Whether you're jumping into Arcade or getting your squad together for a Ranked session, the one thing that all players need is a reliable online experience. In this blog, we'll shed some light on connectivity in 2023, look at what we've achieved, analyze any unplanned downtime, and take a peek at what the Connectivity team is working on.
A YEAR IN REVIEW
Firstly, let's take a closer look at some of the changes brought to the game over the past year that had directly impacted Connectivity, so that we can deep dive into some of the solutions put in place to improve the overall player experience.
UNPLANNED MAJOR DOWNTIME
Downtime is likely to be the biggest concern for most players when it comes to connectivity. Downtime of a game's online services can have a wide array of causes, many of which are not linked to the game's servers themselves. Issues related to new features included as part of an update or the process and logistics behind patch deployment are just a couple of examples of triggers that could result in an online services outage. While our Connectivity team works to ensure our servers are ready for players at all times, we have multiple teams who are making improvements on their side too, with an aim to minimize these extra trigger sources as much as possible.
Below you will see the total unplanned major downtime for each month this year so far. We can see that while the most recent months of September and October have been a relative success, there are three main spikes throughout the year prior to this. Let’s inspect those spikes, why they occurred and how our teams responded.
JANUARY January saw 15 hours and 54 minutes of unplanned downtime with a number of unique causes being identified, part of which was related to the release of Crossplay. The Connectivity team worked through both December and January bringing stability to the game and establishing areas where revisions or improvements were required. Each instance of downtime was also independently investigated by our teams, with steps taken on how to avoid or mitigate the effects of similar issues in the future. Changes made as a result of the investigations have since helped to reduce impacts from similar events.
APRIL In April, we had 7 hours of unplanned outages across three separate incidents all again having a unique cause. In all cases, the Connectivity team was able to detect the point of failure which was causing players to be unable to connect, and was then able to make immediate or planned changes to our systems and procedures to remedy the issues going forward.
AUGUST Y8S3 Operation Heavy Mettle was released on August 29th, and with this we encountered a major outage with overall downtime totaling 17 hours and 49 minutes. In essence, this outage was caused by a specific group of conditions arising, which led to our services being unable to handle the high amount of players attempting to connect at season launch.
To alleviate the issue, the team disabled systems that would deliver Rank information to players, while still allowing Rank calculations to take place in the background. This allowed players to connect, matchmake, and complete meaningful Ranked matches while the team continued their work to get the game services fully operational once more. The team was then able to reinstate the delivery of Rank information to the game once conditions were stable.
In response to this situation, teams were able to make both specific and systemic changes to help ensure that the same outcome would not be repeated under similar circumstances.
DDOS (GAME SERVER)
When talking about game server DDOS, we're looking at DDOS that directly affects players as well as a group of matches hosted on the targeted game server. The team have previously implemented a feature to reduce the number of matches affected by these attacks, resulting in less players being ejected from matches.
Although the team has made progress in this area this year, we know that players still experience some issues with this. We see your feedback; we want to share that our work continues in this area and that the team will be making further changes in the future to help improve this situation.
SERVER REGIONS & PING TESTING
When a player boots up Siege, it checks to find the server which will provide the lowest ping based on the player's current location. This functionality has allowed us to run live tests using new data centers, while gathering performance data. These tests are helping us to understand how activating new locations can not only improve connectivity for certain communities, but also impact the experience of all the other players.
During 2023, after such tests had been completed, the Connectivity team made two new server regions available (one for Korea and another one from Europe Central). We've found that these new locations have been a boost for many players, enabling them to play with decreased pings leading to an improved experience overall.
SERVER REGIONS - WHAT'S NEXT? We've got nothing final to announce regarding additional new server locations as of right now, though we can confirm that it's an area the Connectivity team is putting a lot of resources into. In the coming seasons, the team will be running new internal tests, and we'll share more updates on this as soon as results become available.
In addition to testing new server locations, the Connectivity team is also working on updating and evolving its tooling. This will allow the team to pull more detailed information regarding their usage and ultimately facilitate decision-making when it comes to deciding which regions could benefit from additional resources the most.
CROSSPLAY
Crossplay was implemented back in December and has been one of the biggest online changes to come to Siege. The feature has been a great success, though it's important to highlight just how this affected our online services in the weeks following release. During this time, we did experience issues leading to downtime which ultimately stemmed from the Crossplay feature. These issues were due to the challenges of deploying such a game-changing feature, while ensuring that all of our systems were ready to provide a stable experience with this additional load. Crucially however, the team was able to ensure that the feature remained live, while bringing stability to the game's online services, providing a highly awaited change that many players had been asking for.
TECHNOLOGY REPLACEMENT
Over the last few seasons, our teams have been working iteratively to replace older technology which is integral to our online services. Some of this technology has been in place since Siege's early development, and as the game continues to evolve, there is a need to ensure that we still have state-of-the-art systems in place. Once complete, our team and players alike will be looking to gain multiple advantages, including decreased maintenance downtime.
COLLABORATION
At Ubisoft we have a wide range of titles, each with their own Programming, Art, and of course, Connectivity teams. In the last year, our Connectivity team has found new ways to collaborate with such teams from other titles, including For Honor and Roller Champions. Since the new efforts were established, the data being shared has enabled us to mitigate online issues that might have otherwise affected players and has resulted in a significant positive impact overall.
LOOKING FORWARD
The team has made multiple learnings over past seasons and applied a number of changes while working on others which will be implemented in the future. While some of these changes only represent remedies for a fraction of causes, there is no doubt that the steps taken will be beneficial moving forward.
To sum-up, here's a look at some of the areas the Connectivity team is currently working on:
Putting strategies in place to minimize unplanned downtime.
Reducing the impact of game server DDOS.
Tightening collaboration with other titles including For Honor and Roller Champions.
Testing for possible new data centers.
Removal and replacement of old technologies used throughout the game's life.
And much more behind the scenes.
This is just a brief overview of what the Siege Connectivity team has been up to, we hope that this article provides useful insight into some of the topics that are being looked at. We want to add that this is only a snippet of what this team is working on, and we'll share more on this topic in the future.
We thank you for providing feedback on your online experience as it's extremely helpful to the team and we couldn't make improvements without you!
We’ve got some exciting news to share with you all: RESISTOR has been selected to take part in the Day of the Devs: The Game Awards Edition 2023!
We’ll be revealing a new video as part of the digital showcase on the 6th of December which will give an overview of the game’s core features alongside some exciting new reveals. Just two days later, on the 8th of December, you can find us at the onsite event in Downtown LA where we’ll have a brand-new RESISTOR demo available for you to play!
If you're in the area you can get your free ticket to the onsite event HERE
Prepare for an infusion of realism! We're pleased to unveil the highly anticipated addition of the Halibut as the following featured fish species in Ships At Sea.
In our game, each fish, including the stunning Halibut, employs the power of physics to attain lifelike behavior.
Halibut
The Halibut, a prized catch in the fishing career, will challenge your fishing skills with its size and elusive nature.
Our commitment is towards constantly elevating your gaming experience and this is just a glimpse into what´s yet to come!
We're eager to hear your thoughts and feedback on this news update. Please share your insights with us by joining our Discord community.
Hello, everyone. I apologize for the really slow and general lack of updates that PD usually has (at least during its BETA period.) The reason these have been taking so long is lack of motivation. This coming update (was going to be v1.2, but will just be v1.1.2) was supposed to bring a lot of things; Strongholds, a new Rift that was supposed to branch and show off elements and how they react with each other (There are currently two elements. Fire, via the Endless Mode exclusive IgnitedPellet, and Acid, via the currently unused CorrosivePellet. These elements will have a mixture of different branching reactions. Another thing that was gonna come was some major changes to the HyperRift; allowing it to look better and fit into the Pellet Dodge base storyline. One more thing that was going to come was the Boss Rush gamemode. However, since I'm only one person, this is impossible within the time I mentally give myself. There wouldn't be enough time to keep things fluent and also keep thing to the highest quality (and would probably have a lot of bugs.) This ended up overwhelming me every time I open Unity. So, to actually get updates out, things will remain small and unfortunately won't be this big content pool I want to add. How I am currently planning these major things will be as follows:
v1.1.2 - Bug Fixes and further backend support so Endless Mode Tournaments can come soon
v1.1.3 - Boss Rush
v1.1.4 - HyperRift updates
v1.1.5 - The First Stronghold (may or may not come with Co-Op support at launch.)
I also want to add support for Local Drop-In Multiplayer (for supported levels like the Base Game) and Local Split/Screen for Open-World/Large-Scale levels somewhere down the line either as its own update or bundled with one of the previously mentioned ones.
In conclusion, I greatly appreciate all of you and hope that you can stick around for these updates that should be more regular. (I want to get into a schedule of at least 1 update around every week.)
Thanks for playing Pellet Dodge and please share it with your friends and help me out with growing so I can have more feedback to improve!
Next week we will be releasing another minor update focused on fixes and improvements.
Fixes will be included for the following topics:
Trading add-on, keep active blocks, enemy AI, large fire box, diesel burner, water jets, underwater doors, air scoop, turbo props.
We remain determined to clean up all these issues for good, and there is plenty of other stuff that we are also getting to, that players have reported on the tracker.
Thank you to everyone who have reported issues and helped us resolve these problems!
If you are experiencing an issue with a component not listed above, have not reported it yet, and have a simple example, please do get in touch via the in-game "report a bug" button. We want to make sure we are aware of all remaining issues so we can get them resolved as soon as possible.
With the above said, we have made huge progress, fixed the majority of problems, and fixes are for increasingly rare issues.
We are also working on the unit test system and should have this integrated into our process in the next few weeks.
Fixes and improvements remain the priority, but further ahead we are planning some great new content and features which are highly requested. 2024 should be a great year for updates!
Welcome Travelers, and thank you all for joining us for November’s Developer Blog as we progress through the final stretch to 1.0. As many of you are likely already aware, yesterday saw the first reveal of our Cinematic Trailer for Last Epoch over on IGN. We want to thank everyone for the fantastic support we saw in regards to the trailer, it’s been a great morale boost to see the continued excitement for our 1.0 release. If you didn’t have a chance to check out the Cinematic Trailer yet, please do so below!
Of course, on October 20th, we also announced our roadmap to 1.0, covering the main news articles to keep an eye out for, as well as our 1.0 release date of February 21st, 2024! We’re all very excited for the big day and wanted to talk about both what to expect in regards to the roadmap, as well as share with you all some of the things we’ve been working on. I’m sure you’re all excited to hear about some of these things coming, so allow us to waste no more time and get into it!
Roadmap
Let us start by talking a bit about the Roadmap we showed with our Release Date announcement. As many of you are aware, 1.0 not only marks the release of Last Epoch from Early Access, but will also introduce Item Factions, The Warlock and Falconer masteries, and a host of additional updates!
In the roadmap, we showcase the major upcoming announcements leading up to our 1.0 release on February 21st. We wanted to provide a bit more context on what to expect from each of these areas and give you a bit of a look into how Last Epoch continues to support its community, with both the Warlock and Falconer previews being community-driven exclusives that are designed to bring some awesome depth of information for these masteries ahead of their release at 1.0.
As you may notice with this dev blog, this roadmap is not an exhaustive list of all news posts to expect leading up to 1.0, so you can look forward to much more insight into 1.0 before the big date. Instead, this roadmap shows the dates of when you can expect to get more information on the three headlining features for 1.0 - Item Factions, The Warlock, and The Falconer.
January 11th - Item Factions
Fresh into the new year, keep an eye on our socials as well as here on our regular posting platforms where we’ll be releasing a comprehensive blog post diving into Item Factions: providing information on The Merchant’s Guild, The Bazaar, Circle of Fortune, and Prophecies. There’s a lot of information we’ll be sharing in this post, so look forward to getting all the info in this deep dive! As a note, to clear any potential confusion, Item Factions are launching with the 1.0 update, and not on Jan 11th.
January 25th - Warlock Preview
On this date, our community member AaronActionRPG will be providing a first look at the final Acolyte Mastery - The Warlock over on Icy-Veins.com. A long-time fan of the acolyte class, a huge supporter of Last Epoch, and a great member of the community, we are excited to see what Aaron and Icy-Veins have in store for the reveal. As a note - The Warlock will be coming with the 1.0 update, and this will be an early informational look at the class.
February 8th - Falconer Preview
Just over a month before Patch 1.0, the bird will be the word over on Maxroll.gg with the first look into the final Rogue Mastery - The Falconer. We’ve worked with the team over at Maxroll before, and are happy to be rejoining them for this reveal leading up to release. Here, some of our hardest-going community members will be representing Maxroll for this reveal, so we know no interaction will be left unturned. Find out how the Falcon works, what kind of skills will be coming with the mastery, and what kind of stats to expect on the Falconer over on Maxroll.gg on February 8th! As a note - The Falconer will be coming with the 1.0 update, and this will be an early informational look at the class.
February 21st - Last Epoch 1.0 Launch Day
The big day! On February 21st, 2024, Last Epoch will be releasing with version 1.0! On this day, everyone will be able to play the Full Last Epoch experience with Item Factions, The Warlock, The Falconer, and all the other improvements we’ve been hard at work on!
Of course, 1.0 is just the start of our journey here at Eleventh Hour Games as we plan for many years of content to come. However we cannot understate our excitement to be hitting this massive milestone, and look forward to seeing you on Launch Day!
Other Features
A couple of weeks ago we invited everyone to provide feedback on things they wish they knew as a new player to Last Epoch. We would like to thank everyone for providing responses to this form, and we’ll be going over this great feedback to find further improvements to the new player experience we can sneak into 1.0, as well as what kind of community resources we can put together to continue supporting you all in your travels.
If you haven’t had a chance yet to provide feedback on things you wish you knew as a new player, let us know by following this link to the form: https://forms.gle/8Mg9u7e1NJcyDJph9 .
Now, Lets take a look at a few of the improvements coming on the big day!
Visual Improvements
Lighting and Shadows
One of our major goals for the game is to improve both visual quality and performance across the board. To continue chasing this goal, we are making multiple changes to our lighting systems, shaders, and more.
Historically, many of our scenes felt a bit floaty, with characters and objects not grounded in the way we would wish. A big part of this issue was missing good contact shadows and shadows in general. There are many reasons why this is not as simple to solve as it may look - the most significant reason is of course the performance.
One of the systems we have improved for 1.0 is Ambient Occlusion. Our new implementation creates much more accurate contact shadows and brings much-needed depth into many of our scenes.
In addition to ambient occlusion improvements, we are also adding a modern screen-space Soft Shadow system. In many scenes, where we previously did not have any shadows, player light is now the source of physical light where objects around the player properly cast shadow, which is increasing much more dramatic lightning in our scenes, while still keeping performance in check. Since this is screen space solution, it has fixed performance cost, no matter how many objects or monsters are on the screen.
In addition, we are reworking lighting in almost every scene in the game, with multiple goals in mind - to improve performance, to increase the visibility of the player, and frankly, to improve the visual fidelity of our scenes.
Here is our EoT scene as an example. With new ambient occlusion, shadow system, and reworked lighting, all objects in the scene feel more grounded, the player character is clearly visible and there is a much better sense of depth.
Scene Variant System
The scene variant system is another major system we are introducing for 1.0. It is basically a set of tools and shaders which allow us to improve the visual quality of our scenes and add more variety to the game. It allows us to create dramatically different-looking scenes by using scene variant templates
In the past, it was quite hard for us to create different variants of the scene, having different weather effects or changing our vegetation. In most cases, we needed to create new materials, new texture maps or assets, and decals, and combine them to achieve results we needed - which has a negative impact on performance, since it all can increase draw calls.
However with shader changes, we now can change the vegetation, wetness of our surfaces, and add puddles to the scene using just shader functions. In other words, we can now have richer looking scenes, while improving performance in the process.
This set of tools also allows us to create new scenes more quickly, allowing the level design team to focus on, well, level design, without trying to solve technical issues and challenges.
Last, but not least, it allows us to bring much more variety into the game. For example monolith scene can look very different each time you will enter it, as you can see in some of the examples below!
We have big plans for the system and you will see us utilize it more and more as the game progresses in the future.
Shaman Revisit
We’ve heard all of the feedback regarding the Shaman Mastery and agree. For 1.0 we’ll be revisiting our favorite warrior of the north (sorry Grael), giving this mastery some much needed love helping to bring it up to par with the other mastery options in Eterra. With this revisit to Shaman, we won’t be doing a complete rework of the mastery; However, we know some aspects of the mastery can be a bit lacking at the moment, and we decided it needed some time dedicated to it in preparation for 1.0.
These changes are still a work in progress, so for today’s post we’ll just be speaking a short bit to one of the big improvements coming to Shaman with the reworked Tempest Strike skill. We’ll also be making changes to the Mastery’s Passive Tree to improve options in the tree and a new, as of yet to be disclosed skill. Expect more information in a later post!
Tempest Strike
Tempest Strike, as it’s currently implemented, is a spammable melee skill imbuing each strike with a chance to trigger elemental storm spells on hit, and offering elemental penetration instead of attack speed scaling. Being a hybrid skill with both attack and spell features, with the spell procs not being the most reliable, and lack of attack speed scaling, Tempest Strike has been in a fairly rough spot. As such, Tempest Strike is getting a complete rework for 1.0, keeping the same name and theme, but with completely new mechanics, skill tree, and even role as a skill.
As of 1.0, Tempest Strike will instead be a powerful high-cost combo ability. With each strike of your weapon, Tempest Strike will flow through launching penetrating icicles, creating tornadoes, and expanding rings of lightning. In its tree you’ll find the ability to specialize into each of these strikes making them more powerful, or removing them for other benefits. You’ll also find the reworked Tempest Strike will be quite favorable to building attack speed, allowing you to rage an elemental storm through hordes of enemies with a whole new suite of animations and VFX.
Speaking of storms, this change to Tempest Strike leaves a vacancy within Primalist for a low cost generator, or filler skill, tailored towards Shaman - but that’s a story for another time as we get closer to 1.0.
Endgame Rebalance
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback concerning endgame echo modifiers, as well as corruption scaling. As such, we’ve decided this is another great area we can add polish to with our release. In this area, there was two main pieces of feedback we wanted to address. The first is inequality and obfuscation of Echo Modifiers, and the second is the effects of scaling corruption.
Echo Modifiers
With Echo Modifiers, we wanted to focus on enemy power coming less from the modifiers themselves, and more from the inherent strength of high level enemies and Corruption directly. The goal of these changes are primarily to achieve a more predictable experience in high corruption Timelines.
To accomplish this we’ve made Echo Modifiers have shorter durations (now lasting a maximum of three echoes), and importantly made these mods no longer scale with corruption or distance from center.
As we dove into echo modifiers, there was a number of mods which scaled invisibly with corruption including enemies enraging at half health, Enemies have high speed and crit chance until approached, and enemies are deadly if not damaged recently.
These mods actually scaled at the same rate as increased damage modifiers, which if you're familiar with these mods, means these quickly became extremely deadly without clearly presenting the increasing difficulty of these mods. This will no longer be the case as these will now have fixed values alongside all other mods, including the infamous increased damage mods.
We're still tweaking numbers for this and testing the changes, so we're not quite ready to share numbers. These changes to Echo modifiers should make for a smoother more predictable experience, however don't expect tackling endgame scaling to suddenly be an easier task.
Corruption Changes
While Echo modifiers are getting reigned in, we’re also shifting some of that power from scaling modifiers directly into Corruption scaling. The difficulty modifier from corruption will now scale much more quickly meaning corruption will be the primary method of scaling difficulty, and hitting these points should be both a quicker and smoother experience. For this, we feel it’s important to provide some numbers here for context, however please do keep in mind these numbers are still subject to change:
100 corruption: 60% more monster damage and health (from 50%) 200 corruption: 170% more monster damage and health (from 100%) 300 corruption: 281% more monster damage and health (from 147%) 500 corruption: 505% more monster damage and health (from 289%)
Corruption will now also slightly scale up the average legendary potential and weaver’s will values. This means item rarity from echo modifiers will increase the total number of unique item drops for more chances at Legendary potential, while Corruption will have a multiplicative effect directly increasing the chance for Legendary Potential on each Unique item which drops.
Closing
With 1.0 being such a significant point for us, features are not the only thing we’re working on. We’re continuing to work through many of the current bugs, Improving our networking, improving performance, and addressing many balance concerns brought forward by you all. We want to ensure Last Epoch has the best launch it can for everyone, and we’re working hard towards that goal.
With 0.9.0, we had to change a number of processes with the Community Tester program, meaning we weren’t able to get the program back up and running for 0.9.1, and managed to get the program up and running only just before 0.9.2. We know with this, there’s been feedback and concerns regarding if there will be sufficient testing and review of these big new features coming to Last Epoch. We’re happy to say that the program already started a week ago providing testing a few of these upcoming features, and have already started adjusting to feedback from these community members!
Currently the program isn’t accepting additional members, however we wanted to provide the reassurance that we’re as always committed to working closely with the community, and making sure we fulfill that cooperation and coordination for these important features. Though not limited to the CT Program, we as always will be keeping a close eye on everyone’s feedback as we continue on the path to 1.0 and beyond.
Thank you all for for taking the time to read up on the latest goings-on here at Eleventh Hour Games. For more information concerning 1.0 and all things Last Epoch, make sure to mark the Roadmap Events on your calendar, keep tuned into our social channels, and join us on Discord at discord.gg/lastepoch for further blog posts and teasers as we work forward to the February 21st release!
It's been a while since our last update, and we are eternally grateful for your patience. Significant progress has been made on the game and we have amazing new announcements to share in the coming weeks.
Our progress on the game's skyrocketed since we shared the July update, adding more artists and programmers for the final push to complete the project in early 2024. As a matter of fact, we're set to announce the official launch date soon!
Moving forward, we're kicking into high gear and will be posting once every two weeks. Let's jump into some news!
Boss Fights Polish
All bosses are now fully implemented! Each one more badass than the last. There are all kinds of players on the dev team, some better than others, it's given the design team incredible data to work with. Fights are going to be epic! Super-mega-final-boss is in, too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves! Here are teasers for The Preacher and Silver Ghost.
Who said going to church was supposed to be boring?
Seems like that wiring needs some work. Still polishing art on this one, we'll keep you posted on our progress.
Arena, the Lightning Dome Challenge!
Test your combat skills in the Lightning Dome! Defeat wave after wave of bloodthirsty enemies to win amazing prizes (if you survive). Conquer all four challenges in record time to prove how much of a badass you really are! Blood, gore, and death are guaranteed!
The Church
An ultimate challenge awaits the Kid in this larger-than-life church fit for a God. Here, you will face the culmination of our developers’ insane machinations. This area will showcase amazing art, accompanied by what will arguably be the best work Le Matos has put out (music currently a placeholder). Get ready to perform indescribable bike tricks to overcome what awaits within!
Flashback Scenes
Remember the events of the movie back in 2015? Well, the Kid certainly does. Every now and then, memories will materialize in the Kid's mind and the world around him.
Skeletron Returns
To end you. :)
Is he real or just a dark memory?
Switch Port
A recurring and legitimate question. We are currently collaborating with Triple Boris to port the game to the Nintendo Switch. This is a complex process, and we are making good progress. Our goal is still to release it alongside the Steam launch, but it might take a bit longer. We're extremely sorry about that. Should the Switch version be released later than the Steam version, Outerminds will personally provide free Steam keys to Kickstarter backers who selected the Switch option. Whatever happens, we will do our best to communicate as we near launch!
Stay tuned on our socials and right here for more updates!
Update 0.20 "Trucking" (It will be renamed to "Paint & Build & Control" or something)
The upcoming update 0.20 "Trucking" will be "swapped" with a update that adds settings to the cameras (for panning/motion sickness etc), Control improvments (so it doesnt drop the inputs like it does for some users) and other features that have been suggested by the players. The trucking will come after this update. (most likly with the breakdown update)
This week we have been working on the following:
*The ability to paint steel blocks, this gives you 30 color options instead of the 3 planned * Default support for Xbox, Dualshock, Steam controller etc * Externaly saved controls that can be shared and wont be affected by updates * Actual input promts to help with the flow of gameplay * New default preset for Controller that feels way better
Also coming in this update:
*Additional Camera Settings *Improved Controls that doesnt drop the device *80+ new or updated building blocks *World grid build mode *Reworked control modes *Alot of minor changes
And we have way more being worked on that we cant wait to reveal!
Hey, awesome hamsters! We're excited to announce our very first Fan Art Contest. Your incredible support has been amazing for us, and we can't thank you enough. 🙌
Now let's dive into a world of creativity together. Big thanks, and let the artistic adventure begin!
We are calling all the artists and gamers, to enter the Hamster Scramble world by redesigning Robeen's palette for a shot at in-game fame!