and finishing the story. Even now on their website they’re talking about new events and updates, but HEY HOW ABOUT FINISHING THE STORY.
I reached the end of the current state of The Last Epoch without realizing it. I killed the snake person and then the other snake person drained the Epoch and escaped through a portal, and I was like “I will find you!” and then it told me to go to the end of time and grind through the monolith in order to “recharge” the Epoch.
And I was like, wait what? I have to grind through the entire Monolith in order to continue the story? That’s kind of fucked up. So I read up on it on some forums and apparently the chapters that follow don’t exist yet. So even if I would have hacked through the Monolith, I would have eventually reached a point where there was nothing else to do until they add the rest of the game.
I am not one of those people. I don’t generally enjoy endgame content. Once the story is complete, I’m usually done with a game. The rest of it is just wandering aimlessly or leveling up just for the sake of leveling up. And I don’t have time for that. If there isn’t a clear direction for me to go, I tend to check out.
So at this point in time, I am considering myself done with The Last Epoch. Which kinda sucks, because even if they do finish the story eventually, I don’t know if I will ever come back to it. I’m not one to dwell on official game forums (not since Ghost Recon 2) so if the rest of the story releases, I probably won’t even know about it.
Now that that entire diatribe is out of the way, I do have to say that I enjoyed The Last Epoch quite a bit. Which is why it’s such a bummer that it isn’t finished. It has quite a few number of bugs and things that just don’t feel quite finished. I’m not convinced the game was ready for a 1.0 release. It very much still feels like it’s in beta. One of the biggest things is that the game has controller support, which for the most part works well enough when controlling the character. But the interface and menus DO NOT like the controllers. There are things you just can’t do without either grabbing the mouse or using the right thumbstick to use the virtual mouse to select things.
Common actions like equipping a weapon to the off-hand is not an option without mouse-clicking on it and manually dragging it to the slot. Likewise, when comparing a weapon to one equipped, you can only compare it to the main hand weapon. This wouldn’t be a big deal if the weapons and armor didn’t have entire lists of stat buffs and debuffs that you need to carefully consider when trading one weapon for another. And trust me, it’s important. At one point I started having difficulty just killing simple shit. And I was baffled and couldn’t tell if it was my imagination, or if I had just moved into a zone that was a higher level, or what… it wasn’t until I was trying desperately to adjust my build that I realized one of the relics I had equipped contained a debuff that set my Critical Chance to 0. Only then did I notice that my character had no crit whatsoever. No fucking wonder I was having to hack away at the most minor fodder in order to get by. Once I ditched that relic, my critical hit chance went back up to the 60 or 70 percent that it should have been and I was back in business.
One of the other things that kind of annoyed me was that there were different magic types of which you could have resistances to— your usual ice, fire, shock, etc. You could build your character to be impervious to these attacks in order to better your chances of survival. Simple. A staple of these types of games. But aside from the ones that were pretty obvious, like fire (which looks like fire) some of the other ones were pretty vague. Blood magic and Void magic kinda looked the same, but if you got your ass handed to you, it would show the damage that killed you, but not the magic or attack type. I was getting one-shotted by a boss at one point, and I obviously needed to change something. But there was no clear indication of what was doing me in, so it was kind of a crap shoot in needed buffed.
I realize that when I play these games, I’m usually playing at a casual level, at best. I don’t dig deep into builds or micromanage stats. Usually I can get by with brute force. But I’m not so inept as to not understand the deeper mechanics at play. For the most part I can tweak what I need to tweak in order to overcome a challenge. That being said, holy shit the trade-offs in this game are on another level. Each weapon, armor, relic, necklace, charm, etc etc etc has a slew of buffs to them. Each stat increase or decrease will be listed on the item you want to equip. The increased buffs will be in green, and the decreased ones will be in red. That’s all well and good, and I appreciated the color-coding. But that didn’t make the decision to equip something any less stressful. In the beginning you’ll have items with fewer stats and there will be a clear winner, but later in the game the list of trade-offs starts to get quite long, and the gray area of whether the weapon will benefit you or not begins to widen quite a bit. After a while it all gets pretty exhausting. I ended up with a mentality of “if it ain’t broke” and just stopped picking shit up unless it was a legendary or set item.
One of the things I did appreciate about the game was its size. The Last Epoch is nothing if not huge. One of the things that can get me really bored in a game is if there is not enough variety in the zones (I’m looking at YOU Diablo IV). But The Last Epoch has a unique twist in that you’ll see the same zones, but in different eras. Vastly different eras. Not one or two hundred years, but thousands. You’ll get to see some zones in their prehistoric state, during the height of the Imperial rule, in a post-apocalyptic state, etc. It’s a pretty cool angle that reminded me a lot of Chrono Trigger. If only the decisions made in one era affected another. That would have been pretty cool.
The only gripe I had with it is that after a while, you’ll be hopping between eras so often that they do kind of start to blur together, especially in the two ages that are relatively close to each other. I had even forgotten which era my character even started in.
One of the things that I wish was different is something that I see a lot of these things doing, and that’s locking character appearances to class. Diablo does this too, and it’s annoying. Why does the mage have to be an old bearded guy? Why does the druid have to look like Andre the Giant? Why can’t I make a character look the way I want them to look, and be whatever class I choose? Isn’t that the point of these games? Diablo IV bugged me because I liked the Druid class but I hated the look. It’s even worse when you like the look of a character but don’t like the class. Cuz then you have to decide if you want to put up with a class you don’t find fun, just so your character can look cool.
I always preferred the Elder Scrolls approach where if you wanted to be a Thief wearing heavy armor, you could do it. Good luck sneaking around in loud-ass clangy metal, but the option was there if you wanted.
Also, I never learned how to use the crafting system. People say it’s cool, and I tried it a few times, but I never made anything worth a shit, and on top of that, I didn’t even know how to make something specific, aside from a random whatever based on the gems I slotted in. I much prefer crafting systems where I say “Okay, I want a sword, and I want that sword to have fire magic. And buff it with some ATK +5 or something.” And then I can make it. This crafting system never really seemed to give me something that was more useful than what I already had equipped. Like I said, I’m sure there are people out there that took the time to learn it and are making incredible shit, but I just couldn’t be bothered.
Let’s see, what else should I mention… Money is still useless in a game like this. I played as a Rogue Falconer. I put about 40 hours in before I threw in the towel. I played offline, which cut me off from the public market and economy (I guess maybe that’s where the money comes in?) The graphics were pretty good, even though I saw people comparing it to “PS3 graphics” which I can only assume was said by someone who never actually played a PS3. It was better than Wolcen, because fuck that game.
And that’s about it, I guess. I’m actually pretty glad to be done with this one, because I hit a few roadblocks that almost had me put it down for good. Thankfully the game is pretty open to grind, and the Monolith being available so early allowed me to get in and get a few levels if I got stuck somewhere.
Chalking this one up as done, and with that, it marks one quarter of the way through, at number 25. The next few should come in pretty quick succession, as I’ve been bouncing around through multiple games at once and I should be getting to a point where I’m wrapping them all up pretty soon. Time will tell.
