Last Epoch lays out plans for a big patch this week and new end-game content later

Having launched out of almost five years of early access last week and quickly become one of Steam's current most-played games, fantasy action-RPG Last Epoch has laid out initial plans for post-1.0. Expect bug fixes and quality-of-live improvements soon, then new challenging fights later. The developers, Eleventh Hour Games say they're "going to have a heavy emphasis on expanding end-game content". But first, yes, more fixes and improvements to the servers which suffered and stumbled.

Eleventh Hour have already released two wee hotfixes since v1.0, and say in the latest dev blogblast that they hope to release a "good-sized" patch with bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements this week. They plan to continue weekly patches, along with any hotfixes as needed. Bigger stuff will come with Patch 1.1.

They say the "most important part is focusing on and committing time to act on player feedback", and they're also working on that end-game jazz. "For future patches we have plans to expand the monolith, bring great new itemization options, add more boss content, class and balance updates, campaign content, etc," they explain. "For 1.1 specifically we'll be focusing on bringing some 'pinnacle' content, or very hard fights that will give you challenges to aspire to." More specifics on on v1.1 will follow.

As I write, Last Epoch is #7 on Steam's ranking of games by concurrent player count, sitting just above Helldivers 2. Good company. It passed 265,000 players in-game at the same time this weekend, which they say is "the #39 highest concurrent user count recorded on Steam". This was a huge jump from its usual early access numbers, and over six times its early access peak. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in a few server wobbles.

Eleventh Hour say the game experienced "some unanticipated bottlenecks in our backend architecture" but they have "made improvements each day in the backend infrastructure to support the demand" and seen improvements. They warn that players may still see "shorter periods of downtime" as they roll out updates, and they're planning further improvements. Once things are in better shape, they want to tell the public more specifics of why things went wonky at launch. Knowing exactly what happened does often seem to sooth nerves.

In our Last Epoch review last week, Alice Bee said it "is a worthy mid-point ARPG that has fun with its fantasy time travelling world, and makes crafting and building towards percentage point increases actually rewarding. Even fun!"