Maps and enemies respawning when you portal

[mph0023]

Can you toggle how respawning works? When I portal, and then come back, the map acts like I've never been there, everything respawns and my mini map is blank save for POI's.

Personally, I find this really annoying and wish it work just like all the other Diablo-likes I enjoy. Stuff stays dead until you exit to the main menu, and the map always stays filled in once you've walked it.

I get wanting to be different...But I like my Diablo-likes to be Diablo-likes. Don't mess with what works and defines the sub-genre. Let us assign our hotkeys and mouse buttons exactly how we want to. ie: Let us just do the standard move and attack with a click with no hiccups. Again...Like the others manage to do.

I want this game to come out of EA finished, polished, and right up there with Grim Dawn and PoE as the best of the sub-genre.

[RodHull]

The intention back when the game first appeared was indeed to have the maps have permanence. We were told that due to a bug which was related in some way to implementing MP that this wouldn't be fixed till MP was added. And so it stayed.

Fast forward a year or two and suddenly this got rebranded as a design choice. No joke, the devs have now said its their intention to keep this and they have just erased history when it comes to it being a bug.

This is problematic for two reasons.

1) The previous stance on this was a lie and it was always a design feature they just didn't feel confident selling to people
2) They spent 2 years trying to fix this and couldn't make it work so just kept it in.

The short answer is no its not ever going to change, as the devs have decided they can't make the traditional method of maps being permanent work, and the LE faithful have dutifully fallen in line and now say this is a preferable way to play the game.

[EHG_Kain]

I don't think it's very surprising that there's many reasons for a particular thing to happen, and that some of those are beneficial, and that we would acknowledge those beneficial aspects as well.

I want to try to provide some clarification and update as to our stance on this occurring, and what future plans are. Previous shorter responses appear to have generated some confusion, so I want to try to provide as full and complete of an answer as possible.

We recently discussed this in our development update (https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/closed-multiplayer-testing-begins-development-update/48809#multiplayer-monolith-8). For ease, I'll copy the relevant information here:

One major decision we’ve made is a change to how our game loads for you. We wanted to make sure that traveling back and forth from Echoes and the Monolith reward chamber was a quick and seamless experience. So we totally changed how we do loading in Last Epoch!

Previously, at any part of the game, we would just unload old zones and load new ones as you played. Your experience is more complicated in the Monolith - you are moving between Echoes, the reward chamber, and the hub zone constantly. In a group, this would have meant a lot of loading of new servers for players - not only is that expensive for us, but it’s a very slow and annoying player experience.

To solve all of this, our outstanding development team has re-engineered our game to support additive loading - that means we can do all kinds of things now, and in the future!
[...]
Ideally, we are also going to use this technology in the future to make the entire game load faster at all points.

One of the largest benefits of the current system is performance. I understand that may be difficult to believe given current performance - which we recognize and are very hard at work on improving. I'm sure you can understand that the game also remembering states of previous zones requires a lot of extra memory. As we improve zone performance, and create additional technology, it becomes less expensive to maintain old zone states and helps to open that door.

Another commonly recognized benefit of the current system is farming, which I believe is a response RodHull is referring to - where the previous system allowed players to be able to reset zones to farm them before things like the Monolith of Fate existed instead of having to completely re-log to reset a zone.

In standard gameplay, leaving and re-visiting a zone is very uncommon. "Vendor runs" are disincentivized in Last Epoch, as we want players to be out there playing the game, killing mobs not sitting in town talking to vendors as their gameplay experience. As such, items are set to sell for extremely little gold so players don't feel any need to keep portalling to town to sell items. Quests also don't regularly have players re-visiting the same zone. In standard gameplay, the only common events we expect a particular zone should be revisited is if a player needs to portal to town to go AFK for a while, or has left the game and come back to it, or with the monolith of Fate reward zone.

Because of the current performance costs of maintaining old zone states, priorities on other projects (such as improving performance which would make this more feasable), and the original benefits which the system could hold, this was not a priority feature.

However: As we are improving the reliant systems, and have implemented the technology required for other systems (as mentioned the monolith of fate) - we are looking into extending this additive loading to other game systems.

Hopefully this helps clarify our stance and efforts regarding this particular gameplay concern.

[mph0023]

To: Dev Guy:
Your game has terrible performance and there's no excuse for not including Diablo-esque options for players.
None of this is new. Path of Exile figured it out. Grim Dawn figured it out.
Seriously. This is a tight sub-genre. Don't make a Diablo-like if you can't do it right.

[Ravenkid9266]

Aw man it must be my birthday to see the points laid out by Rodhull right above the points laid out by a developer, its like a crash course in cognitive dissonance.

[RodHull]

EHG_Kain eredeti hozzászólása:

In standard gameplay, leaving and re-visiting a zone is very uncommon. "Vendor runs" are disincentivized in Last Epoch, as we want players to be out there playing the game, killing mobs not sitting in town talking to vendors as their gameplay experience. As such, items are set to sell for extremely little gold so players don't feel any need to keep portalling to town to sell items. Quests also don't regularly have players re-visiting the same zone. In standard gameplay, the only common events we expect a particular zone should be revisited is if a player needs to portal to town to go AFK for a while, or has left the game and come back to it, or with the monolith of Fate reward zone.

So selling a game to people that has a campaign which you have designed to be a 1 and done throwaway experience you will never want to play again after the first playthrough is not a good thing. You do understand that yes?

There was a reason even back in D2 that people did certain runs, cause they enjoyed them, the zones were interesting and felt fun to fight through. Another of your competitors Grim Dawn people regularly revisit and 'grind' old campaign zones. Even POE which had its potato servers that only remembered zones for 15 minutes knew that people wanted that option. But here you are telling us that because you want us playing the game not using vendors that this 'feature' or no permanence is actually a good thing?

Like you do understand that getting loot returning to town selling loot and having brief moments of down time to regear/rejig your characters is a core element of most games like this yes? But of course its not in LE as the zones are linear and generic, plus for the most part the loot you find is mostly immediately broken down into mats so I can see your thinking, but again its not a good thing. To put it simply its like saying 'those things you enjoyed doing in other ARPGs well don't worry we don't have those so you don't need the maps to remember your progress'

And you can come up with as many frankly bad reasons to justify this as you like, but if people are so rarely revisiting zones and so rarely doing vendor runs then just give us the option of map permanence. Unless you can't which is basically the real reason. You can't figure out how to make this work so you have just back burnered it. Fine I get it, but please spare us the bad reasoning as though none of us have played ARPGs before that literally ALL do this as standard.

EHG_Kain eredeti hozzászólása:

Because of the current performance costs of maintaining old zone states, priorities on other projects (such as improving performance which would make this more feasable), and the original benefits which the system could hold, this was not a priority feature.

However: As we are improving the reliant systems, and have implemented the technology required for other systems (as mentioned the monolith of fate) - we are looking into extending this additive loading to other game systems.

Hopefully this helps clarify our stance and efforts regarding this particular gameplay concern.

So wait is this a feature and deliberate design choice (as was alluded to in a recent post) or is it that you are still trying to fix this? Cause I'm having a hard time keeping up with which particular version of reality we currently live in.

And I'm aware I probably come off as a total tool who probably has no grasp of the complexities you are working on, but please for the love of god stop with the weird posts where one dev says a thing, then another dev says the complete opposite.

It's either a feature you think is good (reload on zoning) or it isn't, simple as that.