In what seems to be the only good news related to publisher Krafton right now, the Last Epoch developer it bought in July hasn't been warped by its aggressive pivot to becoming an "AI-first company" above all else. At least not yet.
Eleventh Hour Games broke its silence on whether you'll have to pay for Last Epoch's upcoming Orobyss expansion after spending years—as an indie developer—promising players everything would be free. The answer is no: Last Epoch's expansion will be free to anyone who already owns the base game, and it will be packed in for anyone who buys the game after it's out.
Last month, EHG founder Judd Cobler said the studio would "maybe" have to charge something for the expansion, as the game's first three seasons haven't been profitable. But now it looks like EHG will hold to the promise it made when it ran a Kickstarter for the game in 2018.
There's a small catch here though: Alongside the expansion a new "Paradox class" will be released and it will have a price that won't be revealed until later. In the announcement post on Reddit, Cobler describes it as a "fully alternate playable class built on systems that work differently from anything else in the game." The one coming with Orobyss won't be the last, either, as EHG plans to "experiment in new and innovative ways" with more classes in the future.
That last bit is too vague for me to have a strong feeling about it, but that hasn't stopped fans from speculating that it's just a sneaky way for EHG to charge players for something other than expansions and cosmetics. There's zero evidence for that, but there are fans with more reasonable concerns that paid classes could outshine the existing ones in a potential pay-to-win scenario.
Last Epoch is an action RPG where you click monsters until loot pops out of them. It's not a competitive PvP game and there's no reward for ranking high on its leaderboards other than prestige. Just like when Blizzard released a ridiculously overpowered new class for Diablo 4's paid expansion, it won't do anything to people not playing it other than make them feel jealous that they didn't swipe their card. For some people, however, it's about the principle of only letting you play with the fancy new stuff if you pay, and I can at least sympathize with that.
Orobyss will be released next year, but it will be preceded by two seasons with plenty of updates to the base game. Cobler says the gap between seasons will remain longer than the studio wants at the moment because it's busy hiring new people and preparing for the game's launch on PlayStation 5.
At the end of the post, Cobler addresses the skepticism that Krafton's AI obsession will trickle down to EHG. "To be clear, our development approach is not changing," he says. "We remain focused on building Last Epoch the same way we always have, with the same hands-on design philosophy."
That's a promising thing to hear after just about every headline about Krafton lately has been absolutely harrowing, especially if you would like to see games like Last Epoch, PUBG, and Subnautica 2 not get pulled into the "AI-first" black hole.
