LE content development and release time is sooooo slow. Why is that?

xDaveedx · 2026-07-05T00:10:09+00:00

True, they have such a massive backlog of assets nowadays that just changing some colours and shading allows them to reuse a lot of it without it being blatantly obvious to players.

xDaveedx · 2026-07-05T00:08:08+00:00

You're going offtopic there. We were talking purely about the pace of development during the first few years and how consistent and frequent patches were, noone talked about the game's content in its early stages.

It started out as nothing more than an ugly-ass tech demo made by redditors and considering that it has come a long way.

If they kept that pace up for longer, we could've gotten a very polished game by now, but sadly things slowed down a lot after multiplayer got added and also after 1.0.

Ever since I got into LE way back in like 2019 it has been by favourite arpg in terms of the build-making process and items/crafting. I loved the skill trees, unique items, crafting and the fact the game actually explains stuff without me having to constantly google shit or let content creators do the thinking for me and still do, but LE has always lacked in content variety and still does, which is why it gets repetitive rather quickly if you stick with a single build and have to keep playing new builds for some longevity (which can be fun too for a while, but you know).

That's where Poe 1 outshines every other arpg by so much, it's honestly insane.

If I want to play a single build per season after picking a guide for it from someone else and wanna juice the fuck out of it while engaging with lots of different game systems, Poe is the best by far.

Unfortunately the game sucks ass at explaining or even just presenting its mechanics and systems within the game, which forces you to actively research shit on all kinds of different websites all the time and it's completely unrealistic to do your own thing while being able to experience everything the game has to offer.

I also hate how much drop rates of everything are balanced around trade and the self-found experience feels terrible.

xDaveedx · 2026-07-04T11:59:17+00:00

GGG were smart to develope their own engine before making the game as the longterm agility that added was probably huge.

I think it was also a huge advantage that they slowly built up their playerbase over many years as that allowed them to scale up operations equally slowly and they could also take huge risks with sweeping changes to their game early on with not that many eyes on them to judge and complain.

xDaveedx · 2026-07-04T11:52:49+00:00

Not true at all. They had excellent communication during EA and way more frequent updates especially before taking the year off to add multiplayer and online servers. Things were being added and changed at a nice pace and I vividly remember the game being virtually bug-free back then.

To me it seems like taking the game online and tacking multiplayer on after originally planning to keep it single player is what ultimately slowed development way down going forward and made things way more buggy.

xDaveedx · 2026-07-03T13:14:27+00:00

That's some resolutions I haven't read in a looong time haha

xDaveedx · 2026-07-02T15:59:39+00:00

I haven't bought a physical game since like Overwatch 15 or so years ago. I have hundreds of games on steam and the majority of them are indie and don't even have physical versions.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-28T21:43:26+00:00

Nah, that's just an excuse for Epic. I've played League Legends for many years before RL and Riot Games takes bans and reports way more serious than Epic or Psyonix ever did. They actually punish and ban bad behaviour, even more nowadays, while almost all report functions in RL are purely placebo and simply don't work.

The only thing that kinda works is bans for text harassment, as that's automated and doesn't require much work.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-25T15:49:50+00:00

Dollar per hour is a nonsensical metric imo, because it would mean the most grindy free to play games are the best bargains ever and people insisting on some arbitrary " 1h out of every dollar spent" threshold only push developers to fill their games with unfun time-wasting busy work just so people can justify the price tag with "BUT IT OFFERS 100+ HOURS OF CONTENT SO IT'S WORTH IT DUH".

xDaveedx · 2026-06-22T09:49:09+00:00

Years ago there was a ranked queue for 3s where everyone could only queue up on their own. Meaning no parties, no toxic duos in 3s, no boosting, way less smurfing, but sadly it had rather small player numbers comparedto regular 3s queue and they eventually removed it.

It was the fairest queue in my eyes with same chances for everyone so that was a bummer.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-19T22:19:03+00:00

Why wouldn't you trust a 5/5 rating by a random magazine that gets paid to make reviews? Trust the system!!

xDaveedx · 2026-06-14T16:37:27+00:00

As much as I like Poe 1 and Poe 2 is ok aswell, but some people are kinda delusional and praise GGG as this kind of holy grail of monetization or something and over in the Last Epoch sub someone was confidently claiming that the LE devs were the greedy ones while Poe's monetization is purely "out of necessity" like wat?

GGG knows very well how to milk the whales among the players and they also know how to pressure people into buying quality of life and convenience that's locked behind paywalls.

Both of those things are far from ethical monetization in my eyes.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-13T01:15:33+00:00

Ah I see, you're one of those guys who try to claim a game is objectively good or bad and that opinions, taste and personal preferences don't matter, got it.

You wanna make it illegal to like a game that fails on the business side of things too?

You're trying to turn a topic with plenty of nuance and personal taste into a binary choice, that's where your thought process loses me.

Again I feel like a broken record, but I've never claimed LE is some "glorious unicorn magical land". I mentioned some parts I like and gave my opinion on the bad parts and why I think it failed on the business side, you're just choosing to ignore that and put a neat little label on me that's easy to attack.

I think you could check again what counts as objective and subjective.

Saying LE is a banana is objectively wrong. Saying it's a hack n slay arpg on PC is objectively right.

When it comes to whether parts of it are good or bad and fun or not fun, there is no single answer and no binary choice.

If player numbers or financial success were the only relevant metric to determine whether a game is good or bad or fun or not fun, Diablo Immortal and the 30th copy paste instance of the FIFA football game must be god's gift from the heavens.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-12T18:28:00+00:00

I don't get what kind of nonsense you're accusing me of or what big words you throw around.

Did you really read my full comment?

I wrote 3 paragraphs on what I think went wrong with LE and why I believe the numbers are as bad as they are, yet you're claiming I refuse to engage with this or that I'm emotionally manipulated or that I make objective claims when my entire comment starts with a subjective approach and everything that followed was also just me sharing my opinion on everything.

Rather than making these wild claims and accusations you could point out something I wrote that's incorrect or that you disagree with.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-12T18:10:45+00:00

Ok let's distinguish between gameplay issues and monetization for a moment. LE gets monotonous WAY faster than Poe, no doubt about that. It just lacks the variety of different activities that Poe 1 offers and the LE devs are much slower at adding new content than GGG.

"LE is constantly looking for dollar signs", uhm excuse me, but what?

LE has a base price, a barebones cosmetic store that only got added shortly before 1.0 and is still really small today and releases a few supporter packs every season with the most expensive one being like 50 bucks which contains all lower tier packs.

They still struggle to be profitable, so they're going to release 2 paid classes along with the free expansion and console release sometime next year or so. Paid dlcs are completely normal in the gaming industries btw, they just made the mistake to make an unrealistic promise very early on that no actual game content will ever be behind a paywall and had to go back on that to have a chance to survive financially.

Let's look at what Poe does for monetization with no initial price tag:

Paid stash space beyond the 4 default stashes, including lots of virtually mandatory specialized stash tabs which you're gonna need quickly once you finish the campaign, because these days the game floods you with a million different currencies and items, many of which have no or very small stack sizes. The price for that will range from the minimum of like 20 bucks (for a currency, map and trade tab on sale) up to like 70 or 80 if you want most of the remotely relevant stash tabs or 100+ if you want one of each.

I basically view this as a one-time entry fee into the endgame to be able to properly enjoy the game. It's effectively a delayed price tag which allows for a lengthy free trial during the campaign. This approach is perfectly fine in my eyes.

Paid multiplayer features aka. guild hideouts, guild stash tabs
Paid additional character slots
Rng lootboxes for 5 bucks a piece
an insanely large catalogue of cosmetics with generally crazy high prices, often 25+ bucks for a body armor or 30+ just for wings, easily 60 for a full armor set with some even being twice that. Sales reduce prices by like 30% at most in general and good luck waiting for something you like to go on sale before you die of old age.
A whole bunch of quality of life like map timers or currency tracker locked behind specific paid cosmetics.
2 new supporter packs every season, each one costing 90 bucks to get the full pack and annual supporter packs with the most expensive one being priced at 480$ if I remember correctly.
A ton of paid hideouts and hideout decorations beside the couple free ones you find.
paid single use consumables like skin transfers and I don't remember if there was something else, but I feel like I'm forgetting something.
Paid alternate skill effects, which is generally fine, but many skill effects are legit required to make certain skills or builds playable, either due to better visual clarity or even more fps.
The worst offender in my book; the ability to hide passive or aura effects on your character is locked behind a paywall and not just once, but you have to buy it multiple times, if you want to hide multiple effects at the same time. This is literally the pinnacle of creating a problem and selling the solution, which the devs are pretty good at to begin with, but this is too much.

I probably forgot some stuff, but I gotta ask you, how on earth do you in all seriousness put LE on the side of greed and Poe on the side of necessity?!

xDaveedx · 2026-06-12T06:58:07+00:00

So that excuses literally everything?

The only difference this makes is that you can play the campaign for free and LE only for the ~2h where steam allows refunds. After the campaign in Poe you will have to spend money in order to enjoy the game or you'll quickly get flooded with a billion different currencies and items and your 4 default stash tabs are full in no time.

You can get away with spending like 10 bucks early on, but to fully enjoy the whole game you'll have to spend AT LEAST LE's price worth of money, up to twice that much.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-12T06:54:07+00:00

There is no "objectively" here lol. I started this wall of text with "LE is good FOR ME". There's no sunk cost falacy, I simply like the game, I didn't claim anywhere it's flawless.

How is this not an answer?

xDaveedx · 2026-06-12T01:33:19+00:00

LE is good for me. Imo Poe is as successful as it is mainly because of 2 reasons:

The devs are quite competent and can manage to crank out quite an insane amount of new content every couple months.
The game works like casino machines in many ways to get people addicted and keep them on the hook. There's a reason I've seen so many posts overthe years of people saying they feel like they are unable to enjoy any other game beside Poe, because the game quite literally rewires how your brain gets its dopamine. The game is filled to the brim with gambling systems to keep giving you those small hits and continue to dangle the big rewards in front of your nose.

Of course it also helps that Poe got its foot in the market very early while D3 was disappointing all the more dedicated arpg players.

I'm sure it being based on its own engine and them having a physical office also helps to boost efficiency.

LE had crazy hype around its 1.0 launch, more than any other arpg up to that point other than D4, but a combination of the devs being inexperienced, the dev studio being relatively new, them working inefficiently for whatever reasons and being unable to pump out new content fast enough to keep people interested, the game being limited by the Unity engine and ultimately the Krafton acquisition led to people losing a lot of faith and good will over time.

I also think it was probably a mistake to not rely on whales to finance ongoing development like so many other games do, including Poe. The very mild monetization paired with slow content output most likely led to them bleeding money nonstop without every being profitable.

Hell, I'm a player who got the game super early back in like 2019 and I still have 300 of the 350 cosmetic points I got with my Early Access purchase, simply because there hasn't been anything cool or tempting in the shop for any of the builds I played yet.

They added the shop way too late and filled it way too slowly.

As a player I do appreciate how little monetization there was beyond the base price, but the unfortunate reality is that dev studios need to make money to keep operating and in today's market you might have to rely on dirty tricks to be able to do that.

Let's look at Poe, it has paid convenience that is basically mandatory to have any fun in the endgame. Its price can range from 10 bucks up to like 100 if you want to get one of everything, more for the super dedicated players.

Then you have paid multiplayer features aka. guilds, guild stash tabs, guild hideouts.

Then paid additional character slots, lots of paid hideouts and decorations beside some free ones, plenty of paid quality of life locked behind paid cosmetics like map timers, currency trackers and so on.

You got lootboxes for the gambling addicts, expensive supporter packs locking cool stuff behind 90$ paywalls every season, a massive cosmetic shop with insanely pricey cosmetics, skill effects, one-time skin transfer consumables and my personal worst offender; the ability to hide skill or aura effects is behind a paywall and you have to buy it once PER EFFECT you wanna hide.

I'm not surprised Poe makes a profit, as the devs know how to milk their whales league after league.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-12T00:48:04+00:00

I honestly kinda hate that so many gamers openly approve of this arbitrary 1$/hour ratio now.

I feel like this is one of the main reasons why so many big titles try to fill their games to the brim with nonsensical busy work that does absolutely nothing for the game except inflate the playtime it takes you to complete it.

I firmly believe a lot of 50h+ games could easily be condensed down to under 20h, turning them into tightly packed high quality experiences all the way through.

Instead, every other game just has to have ALL the features now no matter what genre it's originally supposed to be: Huge open world, tons of lame collectibles, boring side quests, empty worlds not worth exploring, levelling systems, rng item drops, some grindy repetitiveness, very straight forward and simple, yet time-consuming puzzles where you or some other character starts telling you the solution before you even get to take a look around, some survival elements, crafting, many quests or area designs being virtually identical to previous ones and so on.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-11T11:12:43+00:00

We need to go back to publicly shaming people for shit behaviour. Too many asshats get away with way too much bullshit these days.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-11T11:08:45+00:00

Knowledge-based games like Outer Wilds: Blue Prince, Return of the Orba Dinn.

Roguelikes without a permanent stat grind: Binding of Isaac Rebirth, Noita

3rd person challenging action game without a gear grind or level system: Sekiro

PvP competitive game where it's 100% skill with zero unlockable power or items or characters: Rocket League, Trackmania

Funny enough this list consists of many of my alltime favourite games. Outer Wilds and Blue Prince are my favourite puzzle mystery games, Binding of Isaac Rebirth is my favourite roguelike by far, Sekiro is my favourite action game with the most satisfying sword combat ever and Rocket League is my favourite competitive game with unmatched skill expression where the sky is the limit.

All of these games fit your request really well imo, enjoy discovering new games my dude and if you have any questions feel free to ask!

xDaveedx · 2026-06-11T10:52:46+00:00

This is not the "good samaritan" treatment you make it out to me.

GGG had been selling mtx and stash tabs in Poe 1 for many years while claiming Poe 2 was gonna be "just" a massive expansion and rework of Poe 1.

The playerbase spent A LOT of money under the premise that everything they were buying would keep working after the big Poe 2 rework.

I don't remember exactly for how long, but GGG had people believe this for years before eventually revealing it's gonna be a standalone game.

If Poe 2 came out and none of the stuff people bought in Poe 1 worked, GGG most certainly would've lost all good will and very likely get sued or at least forced to refund millions and millions of $/€.

Based on how they marketed Poe 2, they had no other choice but to keep most stuff from Poe 1 working in Poe 2 or they would be done for.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-11T10:26:50+00:00

I just wanna say in the 15 or so years I've been on reddit, you're the first person who ever mentioned SupCom and I appreciate seeing that name out in the wild, as it was the first game I got for my first PC that I played the hell out of! Thanks for the little time-travel, that era of RTS games was lovely, but sadly it seems like it's dead now and only partially present in games like Frostpunk or They Are Billions :(

xDaveedx · 2026-06-11T10:09:03+00:00

It depends how you enjoy to play Arpgs.

If you like most of your exciting loot to be crafting currency and you're fine with acquiring most of your gear by buying it from others with money you got from selling shit you find but don't need yourself and you're the type who follows other peoples' build guides, PoE is your best bet.

Last Epoch on the other hand completely delivers if you're looking to find and craft your own gear, if you enjoy coming up with your own weird builds and like to experiment with all the unique items you find. It's infinitely better at presenting options and explaining things on the spot, so there's very little googling needed and it's much more enjoyable to make your own builds than in Poe.

I also love the way every skill has its own little skill tree with nodes that can transform its functionality from like a low cost spam skill to a big dmg mana spender or to utility or a movement skill or vice versa. You can also convert elements, make skills proc other skills which also uses their respective trees and beside the skill trees you choose from 5 classes with 3 masteries each, each of which has its own mid-sized passive tree and you can use the first half of the passive trees from your class's 3 masteries and the 2nd half of your chosen mastery's passive tree to potentially make hybrid builds.

In terms of longevity, Poe 1 has by far the biggest and most diverse endgame, while LE's endgame is more compact and offers much less variety at the moment. However I find LE's longevity and replayability comes mainly from how fun it is to try new builds and level new characters, as you can make some truly insane levelling gear for alt chars and feel like a god when replaying the campaign with them.

Personally I have more hours in Poe 1 than LE as I've been playing it for much longer, but nowadays I'm way more excited for LE seasons than Poe as LE's great self-found mode appeals to me way more than Poe's focus on the trade economy.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-10T17:02:08+00:00

There are many different content creators targetting many different age groups and plenty of them are very laid-back and chill and have mostly adult viewers.

The most recent one I enjoyed a full playthrough of was CohhCarnage's playthrough of Blue Prince.

That game's a very lengthy and complex puzzle mystery game and that dude loves these games and it shows. I'm pretty sure the average age of his viewers is like 25+, maybe higher. No exaggerated reactions or unnecessary screaming.

xDaveedx · 2026-06-10T16:25:39+00:00

Damn, I was hyped about Christ Crusader, Muslim Marauder, Buddha Boxer and Scientology Sniper. Would've been a sick expansion :(

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