My thoughts on Last Epoch 180 hours in

My favorite game of all time is Path of Exile (PoE). I have sunk countless hours (~6000) into it over multiple years. I am also a fan of ARPGs in general and have played a number of them over the years including all the Diablos, Titan Quest, all the Torchlights, Grim Dawn, and most recently Last Epoch. Last Epoch (LE) had it's 1.0 release in February earlier this year. Since then they have done a couple of what they call cycles (seasons, ladder resets, etc.) and I have sunk around 180 hours into the game over that time. I wanted to discuss what makes LE good and what keeps me from playing it more.

Starting off on a positive note LE does a lot well. To start with it has an excellent crafting system. I won't go into crazy detail but just to outline the basics items can have up to 4 (occasionally 5) affixes two prefixes and two suffixes. You can bring up the forge at any time to modify an item by adding, improving, rerolling, or removing an affix. There are 5 tiers of each affix but there are a 6th and 7th tier that are drop only. So finding a good base with a tier 6 or 7 affix that helps you feels really good. Then shaping that into the perfect item is very rewarding. There is also the concept of legendary potential (LP) on unique items which goes from 1-4 and allows you to smash a rare item into the unique to get 1-4 of those mods onto the unique. This requires running a dungeon to smash these together and also 4 LP items are very very rare so it is frequently a gamble to see what gets carried over to a unique. There are more nuances to this system but suffice to say it give you a lot of agency and reward for using it.

 

2LP item after combining

The next thing LE does well is the graphics. Performance is good and everything looks nice. The effects are neat and varied. The levels look good. The feeling of jumping into a bunch of monsters and wrecking them is satisfying.

Chthonic Fissure and level graphics

LE has five base classes and fifteen master classes which are gated by the base classes. The base classes have a number of common skills that are unlocked via putting points into a passive tree and then the master classes have a master skill and then additional skills to unlock via adding points that particular passive tree. You can also put points into the other two master class trees but you are locked out from the other two master skills and the top two skills of the other two master classes. This system leads to a good variety of classes with unique skills.

Warlock passive tree

Those skills are the next strong point for LE. You can specialize five skills and each skill has it's own skill tree with can radically change the skill. The can be as simple as just doing more damage or adding more projectiles or as complex as changing the damage type or triggering other skills. For example my Chthonic Fissure has a chance to cast Chaos Bolts which themselves have a chance to cast Rip Blood which is normally physical and restores life but now is necrotic damage and grants ward (thing kind of like energy shield from PoE). So when I use that skill it gives me ward in addition to doing damage.

Chthonic Fissure skill tree

LE has a trade economy, which I have not tried yet, but it also has a very strong solo self found experience. There is a faction you can join that gives you bonuses to drops and chances to duplicate drops. Plus this concept of prophecies that allow you to target farm certain types of items like helms or wands when you kill certain enemies or bosses. There are strong items that are gated behind the highest end bosses but you can get reasonable gear just completing prophecies and playing the game.

All of this sounds pretty good, and it is but I generally get to the end game which is going through these things called monoliths and get bored and quit around level 80 or so. Monoliths are this interconnected set of areas that you complete and they have certain rewards and after you have completed enough to build up the stability of the monolith you get the opportunity to fight the monolith boss. The bosses are generally well done and they drop certain types of loot and maybe even specific unique items. But the variety of the areas you clear is not great. It's basically go and kill this monster or monsters, kill these spires (immobile monsters), kill enough monsters to lure out an ambush, or go to this fountain and click it and kill everything that spawns. This kind of equates to mapping in PoE but it would be like running random maps every time and the maps aren't interesting. They look fine but it's like run this generic snow area then fire area then desert area and do these same things. I do appreciate some of the in area activities like the loot lizards and the harbingers and exiled mages you can challenge but the areas are not distinct enough and you have little control over which you are running.

Coming from PoE there are literally dozens of ways to farm different types of content to either use yourself or sell. While LE does have some targeted farming strategies I feel like they are very limited. It is down to go for nodes that have rewards you like, run monoliths that give you rewards you like, and complete prophecies that give you items you like. Each of the areas being samey is a drawback. In PoE you run certain maps for multiple reasons including divination card drops, layout, boss, and the way altars work on the map (for example Sepulcher and Jungle Valley don't have boss altars until you enter the boss area). Mesa has the boss in the middle and you can just rush to it if you are doing a boss rushing strat, Strand is long and linear so running it gets you to all the monsters then the boss pretty quickly, and if you want to run legion you run Dunes because it is big and wide open with plenty of room to spawn legions. Now PoE has been out for literally 11 years so comparing the amount of content isn't really fair to a game that has been out 8 months but the lack of identity of "maps" is kind of a fundamental thing. The only strategy here is the equivalent of running a bunch of random maps to get to Eater or Exarch in PoE then killing them and doing it again.

Another thing I am not terribly fond of in LE is the dungeons, there are three of them and they all have some kind of gimmick and are all not terribly interesting. The one let's you combine a rare with a unique that has LP so that is useful but running it isn't interesting it's just the outcome. One let's you gamble for items at the end and the other lets you spend gold to increase rewards in the final treasure room. The bosses also drop certain uniques so you will potentially have to run these. The one with the combining shrine thing you will have to run to min-max.

The last con is the trading system. Mind you I haven't interacted with it myself so this is all second hand but it sounds like the system is janky. You have to walk up to different vendors to look at different markets, the search functionality is limited, and you have to get to a fairly high faction level with the merchants to be able to sell everything. I won't really go into this much more but it doesn't sound good and I am not excited to try it which is why I stick with the SSF route.

So those are my impressions of LE after 180 hours. I would still recommend this game to anyone who wants a good ARPG, you will definitely get your $35 out of it and the developer is committed to adding more content down the line.

Why NHL 23 and 24 suck and what can be done to fix this series

I have been playing hockey games since the beginning of time. I started forever ago with things like NES Hockey, Wayne Gretzky hockey, 2k Hockey, and of course the ubiquitous NHL series from EA. The series has had it's ups and downs but has generally been good over the years. In 2009 they added perhaps the best feature to a hockey game ever with online team play. This mode let you and your friends play against groups of other people online. It has evolved over time to be called EASHL and added teams and playoffs and a lot of good features.

The series has had a few years where the game wasn't as good as normal. NHL 13 jumps to mind where the goalies were essentially unbeatable unless you scored off a rebound. But NHL 14 was great as was 15 and our faith was restored. My friends and I played a lot of EASHL since 2009 typically we would play each year until maybe a month before the new release. This has changed the past two years for NHL 23 and NHL 24 we have lasted until perhaps January before the game irritated us so much we quit. For those keeping score that is 8 months before the release of the next version, two years in a row. 

I will attempt to break down what is wrong with the game and what EA needs to do to earn back our trust when it comes to getting this hockey game back to a game we want to play until the next version is out.

The base game is suspect. A couple of years ago they made a change to the frostbite engine and since that change the game hasn't felt right. Obviously reworking a game for a new engine is going to cause problems but it seems like they haven't fixed the wonky physics caused by the change. The first year of the change you could understand things would be iffy and you could let a few things slide. That first year what killed the game for us was after a long and arduous process of figuring out how to score and defend our team had finally found our game then in the middle of the season they dropped a tuner patch that essentially wiped out all that progress and put us back to struggling to score and defend. Given how hard it was to get to that level having all of that taken from us in a single tuner was the final straw and we tapped out.

They add new features that no one wants and add no value to competitive play. They seem to add these each year in an attempt to make the game fresh and new. This year they added three things, a couple of returning items, and the full pressure system. The first two things were broken sticks and the hip check. Broken sticks are completely random but seem to screw us at the worst possible times. They do not add any value they just add more randomness which is not what a competitive game needs. Then there is the hip check. To begin this year it was completely broken. They have since balanced it somewhat but it is still overpowered. To me if you are going to put the hip check in the game it needs to function perfectly and work like an actual hip check. Until then just don't put it in. It is just a far too effective way for players playing small to be able to separate the puck from basically anyone.

The third addition is the full pressure system. Anyone playing with this for 5 minutes could have told you this system sucks. The idea is if you keep it in the offensive zone a pressure meter builds until you get to full pressure and the defenders get penalties to skating speed, other attributes, and do not regenerate energy. The goalie also loses energy and plays more erratic. There are so many things wrong with this system. One the other team can just pass it around the outside until the pressure bar fills up. They did tune this a bit to make teams have to get hits or shots in the offensive zone to fill it up quicker and lowered the penalty to speed for the defenders but when you are under full pressure it sucks and it rewards a lot of skating around the outside in the offensive zone not really doing anything which isn't great gameplay. You already had teams doing this in previous years trying to spin off of hits to break down defense to 2 on 1s constantly using LT spam but now it is just easier to get the team to full pressure and eventually you are going to score.

The game would be made immeasurably better if they just fully removed those three additions. I am pretty sure most players would be happier with improvements to the base game rather than these gimmick additions that just make the game more annoying and do nothing to address basic issues. If nothing else add these features to offline modes and focus on making online modes as smooth and bug free as possible.

This years game was also extremely buggy. Probably the most buggy version of it I can ever remember. Being in year two of the new engine this kind of surprised me because you would figure they would be working with a more familiar base this time around. My only conclusion is that they focused resources on the new features rather than making the main game stable and complete. An example of a bug was when we upgraded to our 2nd arena in EASHL we lost our custom jerseys and could do nothing to get them back. We had to reform our club to get custom jerseys back.

So let's move on to matchmaking, luck, and smurfing. This year or last they changed the match making to not be based on divisions but based on player ranking. There are still divisions but they seem to basically mean nothing other than for the playoffs if you are D5 and up you are in one playoff and if you are in D6 and below you are in the other. That's it. So basically nearly every game is a sweatfest. Before we would match up with some easier competition and some harder competition but now it is difficult games nearly every time. This is where luck comes in. Hockey is inherently around 1/3rd luck in real life. In this game I would say it is more like 2/3rds. Goalies make saves they shouldn't on a sniper with one tee on a 2 on 1 lasered towards the top corner. Goalies don't cover pucks they should cover or kick pucks back to opponents for easy goals. Goalies let in unscreened wristers from above the top of the circle, from bad angles, and from other non-dangerous areas of the ice. Also, there are far too many instances where you will get bumped and the puck will end up in your own net. It used to happen once in a while but it is far more frequent now. In addition, hitting is very inconsistent. You can line up a guy perfectly and one time you flatten them and other times they will slide off you like teflon. This is with or without truculence small or large players. It doesn't seem to matter. Also you can't cancel a hit animation so if you wind it up you have to skate to open ice to let it go if you don't actually want to hit someone if the situation changes. This looks and feels terrible and causes the game play to be very choppy swapping from defense to offense. So no matter how well we play it feels like if we win or not is based on mostly luck. In a competitive game this is a terrible feeling. We have played well and gone 1-5 on a night and played fairly meh and gone 5-1.

As for smurfing, we had to remake our club due to that jersey bug and we did it a few weeks before the playoffs started. We weren't able to get to D5 before the playoffs started so we were like oh at least we should have a pretty easy go of it. We ran into so many teams that were using 30k ranked ringers that were either just added to these low ranking teams or the teams were setup to add these players. It was a terrible experience and far worse than previous years. Not sure what EA was trying to fix with this system but it clearly didn't work. Aside from the fact that somehow we nearly always get people who are ranked near us but when we don't we get people who are 3-5k higher consistently. 

So I am not a game developer but I can tell you what I want to see in NHL 25. Focus on the base gameplay and physics. Make the game skill based not luck based to the extent to which you can do that. There will be variance but it can't be as bad as it is now. Remove unnecessary features and only add features that are 110% ready to go and not exploitable. This is a video game not a simulation do what is fun not what is 100% accurate. BTW, the glass breaking is mostly fun but also completely pointless and can kill a scoring play at the wrong time.

Finally I am begging literally any game company to create a competing product. I feel like the EA effective monopoly on NHL games has really caught up to them in terms of effort and focus with literally no one else pushing them to be better. Madden was far better when 2k was pushing them same with NHL. We desperately need that competition back. But baring that EA just needs to do better. All around.