If like me, you’re not really into Diablo 4 anymore, Last Epoch is the bridge between Diablo and Path of Exile you may have been looking for.
However, the game has suffered days and days of server issues with many players unable to play at all, unless they went fully offline, which is mercifully at least an option Last Epoch has. But these connection problems have resulted in a flood of negative reviews making recent ones “mixed” on Steam, even if it’s still 73% “most positive” overall.
However, the worst may be behind the game at this point. I am currently watching the game break its concurrent playercount record every few minutes here. On Steam it’s at 227,231 and climbing, and will no doubt be higher than that by the time I finish this article.
Those numbers are so good it’s now rapidly approaching the last two surprise hits on Steam. Helldivers 2 currently has 292,536 players, and Palworld has 328,884. It does not seem like Last Epoch will get near either’s all-time peaks of 450K and 2.1M, of course, but this is extremely solid performance for a relatively small game, just like those two. Meanwhile, this comes in the wake of giant AAA failures like Skull and Bones and Suicide Squad, the latter of which has 816 players at the time of this writing.
Last Epoch is launching somewhat outside the traditional review model, similar to how Helldivers 2 and Palworld blew up, and then reviews started to trickle in for each. Compared to the hundreds of review for a major game, Last Epoch only has 14 in for a solid enough score of 75. Now that more people can play, including reviewers, perhaps that will begin to climb.
Diablo 4 sold well and reviewed well, but shifting into live mode it has become laden with awkwardly short seasonal content and insanely pricey microtransactions. Last Epoch, though also with an in-game shop, feels different enough to be worth transitioning over for a spell, which is what I’m currently doing now that it actually works after I bought it three days ago.
It does not seem all that likely that Last Epoch is explosive enough to reach Helldivers or Palworld status, but that’s an unfairly high bar and the numbers it is putting up are incredibly good in their own right. It’s absolutely a game to keep an eye on, and one that ARPG fans should all check out, especially at half price of recent AAA $70 games.
Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Read the full article here
