last era After nearly five years in Steam Early Access, it’s now just minutes away from release. This is the first title from the small team at Eleventh Hour Games, a developer that decided to challenge the age-old action RPG genre with its first game. There’s no doubt that Diablo 4, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, Volson: Lords of Chaos (remember that?) and every other ARPG currently being discussed will be ” “The Last Era”. The latter two have been launched for some time, so players’ emotions have basically stabilized.
Path of Exile remains popular with a core group of players who aren’t intimidated by its clunky skill trees, dated visuals, and core combat that doesn’t hold up to any other option. While we all wait for Path of Exile 2, the main game in ARPG town right now is Diablo 4. Man oh man, Blizzard has gone to great lengths to make it unpopular right now, with the poorly thought out Season 3 mechanics and the insanely greedy amount of microtransactions and store bundles for a $70 game.
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In some ways, the circumstances surrounding Last Epoch’s release couldn’t be better. For better or worse, ARPG games feel stagnant right now. Many known quantities are slowly being worked on, but almost nothing exciting is on the horizon. I’ve been playing version 1.0 of Last Epoch as the game prepares to leave Early Access and properly introduce itself to players who haven’t followed its journey yet.
Last Epoch can be said to be a bridge between classic games (such as Diablo 2) and the expectations, accessibility and quality of life of modern games. But it doesn’t stop there, it’s also forward-thinking in a way that I haven’t seen in any ARPG before; with lots of clever design ideas and ways to solve many of the obstacles that many games never seem to avoid.
I’ve spent more time playing Diablo than any other ARPG. Since launch, more than 250 hours have been put into Diablo 4. It’s important to note this at the top because this is the game I’m mainly comparing Last Epoch to. Of course, this doesn’t always work. There’s a huge gap between the two games’ budgets and development time, not to mention the expertise and size of the teams. But I will say that all the time I spent playing Blizzard-style ARPGs inevitably made it my reference point.
Doing more with less pretty much sums up a lot of Last Epoch’s strengths. It’s not a very big game, but it has a clever setup that allows it to make the most of its world map. The game’s story centers around a time travel device that allows players (and other key characters) to travel through different eras of the world, hence the name.
I found that even though the locations you travel through are essentially the same, they look completely different due to the huge gap in age, as well as the major seismic events that have occurred over the centuries. Age of Destruction, for example, is the game’s version of the apocalypse, a timeline in which all of your worst fears have come true.
The premise is interesting and unique to the genre, even if I wish the plot had more meaning than just the standard cliché of preventing the worst timeline from happening and using time travel to prevent disaster. ..just ultimately leads to them.
This ethos extends to the gameplay as well. Last Epoch has 5 classes, which is a good number on paper until you remember that most classes in ARPGs are actually offshoots of each other. In fact, the game has 15 classes, and since each of the five classes has three different mastery feats, you can choose from them within about a few hours of playing.
In fact, each mastery is a different category. Rogues, for example, start with a normal combination of close, fast attacks, and the option to fight with a bow. It then unlocks the ability to become a faster melee fighter with Blade Dancer, a refined ranger with Marksman, or a pet class with Falconer. Whichever you choose, you keep your starting skills, but you also gain unique abilities only available in the mastery tree you choose. Although I wish the character panel also provided a video preview so you could check out all the major skills before diving in.
This is a game that really wants you to have fun as quickly as possible. It does not prevent valid legacy functionality from being retained or even extended in some cases. Last Epoch can be played offline or online. You can have as many hidden spines as you like. The in-game guide is accessible at the touch of a button and provides simple explanations for the game’s many systems. You can even reassign easily, although your mastery level cannot be changed.
Nor are its creation and the materials it requires precious. More than most ARPGs, you’re encouraged to try the system sooner, and the game subtly plants the seeds by displaying an item’s crafting potential rating to show that it might be in your best interest not to neglect crafting.
I spent some time looking into the Rogue and Sentinel classes, but I found the action to be less satisfying than I’d hoped. The world of Last Epoch has a static feel to it. For example, destructible objects are predetermined, and the environment rarely reflects the strength and weight of your attacks. Enemy animations can sometimes show you the power of your moves, but they still feel clunky compared to other ARPGs.
While this should be a near-final release, I ran into a few issues and needed to contact the developers for some clarification. The previous epoch had a very detailed loot filter, but toggling it on the item tooltips stopped showing up, so I spent an hour unable to pick up loot until I disabled it. The developer says that the Nvidia GeForce Experience overlay may be the cause of this issue and offers some solutions, but the average player won’t have to do this for the feature to work.
My biggest complaint by far is that enemies most often respawn when you return from the town portal.Literally, everything in the level reloaded after leaving and returning (including destructible objects), which resulted in me being ambushed by enemies second I arrived and it made me want to skip them and get back to my mission. It’s especially frustrating when this happens to bosses because you’re locked into the area until they’re defeated (again).
Another thing that really made playing Remote Rogue difficult for me was a bug that prevented left-click from functioning as a movement and attack button, which is my favorite way to play ARPGs. Last Epoch actually offers more ways to control what actions are taken when clicked than I’ve seen in most games, but that option was disabled in the patch because it could break interacting with anything Ability. Again, this is a basic feature that most players expect in an ARPG, and while the lack of it may have some people asking for help on Reddit or Twitter, most will probably assume that the game simply doesn’t have it.
The level of polish here is unlikely to convince anyone accustomed to Diablo 3 or 4 to jump into the game. Last Epoch really shines when you see the depth of its features beyond initial impressions, offering some features that most of its competitors don’t have, but you have to see them in person to appreciate them. If the combat isn’t engaging enough and you’re constantly encountering bugs, you’re less likely to stick with it.
Last Epoch is now available on PC via Steam. These impressions are written via code provided by the publisher.
