Last Epoch Q&A on Runemaster Class, 1.0 Launch, and Advantages over Diablo IV

Indie game Last Epoch has no intentions of submitting to the franchise power of games like Diablo IV, Path of Exile 2, and the recently unveiled Titan Quest II.

First conceived in 2017 during a relative dearth of new releases in the hack-and-slash genre, the Last Epoch project started when Eleventh Hour Games Founder and CEO Judd Cobler (who had no prior game development experience) decided to establish a studio to create the hack and slash game of his dreams. He took to Reddit to find like-minded people with actual game development experience, as you can see in archived threads like this one.

In May 2018, Eleventh Hour Games (which owes its name to the team working on the vertical slice after finishing their day jobs) turned to the then-popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, where the campaign gathered $255K in funds. The funding allowed the studio to hire people to work full-time on Last Epoch, and that's when the development really sped up.

The game launched on Steam Early Access on April 30th, 2019, immediately garnering a niche audience. To date, Last Epoch has sold over 800K units, is on the wishlist of 600K Steam users, and holds a Very Positive (84%) approval rating from over 19K user reviews.

Just yesterday, Cobler stood alongside Geoff Keighley on the Gamescom 2023 Opening Night Live stage to announce that Patch 0.9.2 will be released on September 7th, adding the Runemaster class to Last Epoch.

Before that happened, though, I interviewed Cobler for over half an hour on everything from the game's unique development history to direct comparisons to the likes of Diablo IV and the planned 1.0 launch (currently scheduled before the year's end). Keep scrolling to read the full edited transcript.

Judd, can you talk about the unusual development of Last Epoch?

It's been an interesting journey, an exercise in what we call changing the tires as we're driving the car because we came from this eight-person little studio passion project and we've continued to hire more and more individuals, a lot of them with professional experience. We've built the game multiple times, getting up to this point as we've gained resources and it's been attainable to make the game that we truly have been dreaming of.

It's worth reiterating that not only is Last Epoch a game that's made by the players for the players, we really are the action RPG community. We are a band of action RPG players who were so passionate about what the genre was that we banded together in this attempt to make the next great action RPG that perfects the formula that makes these games so great. We spent a very disproportionate amount of time communicating with and soliciting the feedback and ideas of the community because that's the whole reason Last Epoch exists.

This has been fantastic for the game. Thanks to having a close relationship with the community, we've been able to iterate on and find ideas and features that we believe will push this genre forward. This is something that we intend to continue to do in the future.

Can you share the size of the team at this point?

Yeah. We started with that 2017 Reddit post when I was able to bring on about eight individuals, and we are now approaching I believe about 90 people in the studio all across the world. Eleventh Hour is a completely remote studio composed of people who are really passionate about the genre. Going in the direction that we're going, we'll be at 100 pretty soon, which is wild.

Speaking of the pursuit of perfecting the formula that makes these games so great, let me illustrate a list of features that we believe are helping us to execute those goals. First off, every single skill in Last Epoch has its own transformative skill tree.

We have deterministic crafting, which is really important to us because it means that as a new player, you can set out to create the character that you want from the get-go without having to rely solely on RNG drops coming from enemies. Our skill trees and our crafting system allow us to do that.

Of course, there's also the item hunt. We have a very interesting and deep itemization within the game because it's all about finding the next great item that you're excited about. As action RPG gamers, we know that this should be the loop of the game that can keep you engaged for as many hours as you can possibly want.

Finally, there is time travel, which does a lot of really cool things for Last Epoch. For example, it allows us to have this full visual spectrum in the game from high to dark fantasy. In the Ancient era, there's a lot of saturation with lush flora and visual contrast. As you go through time, you enter the Warring Gods era where the undead rise up, then there is the Imperial era, and finally you get to the Ruined era where the void is literally trying to consume the world. This gets into some really dark fantasy vibes like what you might see in Diablo or Path of Exile. But time travel is really cool because you get to bounce back and forth and you get to see that contrast between them.

We have a ton of fun utilizing this because anything that comes to our mind, we're like, we can place that here. It gives us a lot of creative freedom to work with.

Speaking of some contrast here, Last Epoch stands out from the two kingpins in the genre because it is very approachable but also includes a lot of that decision-based power I mentioned before with the skill trees and the crafting system.

Here's a comparison chart between Last Epoch and Diablo IV. Which is absolutely stunning, by the way, and we have to give Blizzard credit for that. This chart shows that Last Epoch has the depth, features, and modes that action RPG gamers are looking for. For example, we have a really robust game loop filtering system. We have an absolute ton of unique items and a lot more coming in every single patch.

I see that you've listed full trade economy as a feature. I guess that means you can sell any item to other players. How does that work?

This is something that ties back into our community collaboration. There's a really cool story here. I will note that this is something that does not exist in the game right now, but we figured it out early this year with the community and people in the community are touting this as maybe the biggest advancement in action RPGs in the last decade. That's actually a quote directly from Rhykker.

As you probably know, trade is a very divisive topic in this genre. Some people think that it is absolutely required and mandatory for them to have fun in the game to have these items that feel like they have value. Others believe that trade absolutely destroys these games and they don't want to touch trade because they want to feel like they should be inside of the game loop killing monsters to find that next great upgrade and not having to go and trade.

What we're going to do in Last Epoch is introduce two factions. One is called the Merchants Guild, and the other is called the Circle of Fortune. What players will do is align themselves with one of these factions when we come out with this at version 1.0.

If they pick the Merchants Guild, as they rank up with this faction, they'll be able to go into this town-like zone called the Bazaar and trade an increasing level of rare items. You can start by trading rare items and then you might be able to trade items that have some legendary potential. When you get to the very top, you'll be able to trade absolutely everything including legendary items.

If you choose the Circle of Fortune, that gives you ways to go and hunt items more easily with these things called Prophecies. It can also give you improvements to loot drops depending on your tier in the faction. That way, we give players the exact kind of way that they want to play.

Can you switch between these guilds if you change your mind?

However, the items that drop when you were inside of that faction will be tagged to you being inside of that faction. So, if you're in the Circle of Fortune and you get a really awesome item drop because of the boost that you have from the faction, you will have to be presently aligned with the Circle of Fortune to wear that item. That way, people aren't just abusing the system.

If you're really an intense player who's going to put a lot of time into the game, you can level up both the Circle of Fortune and the Merchants Guild over time. But at that point, you'll likely have two different gear sets related to them.

You've also listed the ability to play Last Epoch offline. However, how does that work with the trading system? One of the main reasons games like Diablo have gone online only is to prevent players from cheating on their client.

Yes. We feel very strongly about the server authoritative aspect of online play. We want to make sure that offline and online realms never cross each other because it's very important that in the online realm, we don't have people who are cheating on the client side and then bringing those items to the online realm. When playing offline, there will not be trading. The Bazaar feature will be exclusive to the online realm of the game because, exactly like you just said, we don't want to pollute the online realm with any type of client-side hacks and cheats that might come from that.

Great to hear. Can you talk about this Runemaster class coming in the next update?

Sure! We believe is the most robust and flexible class introduced in an action RPG game ever. It has a unique mechanic where you can actually generate runes and depending on the runes that you're holding, the type and sequences, you're able to invoke up to 40 different spells from one single button press. That's as many spells as other games have across an entire class or even multiple classes, and we have it in one single button press with the Runemaster.

Let me backtrack a bit, though. In Last Epoch, you start with one of five base classes. As you go through the campaign, you can ascend into one of three related masteries to that base class. The Runemaster is a mastery of the Mage class. What's really cool about masteries in Last Epoch is that it's not just like a visual change: when you choose a mastery, you get new powers, abilities, and more. There's a lot that comes with ascending into one of these masteries and the Runemaster is no different.

With the Runemaster, any time you cast a spell, you will generate a Rune of the same elemental type as the spell you just cast. If I cast Frost Wall, I generate a cold rune, while casting Glyph of Dominion (a lightning spell) generates a lightning rune. Depending on the types of runes you're holding and the sequence in which you've generated them, you'll cast one of forty unique invocations. We have offensive abilities, we have utility that's built into these and we have defensive spells as well. You have an entire arsenal at your fingertips from just casting a runic invocation.

Also, Frost Wall at its base is more of a crowd control ability, freezing any enemies that walk into it. However, we have these transformative skill trees across the entire game in Last Epoch. For example, I'll take a point out of one of these nodes and then put it into Pyroglass, changing my Frost Wall into a Fire Wall. What was a crowd control ability is now a high-damage fire DoT (damage over time) ability. This is just one of many potential examples.

Let me also show you our passive system. There's a lot of people who tell us this is their favorite skill system in any game they've ever played, not just action RPGs but any game, period.

Every time you level up, you get a passive point to invest. When you start off with this class, you begin putting points into the Mage passive tree. As you work your way down this Mage passive tree, when you get to a point, you're able to start spending points into these different mastery trees. You can spend points on any three of the masteries, which starts to give you some of that dual-class flavor.

Let's say I choose the Rune master as my mastery. I get to go past this lock line right here that you're seeing in the Spellblade. As we got better at creating the passive trees, we've introduced things like point threshold bonuses where if you invest five points into this passive node, it actually doubles the effect. This really helps you build the character in the way that you want to build it, fleshing it out to be unique from other Runemasters.

It is very likely that you, as a Runemaster, might have the same exact abilities on your bar as another Runemaster. But because of the depth of the skill trees and the passive system, it is also very likely that you play completely differently from any other Runemaster that has chosen the exact same skill set.

Regarding your deterministic crafting, most hack-and-slash games do not allow you such systems because they expect you to just farm stuff and grind loot through combat.

Yes, absolutely. The thing is, we also make sure that players want to go out, and that they're really excited about finding the next item. This just makes it so they're not super defeated when they don't find that item that they'd really need for a certain build.

Can you talk about the endgame in Last Epoch?

We have the Endless Arena, where you get to compete on leaderboards where there is server authority. So there's not a bunch of cheaters and stuff on the leaderboards. Again, we're not crossing the offline players and the online players. A lot of people go and compete in that.

We have in-game dungeons that are more of a curated experience where you'll go into the dungeon through different levels and then depending on the dungeon that you're going through, you can do really cool things like crafting legendary items or even gamble for really rare items at the end of these dungeons. We'll make more dungeons in the future that have these really awesome curated experiences, these over-the-top bosses.

The main foundational endgame system is called the Monolith of Fate. In the End of Time era, you'll access the Monolith of Fate, which lets you experience different realities and timelines.

If I go to this one island right here, the Fall of the Outcasts, this is going to be a different reality. From this, you get a whole gigantic web of different zones where you're going to hunt for specific items and fight really engaging bosses. We can tell different stories because the timeline is different from the one that you went through in the campaign. It gives us this near-infinite axis of creating content for the player.

This is something that players want to go through because the rewards that you get from here are things that you can't get anywhere else, including blessings which are these permanent big boons to your character. You can get one blessing in each of these different realities, but each of these realities offers you different blessings. We'll be expanding the Monolith of Fate for years. We actually already have the next three large content expansions to this endgame system already planned out.

Is there any element of randomization or procedural generation to Last Epoch?

The biggest thing in that regard is that randomization is really important for us, from itemization to the drops that you're getting to the things that you're encountering throughout the world.

So yes, there's plenty of randomization in the game. It's not that every single zone is completely randomized, but a lot of the elements within the zones are randomized and we're going to continue to implement more and more randomized features into the future because it is very important for playability.

What about dungeons? 

At the core, they are handcrafted curated experiences. However, we do have randomized elements as you enter these dungeons. You might have to go down different pathways or you might encounter random events that happen sometimes in these dungeons and they might be in different areas.

Does Last Epoch have any form of direct PvP?

Good question. There is currently no PvP in the game. It's certainly something that we're interested in, but it's important to note that the game overall is PvE first and we are completely unwilling to try to balance the PvE experience around PvP because it is so important that you have a strong class fantasy as you go through the game. We don't want to get into that PvP balancing. If we do implement PvP in the future, it will likely be a little bit more unbalanced, and we'll be completely fine with that.

Do you have console versions in mind for the future?

For sure, consoles are something that we absolutely want to come to in the future. We are making big strides in order to do that. For example, we have really great gamepad support in the game already, but we're continuing to improve it in almost every single patch.

What's important to us though is that we release on PC first, ensuring that the launch is super smooth. We make sure that we're able to handle the live operations of that side of the game and we don't spread our smaller team too thin. Once we have all of that down and we're a well-oiled machine and feel we can very comfortably take on console releases and support those appropriately, we'll launch on consoles.

For the PC version of Last Epoch, are you planning to add any sort of upscaling technology like NVIDIA DLSS/AMD FSR/Intel XeSS?

We are certainly interested in all of these technologies and it does seem that more and more of them are coming out and being able to do a lot of really great things for these games.

It's not something that we're looking to incorporate for 1.0, but we're going to continue to assess these and see what they can do for the game. Keep in mind that 1.0 is just the kickoff. We're going to be releasing content regularly about every three months, so things like that certainly have a big opportunity to enter the game.

The goal is to release Last Epoch 1.0 before the end of the year, right?

That is certainly the intention right now. However, it is very dependent on the quality of the game at that point. We want to make sure that the game is at the quality that our players expect and deserve. If it is not ready by then, we'll be comfortable holding on to it either way. 1.0 is coming out not too far in the future anyway at this point.

As for my last questions, what do you think about the genre's apparent new Golden Age between the successful release of Diablo IV, the promising 2024 launch of Path of Exile 2, and the recent announcement of Titan Quest II? Are you more excited about the potential of expanding the genre and its user base or are you a bit worried about your game because you'll need to compete with these heavyweights?

Great question. I think at our core, we are very excited to see new entries into the genre, especially the IPs that we grew up loving and deeply, deeply inspired Last Epoch. We are certainly fans of all of these things. We geek out about them ourselves whenever we see that something like Titan Quest II is coming out.

At the same time, we're not necessarily worried about these. I think competition is healthy and helps inspire great systems in these other games too. Also, because we are a slightly smaller studio than those others, we don't have to have the same level of revenue to make sure that we are a healthy studio. It's not something that really worries us.

We're more just excited and we're going to continue to create Last Epoch with the community and make sure that we have the best game that we're able to possibly make because it's the game that we want to play.

That's completely fair. What would you say is the defining feature of Last Epoch? The time travel setting?

I think it's a combination of the things we discussed in our chat. Time travel is a big one for Last Epoch. I think the fact that every skill has its own transformative skill tree is also one of the defining features of the game. People absolutely love our deterministic crafting system as well. again. And then we also have things like the unique trade system we're coming out with. Really, the goal here is just to perfect the formula that makes these games great, and we will continue to do that.

Thank you for your time.

Written by Alessio Palumbo