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Server issues continue to plague Diablo-like action RPG Last Epoch a day after its full release on Steam, but its offline mode seems to have kept many players fed.

Last Epoch had its full 1.0 release yesterday and immediately started suffering from its success. "Within 20 minutes of launch 150,000 people had joined us," game director and founder of Eleventh Hour Games Judd Cobler wrote on Reddit yesterday. "This did mean that all of our scale testing efforts were immediately put to the test, and unfortunately a service failed in a way that we didn’t suspect, and we immediately went to work to investigate and resolve it."


Players experienced disconnects and abnormally long loading times as they transitioned between areas. Despite the developer's efforts throughout the last 24 hours, those issues persisted until a few hours ago when the servers seemingly shut down. I was able to connect to the online mode of the game shortly after, but area transitions still take up to several minutes to work.

Eleventh Hour Games is well aware of the issue and said in the Last Epoch Discord server that it's "continuing to work on transition times, and connection issues." It recommends playing the game's offline mode for now, which you can easily swap to on the character selection screen.

Everyone who is currently playing or trying to play Last Epoch will receive the "Autumnal Wrap" cape item once the servers stabilize.

"Even though we felt we were prepared and came in with a high level of confidence—even feeling that we over-prepared—we were shown that in a real-world situation things can go wrong that just simply do not in simulated scale testing," Cobler wrote in the Reddit post. Cobler said his optimistic post about the launch on Monday "aged like milk," but still hopes it gives people insight into how they felt before release.

The most recent reviews on Steam have skewed more negative than the ones during early access while the servers struggled, but it continues to sit in the top 10 most played games on Steam this week. Part of that may be its $34.99 price tag and the endless comparisons to Diablo 4 going around in the action RPG community.

In our Lost Epoch review, Jody called it "an action RPG for people who aren't that fussed about action," criticizing its focus on stats and crafting over slaying monsters.

Last Epoch director admits his optimistic launch expectations 'aged like milk' as its servers struggle under the weight of 160K players

 

[thief183]

I so want to play this game, I'll wait a couple of weeks and jump in!

 

[Saber]

I came from never knowing or heard about this game to suddenly getting interested. I even added to the wishlist, gonna keep watching more videos about it.

 

[j0hnnix]

Love to here it! Good on them. The game is fantastic.

 

[Freeman76]

Amazing game. The servers have always been dogshit I will never attempt to play online again but offline is just as good. The combat, builds and endgame are just incredible

 

[kikkis]

Should have used autoscaling servers from cloud providers like palworld.

 

[64bitmodels]

Palworld, Helldivers 2, now this. Seems like games are suddenly having a real big boom again

 

[Cyberpunkd]

Should have used autoscaling servers from cloud providers like palworld.

As someone that works in SaaS I can tell you these cost fortune.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

I played a bit Friday during the day and some more at night. Servers were pretty stable, the worst that happened was it’d sometimes take 1-2 minutes to transition to a new area. Really loving the game so far.

 

[ahtlas7]

Looks like fun. I’ll give it some time before jumping in.

 

[acidagfc]

At least this game has Offline mode.
I always play solo in this type of games, so offline is just plain better for me - no queues, no lags.
Plus, they have a clever factions system that helps with solo play in the endgame.
So if anyone's on a fence about this one - get it, it is a way better Diablo game than Diablo 4.

 

[Holammer]

Palworld, Helldivers 2, now this. Seems like games are suddenly having a real big boom again

Indeed, and Baldur's Gate is *still* doing good numbers. Making Suicide Squad's failure extra delicieux.

 

[Tomeru]

Amazing game. The servers have always been dogshit I will never attempt to play online again but offline is just as good. The combat, builds and endgame are just incredible

But you'll be missing on the 2 factions content. I really want to see how these coexist.

 

[Mibu no ookami]

Palworld, Helldivers 2, now this. Seems like games are suddenly having a real big boom again

It's a slow time of the year for games post christmas.

A lot of people just got consoles and gaming pcs and maybe beat whatever game they got for christmas and are now bored.

It's the perfect time to throw your game into the mix.

Square Enix is releasing FF7Rebirth at the end of this month and they'll hope it will have legs through golden week in japan probably with some word of mouth.

There used to be times when no games were released, but I think publishers are starting to pick up that these are some of the best times to release games. Other busy times like right before christmas become super competitive and hard to really rise above the crowd.

Guerrilla and Sony tried this twice with Horizon. Once with Zero Dawn in February of 17 but Breath of the wild got in the way and again in February of 22, but Elden Ring got in the way.

Q1 is becoming a much more crowded time.

 

[BennyBlanco]

Steam is popping off in 2024. Every 2 weeks there is a breakout hit.

How does this game compare to Grim Dawn?

 

[StereoVsn]

Steam is popping off in 2024. Every 2 weeks there is a breakout hit.

How does this game compare to Grim Dawn?

It’s a bit lighter on the story, and more akin to say D2 in mechanics, but ramped up to 11, lol.

It’s a very fun game for the price if you like ARPGs, IMO. Note that you can play this game OFFLINE with separate SP characters so yes, it sucks that servers are having issues, but at least that doesn’t shut the game down completely for folks.

 

[Schmick]

What's coop like with this game and how many players can play together?

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

is this a diablo game? I only have heard of Path of Exile and other one that I cant remember.

it seems every other week diablo is getting negative news.

 

[hlm666]

Enshrouded peaked at around 160k and that ended up selling 2 million in ~4 weeks. So this has probably reached around 2 mil aswell so far. I didn't even realise this was not a gaas game so didn't pay much attention, judging by comments in here I need to get this game....... I don't have the time but no doubt that wont stop me if it's at least as good as grim dawn.

 

[geary]

223K players on steam. They passed PoE All-time peak.

 

[BennyBlanco]

223K players on steam. They passed PoE All-time peak.

Sheesh. Anyone try it on Steam Deck?

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

Pretty sure the market is saturated OP

 

[hinch7]

Blizzard left a huge opening with its own goal that was Diablo 4. This looks better in almost every conciveable way.

Great its doing well. Saw a few clips of Asmongold covering it and it looks really good.

 

[Dorfdad]

The game still needs some finishing touches. I love the mechanics. I love the skill tree, but the game just feels off in terms of movement and fighting in the story is woefully awful. I don’t know what it is. I just don’t care about any of the characters.

 

[RDaneelOlivaw]

The game still needs some finishing touches. I love the mechanics. I love the skill tree, but the game just feels off in terms of movement and fighting in the story is woefully awful. I don’t know what it is. I just don’t care about any of the characters.

I love Last Epoch, but this is a fair criticism. It's my number one complaint about an otherwise wonderful ARPG. The combat to me just feels .... hollow/floaty/plastic/??? ... it's like I shoot exploding flaming arrows at enemies and they flinch a tiny bit then just fall down slowly and disappear. There's no punchiness, there's no weight, there's no FEEL to it. It's hard to explain.

D4 has this in spades, but every single other aspect about it is garbage. LE has zero of it but every other aspect is wonderful, so I choose LE all day every day.

 

[draliko]

Great game absolutely deserve the success, shits on D4 from a mile above, if love the genre you gotta play it.

 

[hlm666]

Pretty sure the market is saturated OP

It's actually the dev saying it's doing better than they had expected and they need more server capacity. It's a weird way to use aged like milk but this isn't them being negative, it's the opposite.

 

[RDaneelOlivaw]

Pretty sure the market is saturated OP

quite the opposite - this exact thread is proof the market is hungry for games like this. I mean, even a decade old (probably even more?) game like Grim Dawn is STILL getting new content and players are loving it. This market NEEDS and WANTS more games like LE, they're just extremely hard to do well. 11th Hour Games has done a really good job.

 

[Arsic]

I’ve been able to log in without issues, and now zones load within 15 seconds.

However, I’ve ran into a few bugs that didn’t exist in early access plus global chat doesn’t work as of today at all.

 

[Arsic]

223K players on steam. They passed PoE All-time peak.

Damn that’s impressive. Without server issues it would be 500K I bet.

Game is more complex than Diablo but not overwhelming like PoE.

Just plays damn good.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

It's actually the dev saying it's doing better than they had expected and they need more server capacity. It's a weird way to use aged like milk but this isn't them being negative, it's the opposite.

quite the opposite - this exact thread is proof the market is hungry for games like this. I mean, even a decade old (probably even more?) game like Grim Dawn is STILL getting new content and players are loving it. This market NEEDS and WANTS more games like LE, they're just extremely hard to do well. 11th Hour Games has done a really good job.

 

[Arsic]

Sheesh. Anyone try it on Steam Deck?

 

[Spyxos]

Which game is it best compared to? Is it like Diablo or Lost Ark and the other similar games?

 

[draliko]

Which game is it best compared to? Is it like Diablo or Lost Ark and the other similar games?

Arpg a la Diablo, but better mechanics wise, and worse story/graphic wise, it's the best AA version of diablo you can get, deep mechanics, not titanic deep a la poe

 

[Yoshichan]

fuck this game and the 5 hours I spent on it. And with 5 hours, I mean 30 min in game and 4:30h in loading.

refunded this garbage poe clone

 

[Freeman76]

But you'll be missing on the 2 factions content. I really want to see how these coexist.

They work offline

 

[Tomeru]

They work offline

How would trading work offline though

 

[Freeman76]

How would trading work offline though

There are multiple vendors for trading but that faction is a bit pointless really the observatory is much better due to prophecies, plus just buying off another player just kills any need to look for gear which is the whole point of the endgame

 

[Tomeru]

There are multiple vendors for trading but that faction is a bit pointless really the observatory is much better due to prophecies, plus just buying off another player just kills any need to look for gear which is the whole point of the endgame

No it doesn't, but good to know

 

[geary]

241K players now...

 

[hinch7]

Played for a few hours before realising it - offline mode. Games addicitive as hell. A little janky and not so well polished as a lot of higher budget arpgs (particularly UI) but its fun.

Trying to get running on the Steam Deck and its not launching. Anyone have any tips?

Edit: ah never mind, changed back to beta SteamOS and forced Proton 9.0 in game and its working.

 

[RDaneelOlivaw]

Steamdeckhq will be posting a big article about this game and the deck today, so it'll have all kinds of helpful info about getting it to run as best as possible:

https://bsky.app/profile/steamdeckhq.bsky.social/post/3kmana4hn3t2u

 

[BennyBlanco]

Steamdeckhq will be posting a big article about this game and the deck today, so it'll have all kinds of helpful info about getting it to run as best as possible:

https://bsky.app/profile/steamdeckhq.bsky.social/post/3kmana4hn3t2u

Grim Dawn was such a banger on the steam deck. D4 doesn’t run that great. POE controls are kinda wonky. This will probably decide my purchase.

 

[Audiophile]

Surely by now server providers should have deals that include an initial over-provisioning for the launch window with a set of contingency plans for different outcomes as things either taper off or need cutting down...?

 

[RDaneelOlivaw]

Of course they do, but that's expensive. And 11th Hour most likely weighed the cost of it vs what they *thought* would be a marginal uptick in players at the 1.0 launch and decided they would be fine riding out the wave for a short bit. Problem was there was no small wave, it was a gigantic monsoon, and they were so unprepared. Then not only that, they didn't have good social media management either so the discussions and discord collapsed into complete chaos and garbage.

It also doesn't help that server issues EXACTLY the same as we're seeing now were documented and reported time and time again during the long EA period, and 11th Hour chose to prioritize other things and never really addressed them. Again they probably thought they could just ride out a small wave ...

 

[mckmas8808]

Damn that’s impressive. Without server issues it would be 500K I bet.

Game is more complex than Diablo but not overwhelming like PoE.

Just plays damn good.

I think Diablo allowed this game to be what it is.

 

[Phase]

Steam is popping off in 2024. Every 2 weeks there is a breakout hit.

How does this game compare to Grim Dawn?

I remember when I picked up Grim Dawn for $5 thinking it would be a good time waster, and it was so good! My favorite ARPG of the last decade. I picked up Last Epoch and have high hopes for it from what I've seen.

 

[Heisenberg007]

I don't mind when games from these relatively smaller studios face such issues. It's okay.

Good on you guys for making an excellent game, as long as you're improving the unforeseen technical issues.

 

[Danteyke223]

This seems like a bit of a lie on their end. The game sold around a million units as per their discord server's comments. This was posted on the 9th of Feb 2024. They absolutely knew this was going to happen, they did have some tech issues, but after that it's the same issue with this as Helldivers 2. The backend code is just not up to it for this many players. The EU side of things only has one server (EU west), while the USA has 3, Asia also has 3 or 2 and I might be adding Australia into the mix.

 

[RDaneelOlivaw]

SteamDeckHQ article on Last Epoch

^ article is up. Seems very positive. There seem to be some minor annoyances, but as long as you're okay running with lowered graphics, overall it works pretty well and is a good time.

The full offline mode helps a ton here as well, since when you're not at home on wifi, you can still play as much as you want. Plus, with the wifi modem turned off you'll get a lot more battery time.