Multiplayer Progress Update

Hello all, Happy Holidays and welcome to the December Multiplayer update!

It’s been a fun month for us with our release of patch 0.8.4, Eternal Legends, and some developers taking some holiday time off to spend time with friends and loved ones before we dive in head first into getting Multiplayer into players’ hands in 2022.

We have quite a lot going on in our Multiplayer development and I’d like to break down some updates for the topics from last month, as well as talk about what is ahead of us in the next month.

Our feature list from last month:

Party / Friends / Gameplay

We’re making continued progress polishing core gameplay and making sure the player experience feels great. There are a lot of decisions our team has made for the player experience for the single-player game that manifest themselves in very tiny ways, like how small details of a UI works or how group quests and party UIs will function. Our UX Director Ross (who designed our new website - PS we’re hiring!) will be a large part of our Multiplayer update next month to talk more about how we’ll realize player experience and UI when we go online.

We are making other progress here that is chiefly focused on fixing bugs, and most importantly reducing CPU costs for both our game servers, and your gameplay experience.

Characters

We’ve completed the initial stages of migrating our character save system to the more robust service mentioned last month. This coming month we’ll be digging into the fine details, such as ensuring our crafting and stash systems are as reliable as possible. This will involve things such as breaking down how often we save characters and world states, how to protect the integrity of characters, how to prevent items from disappearing or being duplicated, and much more. We want to catch as much of the easy-to-find issues here before we even release it to Community Testers, and make sure we can fix these kind of problems faster than anything else.

Deployment

Since our current deployment environment is fairly efficient, and we’ve had other priorities, we didn’t place a huge emphasis on work here this month. We spent a bit of time targeting the specific improvements we need and we’re set to do some technical planning for this in January.

Users / Game Access

Last month we mentioned we were migrating our account system, and we have it functional internally now. We aren’t quite ready to roll it out to the public. The next month is focused on integrating this system with our website, and making sure we have the ability to observe important details that will allow us to fix account problems quickly when we see them. Unfortunately a number of players have run into login issues recently with our old system that’s currently live, and you can see why we’re eager to finish our work here to make sure nobody experiences this issue again, or we can create better fixes faster.

Chat

We’ve made massive progress here. We are happy with our new chat system and it will almost certainly be the one we release to 1.0. My update here is very “boring”, software development-related stuff; we are making a few minor refactors, and then planning a proper integration into our new backend systems. With this new chat system, we’re going to able to add a ton more moderation and Quality of Life features than ever before.

Login / Game Server / Matchmaking

We mentioned last month that we have successfully implemented our matchmaker. And even better news is that we’ve tested its scalability up to ~1million concurrent users making matchmaking requests!

A new challenge ahead of us now is to build out more automated scale testing to try to ensure we’re also going to see those numbers in the game client itself; this tech will help us with every release we do and is something the other big Action RPGs give a lot of attention to.

Goals for January

Our main goals for January are very broad, but I can summarize some of my thoughts here:

Planning for Community Testing

Focus on all of the elements we need from every part of both the game, and the platform we are building, to ensure that we can best make use of Community Tester feedback for multiplayer. This means a large focus on our ability to observe the health of the online game, as well as our ability to quickly fix any problems we find. This also implies a lot of other things: fixing bugs, having 24/7 support where possible, planning for how to suddenly increase our multiplayer playerbase by a large amount, and more.

Growing the Multiplayer Team

We’re growing our team to build Last Epoch Multiplayer, and as one might guess it’s important to plan how to do that so we don’t slow down our ability to create work on the game.

Becoming “Production Ready"

This is very much tied to planning for Community Testing but it’s worth breaking out on its own. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, a lot goes into making sure we’re a game company that can provide a great game service as well as a great game for years to come. We’re making sure we continue to put a lot of attention and love into building the departments we don’t already have that will help make this happen.

Monolith/Crafting Ready

Some of our final core systems to fully implement are our Monolith and Crafting systems. Our crafting system is heavily reliant on a lot of complex database work and character saving, so there will be a lot of debugging to perform here. The Monolith of Fate is relatively straightforward to implement at its baseline, but there will be a lot of multiplayer considerations we need to address before we release it to Community Testers.

Final Thoughts

While we’re hard at work on getting multiplayer ready next month, we’ll change up this blog post a bit to allow our UX Director Ross to speak more to some of the ways we’re going to be improving Last Epoch to welcome a fully multiplayer experience.

Happy Holidays and New Years to everybody, it’s been an exciting year for Last Epoch and Eleventh Hour Games and 2022 will be our biggest year yet.

Like always, I’ll be around to answer questions below. Thank you so much for reading, and see you next month!