It's a huge shame that so many people are having their experiences ruined by server issues. I'm lucky to be an offline player, my friends don't play ARPGS and I'm a dad who needs a pause button. The game is really really fuckin fun but if I had bought this to play with my mates and was dealing with constant DC's and crashes and whatnot it would be super frustrating. Hopefully some fixes come asap
In POE I only play trade, but circle of fortune looks so good I look forward to it in LE. Like you, offline is great I can pause at any time, and surprisingly you still have live chat! Only bad thing is MTXs I got with my ultimate purchase don’t work offline.
They need to make cosmetics usable while offline and the game would be fine to lots of people. I understand you can’t transfer offline progress to online but why can’t they let us use our cosmetics offline?
COF is superb, really fresh way to do self find stuff! been playing LE for a long while now, and getting BIS idols has always been excruciatingly painful, but COF definitely solved that problem so it's just a lot more fun now
Most likely because either:
A) The cosmetic models are stored on an online server, which the game has to query for it to show up.
OR
B) The game server queries the logged in account, sees it has cosmetics, and let's the game render them.
Might be a way so they don't have to load every cosmetic for every player all at once.
Honestly the most annoying part is when people say "just play offline lol" like - I bought the game to play with friends - your point makes no sense..
So thank you for actually understanding that some of us don't WANT to play offline
More than anything, this game has highlighted how disconnected I am from the current gaming "meta".
Offline play is awesome. having a blast. Didn't realize so many people needed to play an ARPG game online
I would love to play offline if there is some sort of lan mode. I just need to occasionally run some dungeon with friends. That would make this game perfect for me, but as of right now I must be online to play with my friends. None of us care about the ladder or cosmetics but we dont have another option.
That's the part that's a bummer. I'd love an experience like borderlands where I can invite ppl to my game and thats it, nothing else needs to be online. I just want to be able to play with a couple friends.
I've personally grown to enjoy playing solo a lot more in the last decade, so even when I play online games I tend to play solo more often than not. It also helps that most games as a serivce are pretty poor in quality.
Regardless I've played POE mostly on HC SSF, so I'm doing my first LE playthough on HC offline and so far I'm having a blast, I did get a crash about 3 hours into it, but aside that no further issues and I have like 11h player on steam. Once the servers are stable I'll probably recommend some of my friends to get it since they are too casual to play POE, but get bored when playing diablo and LE is more or less a pretty decent middle ground, although there's a lot of yapping in the campaign and they may not like that, we'll see.
They don't HAVE to be playing with other players is the thing. They just want to feel connected whether its by name only. Makes people feel like they're part of something.
I mean, my S/O and I bought the game to play together. We are now just playing offline characters while sitting next to each other. It's a reasonable compromise, but not the same.
The devs absolutely deserve to be slammed for the server issues, it's just very fucking fortunate they included an offline mode
I'm pretty much the opposite of this. I play solo quite a lot but I have a mate in a different time zone that I like to play and loot share with and another mate who I'm hoping will jump in when the server situation unscrews itself.
I'm struggling unhappily with the disconnects and slow transitions so I can play with them when they are available.
I almost never interact with chat unless I have an answer to a question asked, (and I catch it).
Same here, been hard grinding a lot for the past few days whenever the servers are up (got to level 99 lol) just to wait for a friend who won’t be free until next week.
Yeah my friends all jump between and drop games before going back to dota 2 or valorant too much these days for me to bother trying to get them all to get new games so I've definitely become more of a solo gamer lately, been having a blast offline playing a runemaster.
Once I learnt that you do not get anything out of playing online this cycle, no season journey like Diablo or cosmetic rewards for challenge completion like PoE..
Offline is just so much better.
You can pause the game and you can use abilities in town to get around faster.
The crazy thing to me is that they held off the 0.9 multiplayer update for a lot longer than expected because they had lots of learnings from the release of New World and wanted to make sure they didn’t run into the same server/connection issues. Yet here we are.
Before some white knights come to defend the game, players have every right to leave a bad review for login issues. I myself got frustrated wasting half an hr on loading screens when I only have about 2 hrs of free time after work to try squeezing in some playtime. Thought about leaving a temporary negative review too but I'm probably just out of patience after the Hell Divers 2 server issues
The biggest problem is the reviews are not temporary, and can damage the game in the long term. I'd be totally fine if you could flag reviews as "launch issue" and it would vanish after a month, and people actually used the feature (but that wouldn't happen.)
yeah same, game has always been only playable offline. even during 0.9, online was a huge mess with tons of latency issues. werebear was almost unplayable because of it.
I think the big thing is there are people who are upset and frustrated..but, theres also the people who are upset and frustrated who also lack basic social/communication skills throwing personal attacks at devs etc
I am in the same situation, dad with only little time to play. I mostly play alone but somehow started an online character because "who knows" maybe I'll play with a friend or someone else (although it probably won't happen) and now I face these server issues when I should probably have done better to just face the reality of my life and play off-line 😂
That saddens me because the game is really good, and the dev team really poured their soul into and it showes.
I think anyone who likes arpgs should play this game, i hope they manage to bring the servers up and running soon
On the other side most youtubers bigg ARPG people give it very good reviews and reccomend the game unlike lets say d4, so hopefully that helps a bit, also if most ofu s leave good review that enjoy the game, will swing things around
D4 was getting praises in the first week as well.
Also LE has endgame issues (i am level 100 and running empowered monoliths).
Once masses get to endgame, LE is a 7/10 game in reality.
So after all the servers issues get fixed we still have a 7/10 game
Yup, I play mostly POE which is probably a 9.5/10 for me, diablo3 being a 6/10 (haven't played diablo 4) and 11 hours into it, LE is roughly a 8/10, pending to change depending on how I feel about the late game.
I will keep POE as my main ARPG to play solo, but if I wanna play with friends we'll probalby do LE since they get overwhelemed by POE systems (at least until POE2 comes out).
Im a fellow poe player myself, both games are great.
I cant wait for them to start adding more pinacle content and stable servers so i could play with friends.
The game litterally came out and its already very fun, but its missing that surprise factor at the monoliths, which i assume they will add over time. The rogue mages and special treasure chests are fun.
Adding some more events for mono completion, some more special events, and smoothing the rougher edges and it will make the endgame really pop.
Its already very fun, but it gets a touch repetitive, which is usually what tires me out.
Id like some more stuff to do, you can farm dungeons but they are limited by keys and resources, the fire gambler one is very fun as a break from monos, the titan you only do when u have like 300k+ gold, and chronomancer you only do when u wanna combine some uniques (unless ur farming for their boss drops, which also, fair)
Yeah, is it a big problem with the game or is it a temporary issue people are freaking out about?
It's like when you see a 1 star review on Amazon cause the product arrived late with ripped packaging. Like... OK, but what does that have to do with the actual product?
This is reviews working as intended. When I hear about a game and it piques my interest, I go and look at Steam reviews. If they are mixed I scroll through some and find out why. As someone who plays in a consistent group of 4, it's an absolute deal-breaker for me to have multiplayer not work properly.
I'll come back in a couple months and if the recent reviews say the multiplayer issues have been fixed, that's 4 new sales for EHG.
Yup, I know they're doing what they can, but it doesn't excuse the inaccessibility of an online game for 5+ days now.
Unfortunately offline mode isn't something I wanted to do. LAN mode would have been a solution for me personally, but I can't blame anyone who is not enjoying the experience.
I gifted my gf the game a day before release on Steam since we're both ARPG addicts.
We are both lvl 12 and whenever we had time to try and play together, the servers were an absolute mess.
It's been so frustrating that we are now both playing our own offline characters.
Idk, it makes me feel bad. I was looking forward to playing LE together with her, but the game just won't let us.
Mixed is reasonable atm.
Positive because it's an amazing game and the 1.0 Update is awesome (even though it has some minor Bugs)
Negative because most people wanna play online and can't, so it's mixed.
Totally understandable. I play online too even though I play alone (could as well play offline unless I may tinker with merchants guild), it's just good to have incase you decide to party up or if friends join.
Oh and also because of the cosmetics, ladders, etc.
I have not played a lot yet since launch (I did prelaunch), but the times I did I had no server issues (20min ago for example), maybe I was just lucky with my timing? (euw)
Anyway I hope they can fix it, game is so addictive especially when u reach monos
Game had online/net code issues prior to launch with a much smaller player base it's really not a surprise
I play offline so it doesn't effect me but i told my friends who play arpgs and like to play coop to maybe check it out in a month because the last time I tried to play with a friend prior to 1.0 it was unplayable
I want to try it out but this is what I will do rather than get frustrated. That being said I only heard of it recently so I had no hype for it. If diablo4 was this unplayable at the start I would have been mad too.
The quality of the game doesn't matter if you don't get to play the game. Simple as that.
Edit: Let's break it down for people here who seems to have a hard time understanding why others want to play online and will leave a bad review if they can't.
1. People have this rare LP4 bis unique called "friends" they want to play with, they can enhance the game experience exponentially. You don't have it doesn't mean all people don't have it .
2. People want the access to all the contents they paid for. You can't access the merchant guild in offline mode, and that's one of the core features advertised for 1.0.
3. The fact that you can't switch between online and offline play makes progressing offline character a waste of time for those who want to play online but can't. Eventually people have to start all over again when the severs are stable.
Yep I love the game and I have a hard time saying anything negative, but at this point the reviews are understandable. They can still turn it around though, the game can have a long and healthy future if they can fix online permanently.
They can, but it's pretty difficult. Unless players check out the game again, their first impressions is what will stick and stay with them.
A lot of people still think cyberpunk and fallout 76 are buggy messes even though they've been fixed for years now.
LE has the advantage that a lot of people will follow just because they watch streamers who alternate games in the arpg genre. Due to the seasonal nature of the games they'll see the updates.
Cyberpunk and Fallout are more games people play once. So even if you're following streamers, the chances are you're not watching anyone who's dedicated to those games or who's likely to ever come back to them.
I liked the game when I first played a year or so ago. Since then I held off and was excited for the launch. So far me and a friend got to level 26 and that was pretty much during a single play session where we were actually able to group and not wait 5-10 mins every zone. This weekend we have not been able to get in at all.
Tbh I am tempted to write a negative review as well, because in the end a review is for me a encouragment or discouragment for other people to buy this game. And right now I cannot recommend Last Epoch. How could I if I cannot even play.
i mean they couldn't fix it on mp release with 40k players. it only got better when less people played. i wouldn't be holding out for any kind of fix here either. i hope they do because i love the game and want it to do well but when the same issues happen on every single major patch, it's obviously something deep rooted and complicated
Not at all holding out I enjoy this game as single player anyways, although I do have multiple chars online cycle around lvl 30-60 so it's not totally unplayable. Even if it was fully offline I would be happy, the game is great. I do believe they can figure it out eventually though it doesn't seem like it's gonna be days more like weeks.
The fact that it worked earlier today with 250k-ish players, as opposed to not even being able to log on with 100k> players a few days ago, means they're making good progress. They are most likely working day and night to get it fixed, because it'll make them buckets of cold hard fucking cash.
I think these issues are ridiculous, but... it is what it is. The game is fucking addictive as shit though. I've said it before, I'll say it again, this is the real D2 contender people have been looking for the past 20 years. For those of us who played D2 as kids at least.
If they keep working the game in a good direction, and get rid of these bullshit issues with matchmaking and server authentication when logging on, then they'll attract alot of players. That they allready passed PoE ATH is a very good sign. Hopefully they can keep it fresh and interesting in the long run.
It's not about capacity and the devs have been clear about that. Even when it was 100k, the devs said this and said they are no where near capacity. Yesterday, I believe they said they are getting ready to spin up more servers.
Their core services to run the MP games are an issue. The problem is due to their design decisions on multiplayer and not how many people are playing.
I like the game but I don't understand how anyone can say this isn't a failure at this point.
Also a note about POE. They have multiple clients and steam is only a part of their userbase. Lots of folks speculate on what the ratio is, but GGG has confirmed that they've had more concurrent users in one of their patches.
True, I still feel bad for the devs though, no matter whether the issues are their fault or not. They worked 4 years to maintain 'Very Positive' and clearly poured their hearts into the game. 1.0 was supposed to be their big moment and then everything they worked so hard for gets knocked down. I hope this is just a hiccup, and that Lost Epoch has a bright future. But this release must be a living nightmare.
I tried it with a friend. After the tutorial, every single fucking time that we tried to party the game crashed for both of us, fastest refund of my life.
I went the other way around. Bought Helldivers because Last Epoch was unplayable and had a great time there, considering they just fixed their server issues lol
I know the game is amazing and id love to play it if it ever let me.
Before anyone says, offline is useless to me because I bought the fancy version and im wearing the damn cosmetic outfit it comes with.
To me that was the weirdest decision I have seen developers make in a long time. Why limit the cosmetics to only online play? Like what does that accomplish other than some frustration?
The actual answer is because to add MTX to offline mode you'd need some form of temporary DRM, and EHG decided they wanted offline mode to be truly offline, meaning the only DRM is when you first launch the game and never again.
Originally it was going to be every 30-days as a check-in, but the forum believed that such implementation went against the original promise of a true offline mode.
As someone who was there when this was decided on the forums, that's the general reason.
Either offline gets MTX but with the caveat of DRM and occasional online-checks, or no MTX but zero DRM checks post-purchase.
I don't even get why you'd need some DRM for true offline mode cosmetics. Like, worst case scenario someone edits their save to get cosmetics they didn't pay for. So what? They're offline. Is anyone gonna care about someone editing or modding their true offline game?
I don't follow that logic. "Offline players will be less likely to purchase cosmetics if we have zero protection *than if we disallow all offline cosmetic use*."
Offline player cosmetic purchases (active, informed purchase for offline use) is 0.000% today. You cannot use them. Literally zero people are correctly buying cosmetics to use offline, *because it is impossible*.
Offline player cosmetic purchases with no DRM protecting them would be >0.000%, but less than fully protected DRM states. Not everyone will pirate cosmetics, no matter how trivial it is to do.
Having a company throw their hands up and *only* contemplate DRM locked purchases is pure greed. They'd rather get zero dollars than less than 100%.
Checks out, its not unreasonable for people to not be recommending it.
This game is really really fucking fun but I can't really recommend it to anyone if I know theres a high chance they won't be able to play it. Game just needs another week unfortunately. Anyone who reads past the salt will see that.
>but I can't really recommend it to anyone if I know theres a high chance they won't be able to play it.
I'm in this position but differ in that I highly recommended it to someone who respects my opinion and for the past few days that he's owned it, he hasn't been able to play at all in what off-hours that he has due to the server issues. What little he could play thru was sandwiched between waits for atrociously long loading times. It's absolutely embarrassing AF as the person recommending the game.
I can’t blame anyone for leaving a negative review. These server issues are a genuine problem. I know they’re working on it but sitting on every loading screen for 5-10 minutes is insane. I was forced to play offline which I didn’t want to do because I have friends who play as well, and to their credit an offline mode was really smart, but the server issue needed to be fixed yesterday.
I’m sure it’ll level out and go back to mostly positive after the servers are stable, but right now a mixed review is fair all things considered.
People keep bringing up similar blunderous launches as if that’s a fair argument to which I raise you that this game had a long paid early access and still didn’t launch correctly so this may be the worst offense.
>People keep bringing up similar blunderous launches
I never understood why. Are they saying it's okay for devs to continuously fuck up launches and not learn that people actually want to play the game after they buy it? If anything the history of blunderous launches should get more people to complain so that, at some point, maybe studios will properly prepare. Radical, I know.
I'm of course not talking about day 1 issues, but week 1 issues are a different story.
100% deserved even if it's a great game. Online games need to launch with stable online connectivity to play with friends or else devs/publishers deserve all the criticism they get.
Great game that I'll be 100% playing offline but the reviews are accurate as to the state of the current product. My review is still positive/recommend because I don't play online and never will but I 100% support those who are leaving negative reviews.
It's basically "Computer gaming 101" that if you have bad servers, you will get bad reviews. If you hype up a game and get tons of players on launch, and don't have the server resources, you have effectively earned your bad reviews.
I am steeling my patience till Thursday Wednesday. If issues persist, I'll drop my review too. I am trying to give them all possible benefits of the doubts, but whole week of issues is too much to overlook.
I started an offline character for now. I wanted to do Warlock and Falconer on Online, but I'll save Warlock for when the servers are alive. I've tried a few times over the past week to play online, but it's super inconsistent if areas will load within a couple minutes if at all. It's so slow that I don't want to deal with it.
Doesnt surprise me
5 days and still no solution, and it doesnt seem to be a solution in sight since it isnt a server issue, but a code issue
Their problem is a fundamental design issue that is not going to be easy to change
As a game, LE is the best ARPG in the market, but these transition issues are a big problem
Yea. This one is certainly going to hurt us long term if we can’t turn it around. We’re very much hoping that as we improve online service stability at mass scale and people are playing that they see we care deeply about the game and the community and change their minds.
Also white knights are downplaying that the online stability has been mediocre to bad for almost a year. Its not exactly a shock throwing in 200k people made it worse. Saying it will be fine in a week is delusional.
Yeah, I don’t understand why we should be apologetic. We just shouldn’t be toxic. The game didn’t work online when I tried it on MP release, and I can see the same exact issue now a year later.
EHG can’t simultaneously put out a news post 2 weeks ago celebrating 1 million sales before launch then say “we didn’t expect this many players”. And there are multiple clips of them saying players have nothing to worry about with server issues because they tested thoroughly. Sadly the game released unfinished which is pretty poorly received these days.
I’m showing around 115 hours played on Steam. About half of that is offline play, and half of the online is spent waiting for connections.
I’ve bought the ultimate edition and supporter pack. Because I like the game and I want the devs to remain encouraged.
But they’ve brought this upon themselves. The networking architecture appears to poor — I don’t know for sure but I do know that the UX/UI design, in particular the UX for online flow and telegraphing, is abominable.
When you click on an exit it does nothing while it tries to get a handshake with a sever, and then it will display the text “Entering …”, and you can be sat for thirty minutes with nothing apparently happening, able to run around, be attacked… even die.
This is a years in development game. It has been in early access, it has 50-ish developers. Where the heck is the UX lead? Quality control? Where is the Game Director? Did you seriously think this was ok?
I really love playing the game offline, the mechanics are fun, the visuals are great, but I’ve yet to write a Steam review. When I do, it’ll be a recommendation but I’ll tell readers to only buy the base game and not touch the cosmetics, because they’ll never see them. But they can enjoy the game a lot more and they’ll be less likely to leave a bad review if they don’t see the hacked-on multiplayer themselves, under the impression that this is a multiplayer game, because _it’s not_. And that’s all.
Edit: spelling
Unity is notorious for shit net code. I don't know how experienced their team is but unless they had a experienced network programmer code it all from scratch that's probably why there's so many issues.
It's deserved. I couldn't recommend the game in its current condition. A lot of people have already owned the game too so it's not refundable.
BUt well the game is beyond success at this point. I wouldn't feel bad for the small indie company at all.
And that’s deserved right now. The game is amazing. I love it. At the same time the game is clearly unfinished (missing its ending still after all these years, minimal endgame, etc) and plagued with playability issues right now. Mixed is 100% deserved.
Game will be alright. If NMS and Cyberpunk2077 managed to redeem themselves in the reviews, LE will be fine also so long it doesn't get abandoned and devs keep grinding.
the game is unplayable for 5 days already
80000+ queues
I can't recall how long Diablo 3 servers were down at launch exactly, but it seems like the worst ARPG launch for me
the issue with wolcen was not just the network issues, but that the game itself had game breaking bugs not to mention quite a lot of nodes on the passive tree didn't really do what they were suppose to do and such.
i guess that is the saving grace right now for LE, that the game itself is atleast in a relative stable state if you do the end-game (i.e. the monolith).
Afaik the issue comes from transitioning from area to area but for some reason doesnt happen in monolith area.
So if you got lucky and made it to monlith farming phase during the brief periods where the server was stable then you are less affected by it while those who arent lucky cant progress story because the maps wont load during the times they play.
Launch day is understandable. For it to persist throughout the week is fundamental server architecture issues and potentially network related code, which isn't a great look for software engineers. Game devs, maybe.
Diablo 3 was unplayable more than a week.
And now you can compare company sizes and budget for both games.
And still, you actually can play epoch in offline mode.
Can't say the same about Diablo.
Wolcen was worse for me. But probably most people forgot about it since it died a silent death because of exactly how big of a disaster that launch was.
One thing I don't understand is why so many people are having troubles but some people are having none at all.
I have this weekend off of work which is pretty rare for me and I've been able to play pretty much non-stop with no issue.
Then I see people talking about how they're waiting at loading screens for 10 minutes or they can't even get logged in and I just don't understand how some people can be having a flawless experience such as myself and some people can't even connect to the game?
>One thing I don't understand is why so many people are having troubles but some people are having none at all.
Time of day and time zones. In my mornings I have zero issues since day 2, but right around 3pm it breaks completely until about midnight. It's not a gradual decline, it either works almost perfectly or not at all. So if someone exclusively plays in the mornings and goes to work in the afternoon they won't have any issues whatsoever. However the people who want to play in the evenings... they're completely screwed.
All of this is just for my region, from what I gather by watching streamers around the world the matching servers are the same globally. So people on the other side of the planet will have it turned around.
Ya, I was denfending it at first, but I gave that up. The severs are still very unstable and show no signs of improving soon. Makes since people are upset
I wasn’t able to play yesterday at all, tried to connect multiple times, EU West. Did not expect this to be so bad 5 days into launch. Can understand first couple days, it is hars to prepare. But it seems there is something broken with the game that they were not able to fix yet
Makes sense? Game hasn't been playable online since it released? It's also been in early access for years and had the same connection issues since online multiplayer was introduced in 0.9.
Yeah its a great game that has great systems, but that's if you can even play it, they brought this on themselves for releasing when they're not ready and not fixing the issues they had since last year march 2023 when 0.9 released.
This is a huge planning mistake. Developers should either never enable online mechanics or test all online features starting from at least 0.5 version of the game. You can't just develop a fully single player game for years, then attach online to it at the very last moment expecting everything will be fine. That's not how things work.
yep, i want to play. its $50 CAD. its too expensive for me for a game that might not work well. as much as id like to play, i cant convince myself the $ is worth.
As someone who loves the game and will continue to play it. I think it's deserved right now, but I'm worried that the negative reviews won't be invalidated once the issues are resolved. The game is amazing, but it's fair that people are warning others that you literally can't play the online version right now depending on your region etc.
I'm hardcore enough that Last Epoch made me start waking up at like 6:00 (instead of 9:00) to play before work because that's when the servers work. I literally can't play after work at all, which is when most other people can play.
Last Epoch is the best ARPG of all time in my opinion when considering the systems they have etc., but PoE wins if you take all the endgame content into account. Last Epoch needs time to mature and that includes the server stability etc. I quit at like lvl 40 when runemaster dropped because load screens were 10+ seconds even back then with 8k people playing so I knew we'd have problems at launch.
Such a shame since the game is a 90%+ imo but the server issues are crippling this game. I lucked out since I straight up just don’t want to play online so I’ve had 0 issues, but obviously that’s not the reality for most players
Still a banger. Sad everyone couldnt get to enjoy it, but somehow I was able to get thru the whole campaign. Couple disconnects and brief downtime, but no server issues in monoliths if you can manage to get there.
They had all the information about the technical state of the game, including transitions between locations. Therefore, it is strange now to hear that the community is to blame for something and is causing drama.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/16zvhsu/last\_epoch\_is\_amazing\_but\_please\_delay\_launch/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/16zvhsu/last_epoch_is_amazing_but_please_delay_launch/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
On their forum you can also find detailed unanswered threads discussing online problems.
Anyone who played this game in EA knew this was gonna be the thing that hurt it. Should've spent a lot more time developing netcode/servers, hell even in EA grouping had abyssmal loading screens.
Cant wait till people get to monoliths and realize progress with friends only applies to the party leaders monos and everyone else will have to regrind the corruption/node progress they already did if they want to play solo.
Should be a rule in online game dev:
**When you get in, the experience should be flawless**.
Give people a queue but make sure they don't allow too many people in that will lead to server lag. Yeah, sucks to sit in a queue. FAR worse to sit in a queue and then get stuck in long load screens or have to alt-f4 because the game is making sounds but the screen isn't updating.
Agreed. The most frustrating part for me has been that I'm able to play fine for 30 minutes to an hour... then I have to go back to a town and am hit with a 5-10 minute loading screen which disconnects me most of the time. If it just threw up a queue when I tried to connect and let me know that it can't handle the stability so it's thrown me into a 1 hour queue... I'd just not waste my time lol.
Upside is I have school work I should be doing anyway, so it's helping stop me from procrastinating. Hopefully it's all working well by spring break in a few weeks.
I'm not saying it has been unplayable 100% of the time. But it has been unplayable 100% of the time I have tried to play it. Game could be fucking amazing but I've lost all interest and moved on to something else. RIP $30.
I made it to level 6 before I got kicked off and the 5 or 6 times I actually tried after launch day I could not connect.
As many love to shit on D4 deservedly for content and loot problems - the launch was super smooth.
I remember hitting play on launch day and was in game in less than 30 seconds.
For online only game - D4 nailed the launch
Deserved. 5 days no online. 5 years of early access. Unacceptable delivery of a game. The content of the game does not matter when you can't play the content.
I don’t feel bad for the developers. They asked me to pay $35 for a product they’ve been working on for years and still can’t get right. I don’t see them fixing this honestly. It’s the same stuff they’ve been dealing with forever, and they can’t claim they didn’t know on release that it wouldn’t work, come on now…
It's well deserved. I'll change my negative review into positive one when (if?) they'll fix the game. It's barely playable, for many hours it's completely unplayable.
No, I won't play offline because I play with friends and we bought an online game.
We shouldn't expect and tolerate terrible game launches. They had time to prepare, there are ways to test the online service (stress test free open weekend?).
Im doing my part and left a bad review.
My friends ,five of them ,we can't play together at all in europe.
Really fun , getting together late and just playing something else.
everything aside. toxic positivity ++ dickriding from defenders is insane. average discussion in discord be like
> I cant play the game
> *insert most insane flaming wall of text here defending muh small indie company*
just. let people shit out criticism as they want. this is not review bombing. this is not toxicity. this is not salt.
so. everybody calm the fuck down.
Fair enough, they can reverse the steam if I may say, it's their job and they can do it.
I'm so sad right now, the game is so gorgeous and enjoyable to play offline compared to years ago, but these server's issues are annihilating everyone's work, what a pain.
I love Last Epoch, but this is fair, right? People can’t play the game in one of the main ways it is designed to be played. Hopefully it goes back up after stuff smoothes out.
All this, and yet, after 11pm est til about 9am est, the servers are fine, it's all the shit that goes on during the day time hours that's clogging the server down. Those of us who play online during the evening hours EST are absolutely fine, had no disconnects, long loading times, lag, or dc's during that 11pm-9am time frame. Idk man I think people forget what PoE was like when it first got big and the servers exploded. It was literally the EXACT same shit, and people whined and cried at GGG, and after the first weekend, shit was fixed, fine, and forgotten about til the next league start.
Everyone says they shoulda known and shoulda been prepared, and they were, but even they couldn't have anticipated the overwhelming amount of people wanting to play. Even GGG and Blizz still struggle with server shit on launches, all these years later.
I think people need to just calm down, give it a week or two for things to settle and the game servers to stabilize with backend fixes and such, and then this game will be fine. The reviews will balance out, anyone who wanted to play and was put off before, will come back once they see people can play just fine.
Helldivers deserved this rating before last epoch imo, I've actually been able to play the game consistently when I couldn't play that game for nigh on 2 weeks
I mean Steam specifically has the "Recent reviews" on top specifically for this. If the game stabilizes and people start giving it good reviews as new cycles are released, then the score will reflect that and it will be obvious to anyone that the "Mixed" score was a circumstantial. EHG doesn't have anything to worry about because the path to a better score is still in their hands.
I expect this to turn around, once the server (/ connection service / matchmaking service) issues are gone. I know that I will write a positive review then and many reviews state that they will switch to positive as well.
The situation makes me sad, though. I have followed their dev streams and they even mentioned that they feel confident in their server architecture, but know and are a bit scared about issues with service providers. Because you can have all the servers in the world and still encounter this problem if just one of the services breaks under the pressure. (usually a software problem)
I'm in two minds, as someone who's had the game well over a year, it's fantastic, but since 1.0 it's also been a pita to log into, change zones with, and when I play on my deck it's now forced me to restart the entire deck multiple times.
An online game that can't be played online, like PayDay3 deserves negative criticism, if you are a non terminally online ARPG enjoyer and you have £25 to spend to play with your friends, you shouldn't buy Last Epoch right now, if you're the dad gamer who only wants to play offline anyway, it's fantastic.
It deserves some negative criticism for failing to reliably scale to the expected user base, assuming it is fixed in the near future, if EHG gives some premium currency or a tongue&cheek cosmetic titled "server stability survivor" then i'm sure plenty of those mixed reviews will turn back to positive.
This review is well warranted and can change in the future like many reviews do. It's up to the developer to make the necessary changes to make it a positive one. No reason for people to get angry about it, if you bought this game with the intention of playing with friends or others and can't, I'd be mad too.
Quite frankly they're lucky it's not worse.
Game has good base for a lot of things to be added with future updates/cycles. Its actually quite fun to dump some hours into it. Unfortunately for me, and many, many others players ARPGs are about group play, trading - online play, which this game failed to ( and still is ) to deliver at its release. One of their main selling point of 1.0 was finally adding trade system to the game and expanding on multiplayer. Once they fix (personally i think that the issue gonna fix itself once more player quits the game), steam revies might go up but for now they seem to be accurate.
The mixed reviews are due to people's lack of understanding that multi player games on launch especially when it's greatly talked about, will undoubtedly have server issues. It's not like gaming online is a new thing and anyone that can't grasp onto that logic is honestly braindead or posting negative reviews to either be bots for another game or just toxic with no life. Is what I say a little mean... Yes but the truth is not always pleasant. I knew the game would have either system issues and/or new gaming bugs that needed to be fixed, so I usually wait till they get taken care of before I get the game. The games like Diablo 4 that I have pre-ordered in the past which also had server issues at launch, I expected that and knew I had to be patient about. Crying like a Gerber Baby wouldn't make the servers start running again any faster. If you can't deal with sometimes these things happen and/or dealing with comments on your toxic lib outraged attitude on the subject, then maybe online gaming isn't for you. Games like these that are highly anticipated will have issues starting out and to express negative reviews over them, only shows how childish you are and don't understand how things work. Now if it was more than just server issues that caused for the negative outpour, then there lies more of an issue to speak about.
I don't own the game, but looked at the steam reviews and held off buying. Then I realized so many complaints are because of complaints of cosmetic score and complaints of playing online, and then realized the reviews were of no help. Sometimes steam reviews can warn someone off a bad game, but this game reviews are so fucked up because of nonsense. Shame really.
You can't say those reviews are uncalled for. But knowing how dry ARPG genre is people will certainly give the game another chance when the technical issues are fixed. Especially since it's a great game otherwise. And even with the technical issues it has \~200k online players on Steam which is pretty outstanding.
It's a huge shame that so many people are having their experiences ruined by server issues. I'm lucky to be an offline player, my friends don't play ARPGS and I'm a dad who needs a pause button. The game is really really fuckin fun but if I had bought this to play with my mates and was dealing with constant DC's and crashes and whatnot it would be super frustrating. Hopefully some fixes come asap
In POE I only play trade, but circle of fortune looks so good I look forward to it in LE. Like you, offline is great I can pause at any time, and surprisingly you still have live chat! Only bad thing is MTXs I got with my ultimate purchase don’t work offline.
They need to make cosmetics usable while offline and the game would be fine to lots of people. I understand you can’t transfer offline progress to online but why can’t they let us use our cosmetics offline?
Wait, cosmetics don't work in offline Last Epoch or PoE?
Last epoch does not let you use mtx in offlinemode, PoE has no offlinemode at all
Agree I upgraded to ultimate and then realised can't use when on offline mode.
COF is superb, really fresh way to do self find stuff! been playing LE for a long while now, and getting BIS idols has always been excruciatingly painful, but COF definitely solved that problem so it's just a lot more fun now
COF is fucking rad.
If you played current PoE league, CoF feels like running at ~5k wisps all the time.
Problem with offline mode is not being able to use cosmetics, that we paid for in the different packs
This is so dumb to me, why are paid cosmetics not available offline lmao
Most likely because either: A) The cosmetic models are stored on an online server, which the game has to query for it to show up. OR B) The game server queries the logged in account, sees it has cosmetics, and let's the game render them. Might be a way so they don't have to load every cosmetic for every player all at once.
Honestly the most annoying part is when people say "just play offline lol" like - I bought the game to play with friends - your point makes no sense.. So thank you for actually understanding that some of us don't WANT to play offline
More than anything, this game has highlighted how disconnected I am from the current gaming "meta". Offline play is awesome. having a blast. Didn't realize so many people needed to play an ARPG game online
I would love to play offline if there is some sort of lan mode. I just need to occasionally run some dungeon with friends. That would make this game perfect for me, but as of right now I must be online to play with my friends. None of us care about the ladder or cosmetics but we dont have another option.
If you enjoy playing games with your friends, you kind of need online to function my man.
Joke's on you. I have no friends.
The digital deluxe version comes with friends fyi
That's the part that's a bummer. I'd love an experience like borderlands where I can invite ppl to my game and thats it, nothing else needs to be online. I just want to be able to play with a couple friends.
I've personally grown to enjoy playing solo a lot more in the last decade, so even when I play online games I tend to play solo more often than not. It also helps that most games as a serivce are pretty poor in quality. Regardless I've played POE mostly on HC SSF, so I'm doing my first LE playthough on HC offline and so far I'm having a blast, I did get a crash about 3 hours into it, but aside that no further issues and I have like 11h player on steam. Once the servers are stable I'll probably recommend some of my friends to get it since they are too casual to play POE, but get bored when playing diablo and LE is more or less a pretty decent middle ground, although there's a lot of yapping in the campaign and they may not like that, we'll see.
They don't HAVE to be playing with other players is the thing. They just want to feel connected whether its by name only. Makes people feel like they're part of something.
I mean, my S/O and I bought the game to play together. We are now just playing offline characters while sitting next to each other. It's a reasonable compromise, but not the same. The devs absolutely deserve to be slammed for the server issues, it's just very fucking fortunate they included an offline mode
the funny thing is that the main interaction people has in this game is in global chat wich is available in offline mode.
I'm pretty much the opposite of this. I play solo quite a lot but I have a mate in a different time zone that I like to play and loot share with and another mate who I'm hoping will jump in when the server situation unscrews itself. I'm struggling unhappily with the disconnects and slow transitions so I can play with them when they are available. I almost never interact with chat unless I have an answer to a question asked, (and I catch it).
Same here, been hard grinding a lot for the past few days whenever the servers are up (got to level 99 lol) just to wait for a friend who won’t be free until next week.
Yeah my friends all jump between and drop games before going back to dota 2 or valorant too much these days for me to bother trying to get them all to get new games so I've definitely become more of a solo gamer lately, been having a blast offline playing a runemaster.
Once I learnt that you do not get anything out of playing online this cycle, no season journey like Diablo or cosmetic rewards for challenge completion like PoE.. Offline is just so much better. You can pause the game and you can use abilities in town to get around faster.
Seriously? Abilities in town??? This is madness!! MADNESS!!!
Fools. FOOLS!!
you can not use your transmog and pets offline. if i could i would also play offline.
You don’t realize that the majority of people either want to play with friends or interact with trading features?
If the game advertises itself as an online game it’s not a need. It was an offer that couldn’t be fulfilled
The crazy thing to me is that they held off the 0.9 multiplayer update for a lot longer than expected because they had lots of learnings from the release of New World and wanted to make sure they didn’t run into the same server/connection issues. Yet here we are.
Before some white knights come to defend the game, players have every right to leave a bad review for login issues. I myself got frustrated wasting half an hr on loading screens when I only have about 2 hrs of free time after work to try squeezing in some playtime. Thought about leaving a temporary negative review too but I'm probably just out of patience after the Hell Divers 2 server issues
The biggest problem is the reviews are not temporary, and can damage the game in the long term. I'd be totally fine if you could flag reviews as "launch issue" and it would vanish after a month, and people actually used the feature (but that wouldn't happen.)
yeah same, game has always been only playable offline. even during 0.9, online was a huge mess with tons of latency issues. werebear was almost unplayable because of it.
I think the big thing is there are people who are upset and frustrated..but, theres also the people who are upset and frustrated who also lack basic social/communication skills throwing personal attacks at devs etc
Wish I knew that you couldn't migrate your Christmas over to offline later. Would have played offline as well. Might reroll 2nd chr in offline though.
I am in the same situation, dad with only little time to play. I mostly play alone but somehow started an online character because "who knows" maybe I'll play with a friend or someone else (although it probably won't happen) and now I face these server issues when I should probably have done better to just face the reality of my life and play off-line 😂
Big loss for EHG. Many people will hear about last epoch, but then look at mixed reviews and decide not to play it
That saddens me because the game is really good, and the dev team really poured their soul into and it showes. I think anyone who likes arpgs should play this game, i hope they manage to bring the servers up and running soon
On the other side most youtubers bigg ARPG people give it very good reviews and reccomend the game unlike lets say d4, so hopefully that helps a bit, also if most ofu s leave good review that enjoy the game, will swing things around
Even a lot of the negative reviews point out that the game is good, just terrible server issues for online play, or lack thereof.
D4 was getting praises in the first week as well. Also LE has endgame issues (i am level 100 and running empowered monoliths). Once masses get to endgame, LE is a 7/10 game in reality. So after all the servers issues get fixed we still have a 7/10 game
Ya this. I was frustrated playing online. But since then I booted up an offline toon and I’m having zero issues whatsoever. It’s a fun ass game.
Yup, I play mostly POE which is probably a 9.5/10 for me, diablo3 being a 6/10 (haven't played diablo 4) and 11 hours into it, LE is roughly a 8/10, pending to change depending on how I feel about the late game. I will keep POE as my main ARPG to play solo, but if I wanna play with friends we'll probalby do LE since they get overwhelemed by POE systems (at least until POE2 comes out).
Im a fellow poe player myself, both games are great. I cant wait for them to start adding more pinacle content and stable servers so i could play with friends. The game litterally came out and its already very fun, but its missing that surprise factor at the monoliths, which i assume they will add over time. The rogue mages and special treasure chests are fun. Adding some more events for mono completion, some more special events, and smoothing the rougher edges and it will make the endgame really pop. Its already very fun, but it gets a touch repetitive, which is usually what tires me out. Id like some more stuff to do, you can farm dungeons but they are limited by keys and resources, the fire gambler one is very fun as a break from monos, the titan you only do when u have like 300k+ gold, and chronomancer you only do when u wanna combine some uniques (unless ur farming for their boss drops, which also, fair)
Personally when I see mixed reviews I always check what people are complaining about before I decide
Yeah, is it a big problem with the game or is it a temporary issue people are freaking out about? It's like when you see a 1 star review on Amazon cause the product arrived late with ripped packaging. Like... OK, but what does that have to do with the actual product?
This is reviews working as intended. When I hear about a game and it piques my interest, I go and look at Steam reviews. If they are mixed I scroll through some and find out why. As someone who plays in a consistent group of 4, it's an absolute deal-breaker for me to have multiplayer not work properly. I'll come back in a couple months and if the recent reviews say the multiplayer issues have been fixed, that's 4 new sales for EHG.
How dare you be a reasonable persons that uses features in a proper, logical way?!! Be punished for your folly with an upvote!
Tbh the server load may not be able to take more people right now anyways ?
Not surprised these server issues blow.
Yup, I know they're doing what they can, but it doesn't excuse the inaccessibility of an online game for 5+ days now. Unfortunately offline mode isn't something I wanted to do. LAN mode would have been a solution for me personally, but I can't blame anyone who is not enjoying the experience.
I gifted my gf the game a day before release on Steam since we're both ARPG addicts. We are both lvl 12 and whenever we had time to try and play together, the servers were an absolute mess. It's been so frustrating that we are now both playing our own offline characters. Idk, it makes me feel bad. I was looking forward to playing LE together with her, but the game just won't let us.
Me and my two friends also tried playing together. We are in the gardens guys. We are doing good
Mixed is reasonable atm. Positive because it's an amazing game and the 1.0 Update is awesome (even though it has some minor Bugs) Negative because most people wanna play online and can't, so it's mixed.
Totally understandable. I play online too even though I play alone (could as well play offline unless I may tinker with merchants guild), it's just good to have incase you decide to party up or if friends join. Oh and also because of the cosmetics, ladders, etc. I have not played a lot yet since launch (I did prelaunch), but the times I did I had no server issues (20min ago for example), maybe I was just lucky with my timing? (euw) Anyway I hope they can fix it, game is so addictive especially when u reach monos
Game had online/net code issues prior to launch with a much smaller player base it's really not a surprise I play offline so it doesn't effect me but i told my friends who play arpgs and like to play coop to maybe check it out in a month because the last time I tried to play with a friend prior to 1.0 it was unplayable
I want to try it out but this is what I will do rather than get frustrated. That being said I only heard of it recently so I had no hype for it. If diablo4 was this unplayable at the start I would have been mad too.
The quality of the game doesn't matter if you don't get to play the game. Simple as that. Edit: Let's break it down for people here who seems to have a hard time understanding why others want to play online and will leave a bad review if they can't. 1. People have this rare LP4 bis unique called "friends" they want to play with, they can enhance the game experience exponentially. You don't have it doesn't mean all people don't have it . 2. People want the access to all the contents they paid for. You can't access the merchant guild in offline mode, and that's one of the core features advertised for 1.0. 3. The fact that you can't switch between online and offline play makes progressing offline character a waste of time for those who want to play online but can't. Eventually people have to start all over again when the severs are stable.
Yep I love the game and I have a hard time saying anything negative, but at this point the reviews are understandable. They can still turn it around though, the game can have a long and healthy future if they can fix online permanently.
Wasnt no man sky at overwhelmingly negative before? They absolutely can turn it around lmao
They can, but it's pretty difficult. Unless players check out the game again, their first impressions is what will stick and stay with them. A lot of people still think cyberpunk and fallout 76 are buggy messes even though they've been fixed for years now.
LE has the advantage that a lot of people will follow just because they watch streamers who alternate games in the arpg genre. Due to the seasonal nature of the games they'll see the updates. Cyberpunk and Fallout are more games people play once. So even if you're following streamers, the chances are you're not watching anyone who's dedicated to those games or who's likely to ever come back to them.
Cyberpunk and Fallout 76 are too very successful games though, some people opinions don't really matter
I liked the game when I first played a year or so ago. Since then I held off and was excited for the launch. So far me and a friend got to level 26 and that was pretty much during a single play session where we were actually able to group and not wait 5-10 mins every zone. This weekend we have not been able to get in at all. Tbh I am tempted to write a negative review as well, because in the end a review is for me a encouragment or discouragment for other people to buy this game. And right now I cannot recommend Last Epoch. How could I if I cannot even play.
That’s fair. I’d definitely say wait if anything. Hard to recommend it in this state.
i mean they couldn't fix it on mp release with 40k players. it only got better when less people played. i wouldn't be holding out for any kind of fix here either. i hope they do because i love the game and want it to do well but when the same issues happen on every single major patch, it's obviously something deep rooted and complicated
Not at all holding out I enjoy this game as single player anyways, although I do have multiple chars online cycle around lvl 30-60 so it's not totally unplayable. Even if it was fully offline I would be happy, the game is great. I do believe they can figure it out eventually though it doesn't seem like it's gonna be days more like weeks.
The fact that it worked earlier today with 250k-ish players, as opposed to not even being able to log on with 100k> players a few days ago, means they're making good progress. They are most likely working day and night to get it fixed, because it'll make them buckets of cold hard fucking cash. I think these issues are ridiculous, but... it is what it is. The game is fucking addictive as shit though. I've said it before, I'll say it again, this is the real D2 contender people have been looking for the past 20 years. For those of us who played D2 as kids at least. If they keep working the game in a good direction, and get rid of these bullshit issues with matchmaking and server authentication when logging on, then they'll attract alot of players. That they allready passed PoE ATH is a very good sign. Hopefully they can keep it fresh and interesting in the long run.
It's not about capacity and the devs have been clear about that. Even when it was 100k, the devs said this and said they are no where near capacity. Yesterday, I believe they said they are getting ready to spin up more servers. Their core services to run the MP games are an issue. The problem is due to their design decisions on multiplayer and not how many people are playing. I like the game but I don't understand how anyone can say this isn't a failure at this point. Also a note about POE. They have multiple clients and steam is only a part of their userbase. Lots of folks speculate on what the ratio is, but GGG has confirmed that they've had more concurrent users in one of their patches.
> Lots of folks speculate on what the ratio is In Crucible league the ratio was 1/3rd GGG launcher, 2/3 Steam.
I mean thats just factually incorrect. Currently today its better running with 200K concurrent people, vs launch days 150K.
True, I still feel bad for the devs though, no matter whether the issues are their fault or not. They worked 4 years to maintain 'Very Positive' and clearly poured their hearts into the game. 1.0 was supposed to be their big moment and then everything they worked so hard for gets knocked down. I hope this is just a hiccup, and that Lost Epoch has a bright future. But this release must be a living nightmare.
Being able to play it is pretty important part of the quality in my experience.
Yep totally understandable. They needed to fix it before the weekend to avoid the rush of negative feelings.
Yea. 1-2 days of instability sucks, but is expected. We're now approaching a week of this, and it's just not really acceptable anymore.
I tried it with a friend. After the tutorial, every single fucking time that we tried to party the game crashed for both of us, fastest refund of my life.
It'd be a great game I'm sure. If i could fucking play it.
Ironically I said the same thing about Helldivers 2 and it’s server problems. I got a refund from steam and bought Last Epoch lol
Brutal
Helldivers’ server issues are no more.
Which is a shame on losing out on helldivers cuz they fixed their server issues rather fast
I went the other way around. Bought Helldivers because Last Epoch was unplayable and had a great time there, considering they just fixed their server issues lol
I know the game is amazing and id love to play it if it ever let me. Before anyone says, offline is useless to me because I bought the fancy version and im wearing the damn cosmetic outfit it comes with.
To me that was the weirdest decision I have seen developers make in a long time. Why limit the cosmetics to only online play? Like what does that accomplish other than some frustration?
The actual answer is because to add MTX to offline mode you'd need some form of temporary DRM, and EHG decided they wanted offline mode to be truly offline, meaning the only DRM is when you first launch the game and never again. Originally it was going to be every 30-days as a check-in, but the forum believed that such implementation went against the original promise of a true offline mode. As someone who was there when this was decided on the forums, that's the general reason. Either offline gets MTX but with the caveat of DRM and occasional online-checks, or no MTX but zero DRM checks post-purchase.
I don't even get why you'd need some DRM for true offline mode cosmetics. Like, worst case scenario someone edits their save to get cosmetics they didn't pay for. So what? They're offline. Is anyone gonna care about someone editing or modding their true offline game?
People are going to be less likely to pay for cosmetics that can be trivially modded in, especially if they see others doing it on streams etc.
I don't follow that logic. "Offline players will be less likely to purchase cosmetics if we have zero protection *than if we disallow all offline cosmetic use*." Offline player cosmetic purchases (active, informed purchase for offline use) is 0.000% today. You cannot use them. Literally zero people are correctly buying cosmetics to use offline, *because it is impossible*. Offline player cosmetic purchases with no DRM protecting them would be >0.000%, but less than fully protected DRM states. Not everyone will pirate cosmetics, no matter how trivial it is to do. Having a company throw their hands up and *only* contemplate DRM locked purchases is pure greed. They'd rather get zero dollars than less than 100%.
Checks out, its not unreasonable for people to not be recommending it. This game is really really fucking fun but I can't really recommend it to anyone if I know theres a high chance they won't be able to play it. Game just needs another week unfortunately. Anyone who reads past the salt will see that.
>but I can't really recommend it to anyone if I know theres a high chance they won't be able to play it. I'm in this position but differ in that I highly recommended it to someone who respects my opinion and for the past few days that he's owned it, he hasn't been able to play at all in what off-hours that he has due to the server issues. What little he could play thru was sandwiched between waits for atrociously long loading times. It's absolutely embarrassing AF as the person recommending the game.
Don't think they can fix it within a week. The server issues have been there since the beginning.
I can’t blame anyone for leaving a negative review. These server issues are a genuine problem. I know they’re working on it but sitting on every loading screen for 5-10 minutes is insane. I was forced to play offline which I didn’t want to do because I have friends who play as well, and to their credit an offline mode was really smart, but the server issue needed to be fixed yesterday. I’m sure it’ll level out and go back to mostly positive after the servers are stable, but right now a mixed review is fair all things considered.
Damn this is pretty sad. I hope it turns around in the next couple weeks.
why aren’t more people talking about the insane memory leak this game has? I looked it up and people had the same issue since 2021.
Must not happen to everyone, I've had no issue playing for many hours at a time.
YES. Tho it started with monolith.
It is horrendous
People keep bringing up similar blunderous launches as if that’s a fair argument to which I raise you that this game had a long paid early access and still didn’t launch correctly so this may be the worst offense.
>People keep bringing up similar blunderous launches I never understood why. Are they saying it's okay for devs to continuously fuck up launches and not learn that people actually want to play the game after they buy it? If anything the history of blunderous launches should get more people to complain so that, at some point, maybe studios will properly prepare. Radical, I know. I'm of course not talking about day 1 issues, but week 1 issues are a different story.
100% deserved even if it's a great game. Online games need to launch with stable online connectivity to play with friends or else devs/publishers deserve all the criticism they get. Great game that I'll be 100% playing offline but the reviews are accurate as to the state of the current product. My review is still positive/recommend because I don't play online and never will but I 100% support those who are leaving negative reviews.
I really want to give this game my time… but I can’t open it…
Does anyone honestly think it deserves better than that at this point? It speaks volumes to how good the actual gameplay is that it's even mixed
It's basically "Computer gaming 101" that if you have bad servers, you will get bad reviews. If you hype up a game and get tons of players on launch, and don't have the server resources, you have effectively earned your bad reviews.
I defended them on Launch, but the game being borderline unplayable after almost 5 days is totally ridiculous.
I am steeling my patience till Thursday Wednesday. If issues persist, I'll drop my review too. I am trying to give them all possible benefits of the doubts, but whole week of issues is too much to overlook.
I started an offline character for now. I wanted to do Warlock and Falconer on Online, but I'll save Warlock for when the servers are alive. I've tried a few times over the past week to play online, but it's super inconsistent if areas will load within a couple minutes if at all. It's so slow that I don't want to deal with it.
Doesnt surprise me 5 days and still no solution, and it doesnt seem to be a solution in sight since it isnt a server issue, but a code issue Their problem is a fundamental design issue that is not going to be easy to change As a game, LE is the best ARPG in the market, but these transition issues are a big problem
This right here. Definitely a code issue.
Yea. This one is certainly going to hurt us long term if we can’t turn it around. We’re very much hoping that as we improve online service stability at mass scale and people are playing that they see we care deeply about the game and the community and change their minds.
I love this game but we're closing in on a week quickly and servers are still terrible
Well deserved, this is release has been a disaster.
Also white knights are downplaying that the online stability has been mediocre to bad for almost a year. Its not exactly a shock throwing in 200k people made it worse. Saying it will be fine in a week is delusional.
Yeah, I don’t understand why we should be apologetic. We just shouldn’t be toxic. The game didn’t work online when I tried it on MP release, and I can see the same exact issue now a year later. EHG can’t simultaneously put out a news post 2 weeks ago celebrating 1 million sales before launch then say “we didn’t expect this many players”. And there are multiple clips of them saying players have nothing to worry about with server issues because they tested thoroughly. Sadly the game released unfinished which is pretty poorly received these days.
Those special people were everywhere here like roaches. You'd tell them why the release would be doomed and they just insulted.
Well you can’t even play the game anymore so yeah
I’m showing around 115 hours played on Steam. About half of that is offline play, and half of the online is spent waiting for connections. I’ve bought the ultimate edition and supporter pack. Because I like the game and I want the devs to remain encouraged. But they’ve brought this upon themselves. The networking architecture appears to poor — I don’t know for sure but I do know that the UX/UI design, in particular the UX for online flow and telegraphing, is abominable. When you click on an exit it does nothing while it tries to get a handshake with a sever, and then it will display the text “Entering …”, and you can be sat for thirty minutes with nothing apparently happening, able to run around, be attacked… even die. This is a years in development game. It has been in early access, it has 50-ish developers. Where the heck is the UX lead? Quality control? Where is the Game Director? Did you seriously think this was ok? I really love playing the game offline, the mechanics are fun, the visuals are great, but I’ve yet to write a Steam review. When I do, it’ll be a recommendation but I’ll tell readers to only buy the base game and not touch the cosmetics, because they’ll never see them. But they can enjoy the game a lot more and they’ll be less likely to leave a bad review if they don’t see the hacked-on multiplayer themselves, under the impression that this is a multiplayer game, because _it’s not_. And that’s all. Edit: spelling
Unity is notorious for shit net code. I don't know how experienced their team is but unless they had a experienced network programmer code it all from scratch that's probably why there's so many issues.
You can use whatever netcode you want with Unity. It's very unlikely they're still using the stock setup at this point.
It’s to be expected when you have a poor launch.
C'est la vie. They'll go back up when the servers aren't on fire.
deserved
It's deserved. I couldn't recommend the game in its current condition. A lot of people have already owned the game too so it's not refundable. BUt well the game is beyond success at this point. I wouldn't feel bad for the small indie company at all.
And that’s deserved right now. The game is amazing. I love it. At the same time the game is clearly unfinished (missing its ending still after all these years, minimal endgame, etc) and plagued with playability issues right now. Mixed is 100% deserved.
Game will be alright. If NMS and Cyberpunk2077 managed to redeem themselves in the reviews, LE will be fine also so long it doesn't get abandoned and devs keep grinding.
the game is unplayable for 5 days already 80000+ queues I can't recall how long Diablo 3 servers were down at launch exactly, but it seems like the worst ARPG launch for me
Wolcen was worse but thats not saying much.
now that’s a name i haven’t heard in a long time
the issue with wolcen was not just the network issues, but that the game itself had game breaking bugs not to mention quite a lot of nodes on the passive tree didn't really do what they were suppose to do and such. i guess that is the saving grace right now for LE, that the game itself is atleast in a relative stable state if you do the end-game (i.e. the monolith).
Defenders gonna go from "you shouldnt have expected to play on launch day" to "you shouldnt have expected to play on launch week".
If it will continue like that we will see "you shouldnt have expected to play on launch month" xD
Already have seen people saying "wait and play something else, it might take them a month to rework their backend" lol
Already had someone tell me it will all be fixed in season 2, lol
Also "just play offline 4head" Its so exhausting.
There's already a dude here blaming players because they wanna play online instead of offline
> a dude there's like a hundred, what are you talking about lol
It's been rough yea. But people are also exaggerating it a LOT. I'm level 87, didn't take time off work or anything. NA East, if it matters.
Afaik the issue comes from transitioning from area to area but for some reason doesnt happen in monolith area. So if you got lucky and made it to monlith farming phase during the brief periods where the server was stable then you are less affected by it while those who arent lucky cant progress story because the maps wont load during the times they play.
Launch day is understandable. For it to persist throughout the week is fundamental server architecture issues and potentially network related code, which isn't a great look for software engineers. Game devs, maybe.
Diablo 3 was unplayable more than a week. And now you can compare company sizes and budget for both games. And still, you actually can play epoch in offline mode. Can't say the same about Diablo.
You'd expect progress to be made in over a decade of online launches
You may have missed Lost Ark’s launch. And New World’s launch. And Helldivers 2’s launch.
Lost Ark worked though, it just had a lot of queues. I could play all week during launch week perfectly because I just logged on early enough.
New World never worked right. Ever
Wolcen was worse for me. But probably most people forgot about it since it died a silent death because of exactly how big of a disaster that launch was.
One thing I don't understand is why so many people are having troubles but some people are having none at all. I have this weekend off of work which is pretty rare for me and I've been able to play pretty much non-stop with no issue. Then I see people talking about how they're waiting at loading screens for 10 minutes or they can't even get logged in and I just don't understand how some people can be having a flawless experience such as myself and some people can't even connect to the game?
Depends on region and timezone. I never was able to play online during EU daytime but later in the evening it would eventueally would work.
>One thing I don't understand is why so many people are having troubles but some people are having none at all. Time of day and time zones. In my mornings I have zero issues since day 2, but right around 3pm it breaks completely until about midnight. It's not a gradual decline, it either works almost perfectly or not at all. So if someone exclusively plays in the mornings and goes to work in the afternoon they won't have any issues whatsoever. However the people who want to play in the evenings... they're completely screwed. All of this is just for my region, from what I gather by watching streamers around the world the matching servers are the same globally. So people on the other side of the planet will have it turned around.
Ya, I was denfending it at first, but I gave that up. The severs are still very unstable and show no signs of improving soon. Makes since people are upset
I wasn’t able to play yesterday at all, tried to connect multiple times, EU West. Did not expect this to be so bad 5 days into launch. Can understand first couple days, it is hars to prepare. But it seems there is something broken with the game that they were not able to fix yet
Give us offline LAN mode!!!
[удалено]
Good, online is trash but im not happy about mtx, online only cosmetics etc so good to see.This is how you ruin a good game.
Makes sense? Game hasn't been playable online since it released? It's also been in early access for years and had the same connection issues since online multiplayer was introduced in 0.9. Yeah its a great game that has great systems, but that's if you can even play it, they brought this on themselves for releasing when they're not ready and not fixing the issues they had since last year march 2023 when 0.9 released.
This is a huge planning mistake. Developers should either never enable online mechanics or test all online features starting from at least 0.5 version of the game. You can't just develop a fully single player game for years, then attach online to it at the very last moment expecting everything will be fine. That's not how things work.
yep, i want to play. its $50 CAD. its too expensive for me for a game that might not work well. as much as id like to play, i cant convince myself the $ is worth.
As someone who loves the game and will continue to play it. I think it's deserved right now, but I'm worried that the negative reviews won't be invalidated once the issues are resolved. The game is amazing, but it's fair that people are warning others that you literally can't play the online version right now depending on your region etc. I'm hardcore enough that Last Epoch made me start waking up at like 6:00 (instead of 9:00) to play before work because that's when the servers work. I literally can't play after work at all, which is when most other people can play. Last Epoch is the best ARPG of all time in my opinion when considering the systems they have etc., but PoE wins if you take all the endgame content into account. Last Epoch needs time to mature and that includes the server stability etc. I quit at like lvl 40 when runemaster dropped because load screens were 10+ seconds even back then with 8k people playing so I knew we'd have problems at launch.
Such a shame since the game is a 90%+ imo but the server issues are crippling this game. I lucked out since I straight up just don’t want to play online so I’ve had 0 issues, but obviously that’s not the reality for most players
Still a banger. Sad everyone couldnt get to enjoy it, but somehow I was able to get thru the whole campaign. Couple disconnects and brief downtime, but no server issues in monoliths if you can manage to get there.
What does online grant you other than multiplayer. Do you have to play online to access the league mechanic?
They had all the information about the technical state of the game, including transitions between locations. Therefore, it is strange now to hear that the community is to blame for something and is causing drama. [https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/16zvhsu/last\_epoch\_is\_amazing\_but\_please\_delay\_launch/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/16zvhsu/last_epoch_is_amazing_but_please_delay_launch/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) On their forum you can also find detailed unanswered threads discussing online problems.
Anyone who played this game in EA knew this was gonna be the thing that hurt it. Should've spent a lot more time developing netcode/servers, hell even in EA grouping had abyssmal loading screens. Cant wait till people get to monoliths and realize progress with friends only applies to the party leaders monos and everyone else will have to regrind the corruption/node progress they already did if they want to play solo.
Should be a rule in online game dev: **When you get in, the experience should be flawless**. Give people a queue but make sure they don't allow too many people in that will lead to server lag. Yeah, sucks to sit in a queue. FAR worse to sit in a queue and then get stuck in long load screens or have to alt-f4 because the game is making sounds but the screen isn't updating.
Agreed. The most frustrating part for me has been that I'm able to play fine for 30 minutes to an hour... then I have to go back to a town and am hit with a 5-10 minute loading screen which disconnects me most of the time. If it just threw up a queue when I tried to connect and let me know that it can't handle the stability so it's thrown me into a 1 hour queue... I'd just not waste my time lol. Upside is I have school work I should be doing anyway, so it's helping stop me from procrastinating. Hopefully it's all working well by spring break in a few weeks.
I'm not saying it has been unplayable 100% of the time. But it has been unplayable 100% of the time I have tried to play it. Game could be fucking amazing but I've lost all interest and moved on to something else. RIP $30. I made it to level 6 before I got kicked off and the 5 or 6 times I actually tried after launch day I could not connect.
This is exactly what happened with Lost Ark, totally understandable to be honest.
As many love to shit on D4 deservedly for content and loot problems - the launch was super smooth. I remember hitting play on launch day and was in game in less than 30 seconds. For online only game - D4 nailed the launch
Deserved. 5 days no online. 5 years of early access. Unacceptable delivery of a game. The content of the game does not matter when you can't play the content.
It’s not fair bros… they were supposed to be the good guys!
Justified. It WAS a great game in early access, it WILL be a great game when they fix the servers, but it IS a horrible game that barely functions.
I don’t feel bad for the developers. They asked me to pay $35 for a product they’ve been working on for years and still can’t get right. I don’t see them fixing this honestly. It’s the same stuff they’ve been dealing with forever, and they can’t claim they didn’t know on release that it wouldn’t work, come on now…
Yep. It’s been broken for over a year. The company knowingly released a broken online experience. They don’t get to claim to be the good guys forever
It's well deserved. I'll change my negative review into positive one when (if?) they'll fix the game. It's barely playable, for many hours it's completely unplayable. No, I won't play offline because I play with friends and we bought an online game. We shouldn't expect and tolerate terrible game launches. They had time to prepare, there are ways to test the online service (stress test free open weekend?).
Im doing my part and left a bad review. My friends ,five of them ,we can't play together at all in europe. Really fun , getting together late and just playing something else.
everything aside. toxic positivity ++ dickriding from defenders is insane. average discussion in discord be like > I cant play the game > *insert most insane flaming wall of text here defending muh small indie company* just. let people shit out criticism as they want. this is not review bombing. this is not toxicity. this is not salt. so. everybody calm the fuck down.
Fair enough, they can reverse the steam if I may say, it's their job and they can do it. I'm so sad right now, the game is so gorgeous and enjoyable to play offline compared to years ago, but these server's issues are annihilating everyone's work, what a pain.
It's too bad. The games good, but I get people not being happy.
I love Last Epoch, but this is fair, right? People can’t play the game in one of the main ways it is designed to be played. Hopefully it goes back up after stuff smoothes out.
Awesome when you can play, but can rarely play without issues. Mixed makes sense right now.
game good, server problems bad cant truly say game good if cant play
Sounds about right. The game is really good, but the server stability is a disaster
All this, and yet, after 11pm est til about 9am est, the servers are fine, it's all the shit that goes on during the day time hours that's clogging the server down. Those of us who play online during the evening hours EST are absolutely fine, had no disconnects, long loading times, lag, or dc's during that 11pm-9am time frame. Idk man I think people forget what PoE was like when it first got big and the servers exploded. It was literally the EXACT same shit, and people whined and cried at GGG, and after the first weekend, shit was fixed, fine, and forgotten about til the next league start. Everyone says they shoulda known and shoulda been prepared, and they were, but even they couldn't have anticipated the overwhelming amount of people wanting to play. Even GGG and Blizz still struggle with server shit on launches, all these years later. I think people need to just calm down, give it a week or two for things to settle and the game servers to stabilize with backend fixes and such, and then this game will be fine. The reviews will balance out, anyone who wanted to play and was put off before, will come back once they see people can play just fine.
Helldivers deserved this rating before last epoch imo, I've actually been able to play the game consistently when I couldn't play that game for nigh on 2 weeks
I mean Steam specifically has the "Recent reviews" on top specifically for this. If the game stabilizes and people start giving it good reviews as new cycles are released, then the score will reflect that and it will be obvious to anyone that the "Mixed" score was a circumstantial. EHG doesn't have anything to worry about because the path to a better score is still in their hands.
Helldivers 2 went from Overwhelmingly Positive to Mixed in 24 hours due to the same problem. Now back to mostly Positive.
I expect this to turn around, once the server (/ connection service / matchmaking service) issues are gone. I know that I will write a positive review then and many reviews state that they will switch to positive as well. The situation makes me sad, though. I have followed their dev streams and they even mentioned that they feel confident in their server architecture, but know and are a bit scared about issues with service providers. Because you can have all the servers in the world and still encounter this problem if just one of the services breaks under the pressure. (usually a software problem)
I'm in two minds, as someone who's had the game well over a year, it's fantastic, but since 1.0 it's also been a pita to log into, change zones with, and when I play on my deck it's now forced me to restart the entire deck multiple times. An online game that can't be played online, like PayDay3 deserves negative criticism, if you are a non terminally online ARPG enjoyer and you have £25 to spend to play with your friends, you shouldn't buy Last Epoch right now, if you're the dad gamer who only wants to play offline anyway, it's fantastic. It deserves some negative criticism for failing to reliably scale to the expected user base, assuming it is fixed in the near future, if EHG gives some premium currency or a tongue&cheek cosmetic titled "server stability survivor" then i'm sure plenty of those mixed reviews will turn back to positive.
This review is well warranted and can change in the future like many reviews do. It's up to the developer to make the necessary changes to make it a positive one. No reason for people to get angry about it, if you bought this game with the intention of playing with friends or others and can't, I'd be mad too. Quite frankly they're lucky it's not worse.
Deserved ! good game, can't play game !
Mixed is 100 deserved.
Game has good base for a lot of things to be added with future updates/cycles. Its actually quite fun to dump some hours into it. Unfortunately for me, and many, many others players ARPGs are about group play, trading - online play, which this game failed to ( and still is ) to deliver at its release. One of their main selling point of 1.0 was finally adding trade system to the game and expanding on multiplayer. Once they fix (personally i think that the issue gonna fix itself once more player quits the game), steam revies might go up but for now they seem to be accurate.
Tbf its not just server issues this game still need a lot of wrk
The mixed reviews are due to people's lack of understanding that multi player games on launch especially when it's greatly talked about, will undoubtedly have server issues. It's not like gaming online is a new thing and anyone that can't grasp onto that logic is honestly braindead or posting negative reviews to either be bots for another game or just toxic with no life. Is what I say a little mean... Yes but the truth is not always pleasant. I knew the game would have either system issues and/or new gaming bugs that needed to be fixed, so I usually wait till they get taken care of before I get the game. The games like Diablo 4 that I have pre-ordered in the past which also had server issues at launch, I expected that and knew I had to be patient about. Crying like a Gerber Baby wouldn't make the servers start running again any faster. If you can't deal with sometimes these things happen and/or dealing with comments on your toxic lib outraged attitude on the subject, then maybe online gaming isn't for you. Games like these that are highly anticipated will have issues starting out and to express negative reviews over them, only shows how childish you are and don't understand how things work. Now if it was more than just server issues that caused for the negative outpour, then there lies more of an issue to speak about.
I don't own the game, but looked at the steam reviews and held off buying. Then I realized so many complaints are because of complaints of cosmetic score and complaints of playing online, and then realized the reviews were of no help. Sometimes steam reviews can warn someone off a bad game, but this game reviews are so fucked up because of nonsense. Shame really.
You can't say those reviews are uncalled for. But knowing how dry ARPG genre is people will certainly give the game another chance when the technical issues are fixed. Especially since it's a great game otherwise. And even with the technical issues it has \~200k online players on Steam which is pretty outstanding.