Over 300,000 eager players rushed to play Last Epoch when it launched last week and the servers quickly collapsed under the weight. The widespread connection issues that followed led to a slew of negative Steam reviews that knocked its "mostly positive" rating down to "mixed".
The worst of those issues now seem to be over, but the initial reactions still sit permanently on the game's Steam page. In a post reflecting on the launch yesterday, game director Judd Cobler seems confident the team can turn the sentiment around.
"While we’re continuing to receive high praise about the game itself, Steam reviews and sentiment took a heavy hit due to the initial turbulence of online services at launch," Cobler wrote. "We are committed to regaining that trust by making improvements to our backend infrastructure for this amount of load and providing a great experience for online play."
"We are committed to regaining that trust by making improvements to our backend infrastructure for this amount of load and providing a great experience for online play."
Judd Cobler, Last Epoch director
Cobler assured fans that "Last Epoch is here to stay," and that they can "expect updates from [us] for years to come." A patch aimed at fixing bugs and "quality-of-life improvements" is coming this week. "In addition to weekly patches, the team will be actively monitoring services and applying hotfixes as needed," he said.
Last Epoch's first major update, patch 1.1, will address community feedback—which Cobler says is a "strong focus'' for the team—and expand the endgame with "pinnacle" boss fights. Future patches will also give players more to do with Monoliths, the game's high-level dungeons with ramping difficulty, item variety, boss encounters, class changes, and campaign quests.
You can actually see the negative reviews fall off on Steam's graph as Last Epoch's servers stabilized over the last few days. I still see a handful of people giving it a thumbs down for the disconnects they experienced, but many of the reviews praise the game for its intricate skill trees and satisfying combat. PC Gamer's own Fraser Brown argued that Last Epoch is exactly what he wanted out of Diablo 4, although our reviewer Jody Macgregor was less enthusiastic when handing out his 60% score. Regardless, Last Epoch certainly qualifies as one of the four breakout games we've already seen on PC in 2024.
With around 186,000 concurrent players right now, I'd call it a successful launch despite the early turbulence. Last Epoch continues to hover in and out of the top five most played games on Steam and doesn't seem like it'll be drifting into obscurity any time soon.
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