The developer of Steam hit Last Epoch has addressed the influx of negative reviews that came in after the action RPG’s bumpy launch.
Last Epoch is one of the most-played games on Steam, but its long-standing Early Access user review rating of ‘mostly positive’ plummeted to ‘mixed’ in recent reviews after the game launched in 1.0 form with a raft of issues that prevented people from playing. Online connectivity was so bad that Eleventh Hour Games announced plans to give players an in-game gift as compensation.
Now, in a post on Steam, Eleventh Hour Games founder and game director Judd Cobler expressed his surprise and delight at hitting 265,000 players online at one time over the weekend, the 39th highest concurrent user count recorded on Steam ever.
“We appreciate you all bearing with us as the load initially gave us trouble for online gameplay, but we’re happy to say that we’re holding mostly steady above 200,000 players in-game and have made improvements each day in the backend infrastructure to support the demand,” Cobler said. “We’ll continue to monitor and address any issues that crop up.”
Still, Last Epoch’s ‘mixed’ user review rating remains, at least for now, and clearly it’s caused some concern within the game’s community and Eleventh Hour Games itself, so much so that Cobler moved to calm the player base, declaring: “Last Epoch is here to stay.”
“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 said. “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 take time to read your reviews and feedback on Steam, socials, and our forum and take swift action to improve the areas that we see players are dissatisfied with. We know that seeing our Steam reviews lower than they’ve ever been is concerning to players who are looking forward to the future of Last Epoch, but we want to assure you that the team has always been committed to making a game you can enjoy and expect updates from for years to come. We’ve seen that passion reflected back at us in the community this past week, and it has bolstered our resolve to that goal even further.
“Last Epoch is here to stay.”
To that end, Cobler outlined future content plans, including the upcoming patch, 1.1. There’s a heavy emphasis on expanding end-game content now Last Epoch has launched out of early access. “For future patches we have plans to expand the monolith, bring great new itemization options, add more boss content, class and balance updates, campaign content, etc,” Cobler revealed.
“For 1.1 specifically we’ll be focusing on bringing some ‘pinnacle’ content, or very hard fights that will give you challenges to aspire to. We’ll be sharing more on this and more of what’s to come in 1.1 in the not too distant future.”
Elsewhere, Cobler reaffirmed plans to release Last Epoch on console “in the future”, and so improvements it’s making to the existing gamepad support will benefit the game long-term.
IGN’s Last Epoch review returned an 8/10. “Push past its one-note campaign and Last Epoch is an impressive, time-bending action RPG that combines rich customization with modern action,” we said.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
