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

Last Epoch screenshot of a rogue character carrying a bow

(Image credit: Tyler C. / Eleventh Hour Games)

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.

Tyler has covered games, games culture, and hardware for over a decade before joining PC Gamer as Associate Editor. He's done in-depth reporting on communities and games as well as criticism for sites like Polygon, Wired, and Waypoint. He's interested in the weird and the fascinating when it comes to games, spending time probing for stories and talking to the people involved. Tyler loves sinking into games like Final Fantasy 14, Overwatch, and Dark Souls to see what makes them tick and pluck out the parts worth talking about. His goal is to talk about games the way they are: broken, beautiful, and bizarre.