A new Last Epoch update released on PC. According to the official Last Epoch patch notes, the latest update addresses some bugs and crashes.
Since the last patch, players are experiencing problems with the game. Today’s Last Epoch patch will fix a few of these issues.
Check out more details below.
Last Epoch Patch Notes – February 28, 2022
While we’ve been working diligently on core multiplayer features, we’ve seen a natural increase to the complexity of the processes of creating and releasing Last Epoch builds.
What does this mean? The automated system we use to build the game has become more complicated to maintain, as we now have two major clients (single player and multiplayer), as well as our game servers. We have the skills to address this all ourselves, and this is a normal part of game development, it’s something that will take a fraction of our attention to address whenever given issues come up. This will also become much easier once we’re only developing and releasing Last Epoch as an online game.
With that said, we’re still hiring for more hands to manage the multiplayer release of Last Epoch!
Users / Game Access
We’re still continuing to use our new account system internally, and we have determined that its current state will be shippable to our Community Testers when we get there.
A full account migration of our now-large player base will be something we perform a bit later, closer to when we release a public multiplayer beta. It’s a complex process and will require a very thorough plan to execute, so we are focused for now on delivering a testable multiplayer experience instead.
Chat
We actually have our new chat service nearly fully complete and ready to integrate into Last Epoch. This is quite exciting, as our issues with our current chat have been well known. Right now, because we have another single-player release looming, we cannot yet add it into our multiplayer environment as it’s a complicated process. We will have to wait until our 0.8.5 release to bring this into our internal multiplayer build, test and make fixes, and have it available for when we release multiplayer to Community Testers. This new chat won’t be publicly available until we release a wider multiplayer beta.
Login / Game Server / Matchmaking
We are now ready for all of these to be tested at a larger scale, and are continuing to work at ensuring we remove as many risks to our game’s online stability as possible. This still remains one of the most important things we need to get right to give you all a high quality multiplayer release, so we’re going to always be making consistent progress here.
Also, a gentle reminder that for us, “Matchmaking” is a more technical term that describes how you and your parties will request and receive servers, rather than some sort of party matchmaking system, which is not something we are developing at this time.
Goals for March
Our main goals for March are to ensure we are able to diagnose and debug core problems quickly, and add the last remaining game content to the multiplayer version of Last Epoch. Once we have these closed out, we’re going to have a pretty high confidence in releasing an alpha multiplayer version to our Community Testers, and other players soon after that.
Multiplayer Monolith
Developing the multiplayer version of the Monolith of Fate is a far larger undertaking than adding the campaign (which is already fully complete). We’ve already fully designed and are executing our plan here, and this will be something I will share updates on in great detail in next month’s post.
An exciting part of this plan is that we’re also going to be optimizing a number of parts about how our game loads, and overall performance, so we’re quite excited about this!
Diagnostics / Fixing multiplayer bugs fast
With our team size growing and with so many complex bugs and systems to have to be able to manage when we go online, it’s important we can read all of the information we receive quickly. We’ve recognized a need to reduce the amount of noise we get in all of our logging, as well as start to mature our tools to give each of our teams the data they’ll need to make good decisions.
This may not sound glamorous, but it’s of vital importance for us to be able to diagnose problems as quickly as possible, so you’re never waiting for a hotfix to a problem, or a game update.
Remaining Game Content
Outside of the Monolith, we’ll be adding the remaining game content we don’t have yet online. We’re now happy to say we have enough support to be able to make progress on most of this at once. We’re also nearing the finish line.
Some of the main areas we’ll target: updates to the technical aspects of channeled and shapeshifting abilities, cleaning up some other elements of the endgame such as the Arena group experience, and starting to plan out what our Leaderboard will look like on our new backend. There are a few other features that could be included here, but we’re starting to close it all out!
Final Thoughts
When contemplating the question “when will multiplayer be released for testing?” I’ve learned to ask myself another question: “What are we looking for with a public test?” The answer to that is pretty simple.
We want the experience to be mostly focused on players being able to give us feedback about Last Epoch’s online experience, rather than technical bugs. Our last pushes before releasing multiplayer to Community Testers will now be focused on that philosophy: when we reach a threshold that we feel we’ll get consistent game design feedback to improve our game’s multiplayer experience, we’ll release it. I’ve started to build the plan with our lead network engineer to get us there.