Diablo Clone Last Epoch Gains Second Life After Sands of Majasa Update
The Sands of Majasa update (0.8.3) for Last Epoch, available in Early Access on Steam, has renewed interest in the Diablo-like production. The influx of new players in turn translated into increased popularity on Twitch.
Are you familiar with Last Epoch? It's a Kickstarter-funded hack'n'slash game that's been available in Early Access on Steam since April 30. Developers of the game, the independent studio Eleventh Hour Games, planned the release of version 1.0 for 2022 and it seems that they know what they are doing and will have no major problems with achieving the goal. Suffice it to say that the update titled Sands of Majasa (0.8.3), released on September 3, has renewed interest in the game. Over the past 24 hours Last Epoch was played by almost 6 thousand players at the same time (the record is a little over 7 thousand), and last weekend the Twitch streams were watched by almost twice as many people at the same time. Detailed stats are presented in the chart below.
Source: https://steamdb.info/app/899770/graphs.
What was so special about this update that it attracted so many players? First of all, the ninth chapter of the story campaign was added, with 15 unique zones and 30 types of opponents. There were also new skills, such as Multistrike, Javelin, Void Cleave, and many of the skils already present in the game got significant changes. In addition, the balance has been improved, numerous bugs have been eliminated, and controller handling has been polished. The full list of changes can be found here, and if you'd rather watch than read, you can watch the video below, in which all the new features were briefly discussed.
It's hard to predict how Last Epoch will cope in a market dominated by Path of Exile, Diablo 3 and Grim Dawn, especially since Diablo 2: Resurrected is about to be released, which will play on the sentiments of many fans of virtual entertainment, and, hopefully, Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2 are approaching. The interest of the community is undoubtedly there, so the developers have a lot to build on.
