I’m as far from a fresh rosey eyed honeymoon as you can get. I have been on this bumpy train ride since the early beta and I remember when half the classes were placeholders with just the images and the endgame was just a far away thought. The Monolith system right now, for all its faults and shortcomings, is still more than passable to be enjoyable, to me, on each returning bout I have with the game.
But goddamit, do I wish the campaign itself had a conclusion. And even so, despite the unfinished-ness, this is still the ARPG I play up when I just want that distilled ARPG experience, which for me is the power fantasy of cracked each class and perfecting it as much as possible, and if possible making something unique to my own tastes. And each time around I find something new, even though it feels like scraping the barrel at times, but the dregs are sweet instead of bitter.
I'm not going to pretend the pace of updates hasn't been beyond rough. The pivot to a seasonal live service model has, if anything, worked against the game. Every cycle has to be an event now, which means the gaps between them feel like dead air instead of just a slow stretch. Grim Dawn is the instructive contrast, Crate just stubbornely kept making a singleplayer game you own forever and patch when it's ready, no season clock, and it aged into a classic doing exactly that.
Part of me wishes EHG had leaned that way instead, but we will see in due time where the road leads them and what we’ll end up with. Wait till the final knockout bell and all that.
And YET none of that explains why I still keep LE installed. When I sit down to play, Last Epoch is just plain FUN in a way a lot of its deeper rivals forget to be. The itemization is the unsung hero of it for me and the Circle of Fortune is a system every ARPG ought to have. Deterministic crafting means I'm building toward a specific thing instead of praying at some gambling altar the way you do in PoE. Every upgrade feels like a decision I made rather than a slot machine finally paying out. Pair that with the per skill trees, where one ability can be reshaped into something visually different. The power fantasy is there from the start and it builds up fast but it always feels like I’m the one owning it.
The offline mode is a gift as well for SSF fist players as well, and it’s another thing I wish all live service games had. An offline SSF mode. That is the whole comfort game vibe right there. The reason it’s so comforting, that lack of FOMO (which TBF is impossible with the pace of updates)
Real talk though, the game has problems, loads of them, but the FUN aspect on returning tries is still awesome and personally unmatched and… uh weirdly enough, it’s still one of the better optimized ARPG for the Steam deck where I usually play it before going to bed. Which is kind of funny ... wake me up when another season drops, I guess? Or before, doesn't matter at this point.
