I like the game quite a lot, been playing since late alpha. However something keeps bothering me, especially as I start doing end-game content. To me, the game feels slow. I’m not saying it “is” slow, but that’s the feeling I have playing it.
I have been thinking about this quite a bit, and I think it is because of the combination of poor movement skills and large underpopulated areas. I don’t mind the large zones with small to medium sized monster packs, but to feel good they should be much faster to navigate through. Or zones should be built so that slow-paced movement does not feel so boring.
I might have been spoiled by all the zoom-zoom action of Path of Exile. But the fact is the more I play Last Epoch, the more I tend to feel like playing PoE just to feel faster.
Do any of you feel the same ? Is that something that could change as the game matures ?
I don’t feel the same at all. I prefer the slower pace of the game as it makes fights somewhat more interesting (However i’m playing HC so there is the tension of death, not too sure how it would feel on SC with deaths having not much effect).
There are some movement skills that can help with the pacing, at least on the Sentinel, not sure about the other classes. Lunge and Shield Rush are very good for mobility, with barely any cooldown.
The only issue i have however is that some areas are a bit too big, with a lot of open, dead, space, which makes backtracking a big issue when you hit a dead end as the dead ends can be far out from where you need to backtrack to. Sometimes it can take about 10-15 seconds just to walk back to where you need to go if you have no movement skills available.
I hope they don’t follow the route of PoE and go into extremely fast-pace stuff as it gets extremely boring, extremely quick, as combat becomes a non-issue and the game leans more towards relying on 1 shots to kill you, rather than actual fights.
Well, for me is not the speed itself the problem. It’s the movement. I already wrote in my pro’s and con’s, one of the most important things an ARPG has to do, is to give you the feel of a smooth movement. Even though I hate Diablo 3 for many things. The movement is something nicely done in the game. And with movement I also mean how skills connect into one another.
Maybe we are spoiled by the zoom-zoom of PoE, but yes, this topic was raised a few times on the forum before and many people say some zones feel way too large for the mobs quantity they have. In PoE we have a lot of monsters from the beggining. I guess this is important for the first impressions videos, streams, etc, but I’m sure it will get better as the game progress through beta.
I think it might be a combination of a couple of things.
The first being that the devs have admitted that animations and such aren’t where they would like them. This can make things feel “clunky” even when the pace of the combat itself wouldn’t give that feeling.
The other thing is that the pace of the game might still have another gear. From what I’ve seen, they don’t want to “move move move go go go” pace of POE’s endgame, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t get at least a little faster as more game systems and items get improved/added to the game. Even in POE, the speed and pace of the game for the average player is pretty sluggish early on, and only through items, linked movement skills, flasks, and ascendancy/passive points do players get to the speed people talk about at the endgame.
My hope is that they’ll find the balance between engaging combat and endlessly running from point to point.
I really like the movement in Last Epoch, it gives me a mixed feeling between diablo 2 and early(good game) diablo 3.
Besides that, there’s a few small thing like clicking on a wall wants the character to actually move onto the wall, without being able to, or the movement bugging out a bit when moving into a different level.
Some of the zones are too big, or at least too big for what is currently in them. They could add some stuff like shrines or lore items and some more enemies here and there to make them feel better. I just don’t want this game to become a zoom fest like how PoE is. I don’t play PoE like that but it sucks to know that drops in PoE are balanced around all the people who do.
Thanks all for your feedback. I have watched the twitch clip, and while it is not slow per-se, this clip for me is an excellent example of nothing much happening except teleporting and walking slowly. Combat is actually almost inexistent.
That might be the main issue. I’m playing an ARPG, I want to fight almost non-stop, my brain almost in flow. When I decide (i.e. between monolith Timelines), I take a rest, look at my loot, assign my points, etc. Then back into a new Timeline and fight, fight, fight until the end.
Currently I feel like between each pack I have time to think “okaaaay… where should I go to, where’s the next pack, alrighty then”. I don’t like that much.
It’s too bad because I love all the rest, and all the things that are to come, regarding game systems etc.
It is interesting because today, I did notice that some of the maps/zones were quite large and long - however I also noticed that I liked that part of it as well. Almost like it made me feel a little more immersed in the “journey” though I could definitely see things get added in here and there as you mentioned… especially relating to lore.
I think the monster density will increase in later patches, there might be technical reasons to have it relatively low at the moment (optimization, FPS drops etc.)
Also I hope that they will add more sidequests along with more random stuff to do on the maps. Besides of that, I think maps will feel much better once they implement the map persistence, because exploring maps now makes no sense when your map is blank at the next visit.
