Feb 16, 2023

The Travelers Backpack - Our gift to you!

Last Epoch - EHG_Kain

Hello Travelers!

Yesterday we announced our 500,000 units sold milestone, and today we present to you a gift from the entire Last Epoch team!

Introducing, the Traveler’s Backpack.

This exclusive gift is our way of thanking you, and commemorating our shared journey with all of you who were with us from the start and those of you who are joining us just before we step into the world of Eterra together.

Spoiler Warning - Below is a list of each item on the backpack itself.

[expand type=Spoilers]

Starting in the Top Left, and going around clockwise!

The Last Epoch Logo Patch - This was the first version of the Last Epoch logo revealed during our Kickstarter launch.
The original Symbol of Eterra
Bee-Mike - A wonderful momento from our Dev Mike and his Bee-Themed streams!
In the map pocket on the right side - Map of Eterra
The Bedroll on Top - Our first support pack playmat from our Kickstarter.
Fools! Fools! - One of our favorite quotes from our resident disgruntled Mage.
Rahyeh’s Reserve Hot Sauce - created for the 2022 April Fool’s Day by team member Wick, and showcased in a special hot wings episode on the Weekly Dev Stream.
The Material of the backpack itself is 100% authentic grole hide. (All grole hide was ethically sourced
from a series of ones and zeros.)
Navigational Instruments - Every Traveler needs tools to read their maps.
Zizaran Campaign Mug - from our earliest campaigns to support Last Epoch!
Primalist Patch - The OG class icon to showcase the Primalist.
A Skullen figurine - Remembering the early times of Last Epoch!
Epog!
Where would we be without the ever-present reminder of Multiplayer When?
Orian’s Eye - Always watching you. Waiting. :slight_smile:

[/expand]

If you happened to notice either in the game or watching someone’s stream, we had a sneak peek at this item during our last 2 events.

The Travelers backpack back slot cosmetic will be given to ALL owners of Last Epoch who own a copy prior to the Multiplayer Beta Patch 0.9, coming on March 9th, so there is still time to get the game and the backpack!

If you are thinking about jumping into the world of Eterra there is still time to also get the original supporter packs, but those will be going away during our March 9th release, and a new set of supporter packs will become available. The price for Last Epoch will still remain the same, so you don’t need to worry about a price increase when the launch happens.

A note about current supporter packs and upgrading:
[expand type="A note about current supporter packs and upgrading:"]

If you purchased the game through our website, and would like to upgrade your supporter pack, you can have this done through a support ticket to the link below.

If you purchased the game through Steam, or via a Steam Key, and you’d like to upgrade your supporter pack to a higher tier pack before 0.9, we can’t technically do an upgrade. However, since your purchase on Steam is already considered the Ardent Gladiator supporter pack, and you wish to upgrade to one of the other packages (only available until March 9th), we can offer an additional 350 cosmetic coins as we cannot refund Steam purchases in any way. We can do this for you by submitting a ticket to the link below after purchasing the desired pack.

Link: https://support.lastepoch.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=1260808459030
[/expand]

Thank you to everyone who has helped us on this incredible journey and we look forward to seeing you all showing off your Backpack!

Thank You to everyone,
Last Epoch Team

Jan 31, 2023

Multiplayer Invitational Follow-up

Last Epoch - EHG_Kain

Hello Travelers!

This past weekend we held our first of multiple multiplayer events, the “Invitational”, which went exceptionally well. The aim of this event was to gather feedback, test our live operations procedures, and give the community their first full look at playing together with friends in Last Epoch. We were able to capture a ton of significant data and feedback to help us prepare for the multiplayer release coming with Last Epoch: Convergence on March 9th.

From what we observed, many of the participants thoroughly enjoyed the new and updated campaign zones, all the VFX, SFX, and music changes, which was fantastic to hear. We also received a lot of positive feedback regarding the ease of grouping up, and generally feeling great playing together for hours on end, outside of a few minor bugs (we’re on them!). Some issues that we are aware of and have been actively working on did rear their heads during this event, such as server-side performance in end-game activities and specific late-game team strategies that were providing too great of a bonus for groups. While we were aware of these kinds of things, from the event, we were able to get a better view of where these impacts are coming from, have made some adjustments to our priorities, and have already made some changes for the next events.

We want to go over some of this feedback and what kind of differences you can see between the Invitational event, future events, and Patch 0.9.

What we’re working on

Server-side performance

One of the last things we saw during the event, but one of the first we want to address, is some late-game activities server-side performance. While participants agreed that client-side performance has improved significantly with this release, we did encounter some issues with server performance for endgame builds that can spawn a lot of objects. As mentioned, this was something we were already aware of and actively working on for 0.9. However, the event was able to show us a few specific things that were leading to more performance loss than others.

One of the largest offenders we were able to identify was server lag encountered when groups would split up within an area to individually tackle different parts of the zone. This caused a number of issues, including many actors to all be activated at once, and the server needed to handle that data flow for each player. We’re already well along on a fix for this which should greatly help reduce that performance hit, and while it won’t be in place for Thursday’s event, it will be in place shortly after. There are other hidden things we’re working on (like excessive server logging); however, we think this was one of the more visible issues, and so wanted to make sure we’re addressing it here.

Another offender we saw with ‘lag’, was actually not performance at all. We found some participants who were experiencing lag were actually being assigned to incorrect server locations, such as European players being issued North American servers. This is something we immediately began investigating, and have some changes in place to help address incorrect server allocations which should help with many of these scenarios. In conjunction with the added ability to see server region with the latency tooltip, we expect this to help improve the experience when partying with various players, as well as being able to recognize reasoning for certain ping values.

Gameplay

Of course, there was a lot of gameplay experience feedback provided that we’re acting on as well. For the next event, we’re prioritizing some of the quickest improvements we can get in in time. Some adjustments are technically smaller things, like adjusting the latency bar to represent expectations with ping values better, and adding server information to the latency tooltip, however, this can have a much larger impact on user experience and received more feedback than we expected. As such, we’re working on adding these two items for the event this Thursday.

One of the more common areas of feedback we received during the event was that the campaign was made a bit too easy when in a full party. In response to this, we’re going to be bumping up enemy health scaling for the next event. We’re doing this in smaller increments, so we don’t over-correct, as many of these players are highly experienced players, but we’ll be continuing to monitor feedback on this and adjusting as well.

We also heard from participants that they really enjoyed the new online monolith experience with seamless transitions between Echoes and Echo of a World (the rest area in monoliths). For the campaign, though, the length of some loading screen times was a common topic. We have some adjustments already in the pipe to help reduce these loading screen times, which we’re hoping to have in for this Thursday’s 10k event.

Itemization

Another common topic of feedback was item gifting and the user experience of it. While feedback noted that the interaction felt really good with gifting, and it was a strong addition to gameplay, currently, once you gift an item to a party member, that item can’t be gifted again. Being unable to gift it further caused a couple of negative experiences during the event, so in response, we’re changing this so that when an item is gifted, it retains its ‘giftability’ status and can still be gifted to all the same people who were eligible for it. While this does offer a bit more power to the gifting system, we want to prioritize a fun experience.

Many keen-eyed community members also called out that there seemed to be something up with item drop rates during the event, and that some things appeared a little more common than normal. They’re correct! In response to feedback from both previous blog posts, and event feedback, we’re adjusting some drop rates. In particular, this means making ‘rarer’ idols such as Smite on Throwing Hit not as rare, culling some of the lower level drops - converting them into crafting material drops, and adjusting the distribution of exalted items to make drops more exciting rather than all the focus being on echo reward nodes. We’re continuing to tweak this to reach an even better state in the looting and gearing experience in Last Epoch, and are actively watching feedback on this topic.

We also see the efficiency of boss farming in multiplayer talked about frequently. We currently have an active plan to bring this in line that we’re working on implementing. When you participate in a monolith boss fight in multiplayer, in order to get rewards you will need to have sufficient stability for the fight, and receiving rewards from the fight will cost your stability. So while you can participate in any boss fight, in order to get rewards you need to have, and spend the stability for it. This means you won’t be able to farm stability once as a group, then chain bosses with each party member. While this change won’t be in place for Thursday’s event, we wanted to acknowledge that we do hear this feedback, and are actively working on it!

Onward to 0.9!

There are, of course, many other things we’re continuing to work on, and with our next pre-patch event in only a few days, we’re hard at work on getting everything ready for this Thursday’s 10k Multiplayer Beta week-long event. We’re really excited to get everyone in the community into the experience, as well as the big Pack the Server party, where we’ll ask everyone to help us break things on Saturday. There’s a lot to see and explore with 0.9, including many new unique items, base item changes, updates and adjustments to almost every skill in the game, new zones, VFX, SFX, Enemies, and a whole bunch more. Even if you’re not a big ‘multiplayer’ enthusiast, there’s still a lot to see and check out in this patch.

If you haven’t yet had an opportunity to sign up for the 10k event, you can quickly and easily do so here: https://events.lastepoch.com/packtheserverparty. We hope to see all of you in Eterra in just a couple of days.

Until then Travelers, may the bees be with you!

Dec 8, 2022

Item Gifting Development Update from our Principal Game Designer

Last Epoch - EHG_Kain

If you’ve been following Last Epoch, you’re probably aware that our plans for how trading will work in the game have evolved significantly over development. In this dev blog, I'll explain the reasoning and design process that brought us to our current plans, what those plans are, and how they relate to patch 0.9.

Economies and Our Evolving Philosophy

One of our core beliefs when designing Last Epoch has always been that it feels more rewarding when you find and/or craft the items you use, rather than buying them, and that this also helps keep item drops exciting because there's a reasonable chance that the dropped item itself will be useful for your character. Because of this, we've always wanted to ensure that killing monsters and playing the game is the primary way of acquiring items.

However, we also wanted to have a player economy on top of this. This led to us designing various iterations of the Bazaar, an auction house or player shop style system, always with a lot of restrictions on the rate and type of items players could trade to hopefully keep the system under control and ensure that the items you could acquire in this manner didn't eclipse those you found from drops and/or crafted.

The more we found problems with these iterations of trade, ideated new ones, and advanced those ideas, the more we realised that any of these economy-based trade systems would damage this progression. Economies are extremely complex, even when they're limited to video game items. They're often unintuitive, they change over time as the player base finds more items, and they can act very differently depending on the number of active players. All of this makes it very difficult to accurately predict how an economy will function in practice and balance it accordingly. Ideally, we'd want it to feel relevant and useful and not overtake other methods of item acquisition, but realistically the unpredictability of an economy renders that level of balance precision impossible. The downside of getting it wrong could be trade taking over the game, making item drops unexciting, and ruining the balance of the game's combat.

Another question we were increasingly asking ourselves was whether anyone would be happy with the system and have a good time using it. Players who want to play the economy and exchange the valuable items they find with other players were going to be faced with an impersonal and restrictive system. They would likely be frustrated and feel like their expectations of playing an online ARPG with an open trade economy had been betrayed by such a limited system. Meanwhile, players who want an ARPG with generous drops and crafting would likely still have to experience the pains of us having to balance around the existence of a trade economy, or at the very least, their item drops would feel worse because of the higher standard of items that having an economy results in.

With these conclusions in mind, we decided to pivot away from having economy-based trade and cancelled the plans for the Bazaar.

Specific Item Acquisition

Item trading definitely has some significant benefits in an ARPG. One of them is that if you want to play a build that requires a specific build-enabling item, you're not just praying that it drops; you can reliably farm up currency and buy it. This means that unless they're particularly expensive, needing specific items to get a build going is much less of a barrier for creating that build. This is particularly important nowadays because, in contrast to the subgenre's Rogue-like roots, much of the ARPG community has trended more towards wanting to plan out a build from the start and reliably progress towards that rather than making most of the decisions on the fly and adapting heavily to the items that you find. This is a process a lot of players enjoy and something we want to ensure that we support.

However, trade isn't the only way or even necessarily the best way to support it. The flip side of being able to acquire any item through trade is that the process of acquiring the items you need for your build is just the process of farming currency, so the activities you do and the places you farm are whatever's most optimal to farm currency. This runs a big risk of turning a potentially varied endgame experience into a very repetitive one, where only a small part of the content is experienced over and over again.

Meanwhile, if you need to farm the items themselves, and those items drop either exclusively or more frequently from different specific pieces of content, then that naturally entices you to engage with those different pieces of content to farm those different items. This means that hunting for gear is a more varied process for an individual character and is also more different from one character to another as long as they require different sorts of gear. Because of that, we want to continue to rely on powerful target farming methods rather than trade to facilitate specific item acquisition.

Sharing Discoveries

One of the other benefits of one player being able to trade items to another is that when you're playing with a friend, and you find a cool item that's good for their character, you can give it to them. That's an experience that can feel great because it's a way of meaningfully helping your friend out in a way that isn't always felt so often in the fast-paced combat of ARPGs, but it's still one that resulted from you playing co-op together.

There are two sides to this, though. A player giving items to a friend isn't an unquestionable good that always leads to a better experience. ARPGs are games about progression that are inherently more about the journey than the destination, and a friend skipping that journey for you by giving you all the items you need often drastically shortcircuits the adventure of the game and makes it less enjoyable.

Another danger with unrestricted item gifting is that an economy can grow up of its own accord, coordinated and facilitated by the community. It is certainly cool to see a game's community achieve this sort of thing. However this can result in all the same problems that a developer-created economy can, while also being less convenient.

Nevertheless, our primary goal with multiplayer is facilitating a great co-op experience, and we felt that a big part of that is being able to share the items you find while playing together.

With this all in mind, we set out to design a system that facilitated this sort of co-op item gifting without a full economy developing.

Item Gifting in Patch 0.9

Earlier in the year, we said that trade wouldn't be included in patch 0.9. The community reacted with disappointment to this announcement, and so we prioritised getting our item gifting system ready to be tested by our community testers. That testing went well, and we're confident in detailing the system publicly and including it in patch 0.9.

In this system items that drop while you're adventuring with other players (in the same zone) can be gifted to any of those players at any point. This can be done by right-clicking their portrait and selecting "Gift Item.” This brings up your inventory alongside a gifting window and highlights the items in your inventory that can be gifted to that player. You can then simply place the chosen item in the gifting window, press "Confirm Gift," and the item will be transferred to the player's gift inventory. The player will then receive a notification telling them what item they've received, and they'll have an icon in the bottom right of their screen that they can click to bring up their gifting inventory. From there, they can either transfer the item to their inventory now, leave it there until later, or throw it on the ground, because their friend has gifted them a hat with no affixes.

Trade in ARPGs is a topic that has many passionate people on every side of the conversation. However, we want Last Epoch to be an ARPG that, at its core, is about going out in the world, killing enemies, and finding awesome loot, not one where playing the economy is the key to success. We strongly believe that this approach will make the game both a more enjoyable co-op experience and a more balanced solo experience. With this, we'll be able to preserve and continue to improve all the great systems we've built for Last Epoch in terms of progression and the player experience without having to sacrifice them to accommodate extensive item trading. We'll be closely monitoring feedback regarding the details of this system while we look forward to everyone getting their hands on item gifting and more in Patch 0.9 on March 9th.

Dec 2, 2022

December Development Update: 0.9.0 Date Locked!

Last Epoch - EHG_Kain

Hello Travelers, and welcome to our Development Blog post for December 2022!

Earlier this week, we made an exciting announcement for Last Epoch: The date for our highly anticipated Multiplayer release is locked in on March 9th, 2023! You’ll be able to join forces with your fellow Travelers in Eterra with Beta Patch 0.9.0, but that’s not all it will bring. This major content patch will also be coming with all sorts of other performance, combat, and gameplay feel improvements that you can enjoy with your friends. You may not even have to wait until March to get your hands on these changes - join us early during our upcoming MP Launch Roadmap Events detailed below!

We’ve been hard at work on this next major patch, and we continue to be excited about its release. Of course, we wanted to release it before the end of the year to make a nice Christmas Event, however, as always we continue to prioritize quality over speed. We want to make sure that 0.9.0 lands with the level of quality both you and we all expect from our major releases, with a fun and stable multiplayer, a complete online experience, and all the great improvements to gameplay and performance. We know it’s a long wait since the last major update, however, we’re dedicated to making sure this next one sticks that landing we all strive for as fellow fans.

In this blog post, we’ll be covering some of the features coming in this next major update, as well as providing some developers’ insight into the features as we like to do. We’ll also be covering some of the big features of multiplayer, further Combat Feel improvements, Skill updates, and more. All this info is only a scroll away!

Upcoming Events

The news many are coming to this post for! On Tuesday, we announced not only the date for 0.9.0, locked in as coming on March 9th, but also that we would be hosting three pre-patch events. We want to cover some of the details regarding these events, what they are, how to get involved, and what’s happening during and after these events.

Jan 27th - 29th - Multiplayer Beta - Invitational Weekend

From January 27th, through to the 29th, we will be hosting a Closed Invitational Beta Weekend. This event will be limited to selected individuals, primarily EHG team members, family, friends, community testers, and content creators. That means that invited members for this event will be able to stream the content and discuss all the content they have access to! As we approach this event, we’ll be posting a list of content creators who will be participating - so make sure to stay tuned to your favorite streamer or content creator during this weekend event to get their take on the new 0.9.0 multiplayer experience!

Feb 2nd - 12th - Multiplayer Beta Week - Pack the Server Party!

LET’S PARTY!

This event aims to test our Multiplayer Beta on a larger scale. We will be inviting 10,000 (that’s right, ten thousand) players to join us for a week of putting our servers to the test. Same as before, this event will be for players who already own a copy of the game and can stream the content and discuss what they are playing. This is a big one for us, and we want you to join us.

We will be sure to post the signup for the pack the server party in the future.

Feb 23rd - 26th - Multiplayer Beta - Open Weekend

From February 23rd through the 26th we will be hosting the first-ever Open Beta weekend for Last Epoch! What does this mean? Anyone can try out Last Epoch and patch 0.9.0 for this weekend. That’s right, you will not need a copy of Last Epoch to participate in this event; it will be open to all Steam users!

If you’ve been watching our ongoing development but haven’t quite been ready to pull the trigger on picking up a copy, this will be your opportunity not only to get yourself into the world of Eterra, but also to get a feel for the upcoming major content release!

Multiplayer Updates

As we continue to work towards our next major content release, we want to open up a bit more about how exactly the multiplayer experience will work. For today, a few topics we want to cover are how Monolith navigation, Blessing rewards, and Dungeons work in multiplayer. One of the most anticipated topics being asked about is Trade, and we also have some news to share on that topic. Over the past few months, we have implemented an Item Gifting system for our Community Testers, received feedback on it, and continued our internal discussions of the system. We will be releasing a deep-dive blog post focused on Trade in the near future; however, today, we can confirm that, Yes, Beta Patch 0.9.0 will include a Trade system that allows items to change hands within your party! More details to come!

Monolith Navigation

As The Monolith of Fates is our core endgame experience, our top priority for the Multiplayer Monolith has been to make it feel awesome, not just to make it functional. We’ve been working very closely with our fantastic Community Testers, listening to feedback and adjusting the mechanics as we shape that end-game experience together. We are designing with intention to make sure the mechanics of the Multiplayer Monolith don’t make players feel like multiplayer is the only way to play, so we’ve kept a close eye on things like split farming strategies or multiplayer boosted rewards.

At the very core of this design conversation is the question, “how does a group actually interact with the Monolith system?”. When grouped together, every player in the party can access any monolith which they have unlocked and interact with its web the same as the single-player experience. Upon selecting an echo, the echo is loaded, and a portal is opened for all party members to join up with the player which chose the echo.

In the normal single-player Monolith experience, when a player dies during an echo or disconnects, the echo is closed, and rewards are lost. However, this doesn’t quite work in multiplayer for a couple of reasons. For one, other players are present in the echo, and we don’t want to kick everyone out when one player dies. We also want players to be able to play together and not be stuck waiting at the End of Time for the rest of the party to complete the echo before being able to rejoin. To address this, the portal remains open throughout the entire echo, and all party members can still portal to each other. So if a player falls to the enemies of Eterra, they can quickly and easily rejoin their party. However, beware: Dying during an echo or leaving during the echo will still cause any players who fell to miss out on the end of echo rewards for that echo.

Echo Rewards

With our main two priorities in mind - Fun and Fair, we’ve implemented a unique solution for monolith navigation and rewards. When we first implemented monolith for our Community Testers, it was quickly found that providing the same node rewards to everyone created a very poor experience in which there was a clear optimal path of split farming. This strategy involved splitting up to individually farm out a monolith web until a number of exalted and unique nodes were unveiled, then group up just to complete those nodes to maximize the highest tier of rewards from the monolith. Because this involves constantly splitting up and then reforming parties, it wasn’t a very fun experience. We wanted the experience of multiplayer to be for groups to play together and stay together for as long as they wanted.

Not just any solution would do though. A big part of our Monolith experience when it comes to rewards is that of “Choice.” We feel that it’s important in Last Epoch to empower players with the ability to choose, whether it’s crafting, build selection, or the Monolith. Normally when navigating the echo, you have the power of choice by selecting which echo you want to do, which is often heavily affected by the rewards the echo offers. In multiplayer, if everyone’s in the same echo, then only one player can have chosen the echo and its associated reward, so by default, other players in the party would lose that sense of control over the items they’re farming for. As such, we needed to find a solution that solved split-farming issues while still offering the power of choice. After a few iterative changes, we now have a solution we are thrilled to share.

When in a party, one player can pick a node on the monolith web, and for the person who picks which echo is being done, everything works as it currently does in single-player. However, for other players in the party, when the echo is completed, they will be presented with two options for rewards from the echo. These reward options are the same options that are normally found in the echo web (eg. ‘Exalted Helms’, or ‘Rare Swords’), and are rolled using the same weighting as the echo that was completed. Meaning the corruption level of the echo and the distance from the center will weigh into the reward options. The result of this is that all group members will get the same average value of rewards, and for individual echo’s may result in getting lower tier rewards, the same rewards, or better rewards than the party leader.

So what role will you want? The Party Leader who gets to choose their specific rewards on the web, or the Party Member who gets to choose between two options, each echo with the potential for even better rewards than the Party Leader picked?

Dungeons

Dungeons raise some fairly unique interactions when it comes to multiplayer, and with our desire for multiplayer groups to be able to stick together for the experience. Primarily starting a dungeon, dying during a dungeon, and dungeon rewards. Dungeons are designed as “curated experiences.” This means that dungeons are meant to be experienced from start to finish and don’t work as well, dropping in part way through. We've implemented a few multiplayer-specific interactions to ensure that groups are empowered to stay playing together.

The first is that only one key is required for the entire party to enter the dungeon. Secondly, to ensure the experience remains intact for all party members and that no one is left behind still making their way through the dungeon, we’ve implemented a ready-check system for starting a dungeon boss. Upon attempting to enter the boss room, a ready check will appear for all party members. Once all party members have chosen to participate or not, all participating members will be teleported into the boss room to begin their trial.

Dungeons are also designed to be a rewarding experience with unique reward mechanics, making them most often a highly rewarding activity. We want to preserve that experience for the entire party without making running dungeons in a party much more powerful than running them solo. For this, unlike Monoliths, if you die in a dungeon, you will not be able to rejoin the continuing members, so make sure to stay on your toes in dungeons! All players will also have access to the end-of-dungeon rewards. For example, in Temporal Sanctum, each party member will have the opportunity to create a Legendary item with the alter, and in Soulfire Bastion have their own reserve of embers to gamble with.

Gameplay Improvements

Of course, while Multiplayer has been a significant focus for 0.9.0, that’s not near the only thing coming. Our efforts to improve Combat Feel through improved VFX, SFX, and Animation continue, as well as changes to skills, zones, items, enemies, and more. We want to share with you today a few of these improvements we’ve been making for the gameplay experience coming next patch!

Skill Updates

Beta Patch 0.9.0 is set to bring with it updates to many of our existing skills for VFX, SFX, as well as some balancing changes and even some receiving completely new nodes and ways to build them. Today we’re showcasing a few of these improvements coming in our March 9th update.

Swipe

Swipe is one of the many skills receiving both VFX and SFX updates and updated functionality. Here we’re showing off the new Spirit Wolves node, which will now cause Spirit Wolves to be emitted from your Wolf companions instead of from you. The new Spirit Wolves will count as the wolf casting the spirit, and thus scale with the wolf’s stats instead of yours. Each Wolf companion will send out a spirit, and multiple Spirit Wolves can hit the same target to open up a whole new build style with Wolves and offer better scaling opportunities.

Shield Rush & Rive

Shield Rush and Rive are both fairly old skills, and their VFX shows it. No longer, come 0.9.0 with these brand new VFX updates, we're bringing these highly popular skills up to our modern standards!

Harvest

Harvest was a skill less commonly called out for needing a visual rework. However, after seeing the new version with the nice clean sweeps, the scythe extending from the weapon itself, and the much more impactful swing, I think it’s clear there was a lot of improvement to be made. And that improvement has been made to come in our next major update!

Reaper Form

Reaper form is another skill which has needed a visual update, and we’re happy to show off the new model coming for Reaper form in our next Major Update. This new model will also be accompanied by entirely new scythe models giving some much-needed flair and quality to this core identifying skill of the Lich.

New and Updated Enemies

Temple Guardian

The Temple Guardian stands watch over the entrance to Eterra’s Temple throughout the ages. This mini-boss holds a very important position within the campaign, and we felt it’s about time for this guardian to get the visual update they deserve. Similar to the Forge Guard’s manifest armor, we thought we’d play another game of spot the difference and a turntable view of this new stalwart guardian!

Idol (Giant Worm Boss)

This big old worm was a little too wormy and not enough idol of the void-y, so we’re fixing that with this terrifying new model, accompanied by an all-new SFX kit as well.

Void Despair

One of the brand new enemies emerging from the void in 0.9.0: the Void Despair, is quite agile given its size and has been known to approach from unexpected angles. Make sure to be careful when they’re in the area, or you may provide them the opportunity to demonstrate their namesake.

Voidfused Earth

We've shown off this little guy here before, but we felt this was just too awesome of a view of the new Void Earth enemy not to share as well.

Re-worked Zones

Alongside skills and models, some of our zones are also starting to show their age. While going through every zone in the game and improving performance, we’ve also improved the visual quality of these zones. One of our focuses for improvement without adding a bunch of performance overhead back into zones is improving lighting quality, and we’d like to share a couple of shots from one of our older, earlier zones - the Last Refuge Outskirts.

In other cases, these improvements to zones come in the form of more than lighting. We’d like to show an example of one of these zones with the video below from The Tomb of Morditas. Here the area has a brand new look, with Morditas being contained within some kind of prison - I wonder what that could be all about?

Previous Updates

There is still more we are working on that we’ve yet to reveal, so we hope you’re as excited as we are to bring Patch 0.9 to life in March. As a reminder, we’ve been revealing loads of new updates coming into Patch 0.9 throughout our development cycle, so here’s a refresher! Check out a couple of these previous development posts highlighting even more updates coming in Patch 0.9!

September Development Update

June Development Update

Community Collection of previous Teasers we’ve released, Compiled by Andrew.Tilley

Almost There

Patch 0.9.0 will be a big one, with a lot of content, updates, combat feel improvements, performance improvements, balance changes, and of course, Multiplayer. As we close in, we’ll continue to provide updates on the latest and greatest, both in posts and our weekly dev stream over at [twitch.tv/lastepochgame](http://twitch.tv/lastepochgame). If you’re interested in getting a taste of 0.9.0 before March 9th, make sure to keep an eye out on our news feed for our Pack the Server Party signup, as well as the other lead-up events!

Thank you to everyone as we work towards our biggest feature addition to date, introducing an entirely new way to play with Multiplayer, and we’ll see you in our next post!

Stay safe Travelers, and may Eterra bless your drops.