Last Epoch vs. Diablo IV: Unleashing the Battle of RPG Titans
On February 21, after about 7 years of development and almost 6 years of being in the early access stage of the Steam platform, a very promising action RPG called Last Epoch was released.
Immediately after its release, many began to call this game the one that would erase Diablo IV from memory forever, but is that so? This is what we will talk about in this article.
Buildings and equipment
One of the main advantages of Last Epoch is, of course, the role-playing system and the variety and flexibility in constructing builds. If you want to level up your character fast you need to farm gold. It is the main in-game currency. Gamers often buy last epoch gold to level up quickly and not to waste time on farming. The service is available in big boosting companies like Skycoach, where players can also order leveling up, completing different events and activities, and coaching. Diablo 4 also has such an opportunity.
The classes in the game are all familiar – warrior, mage, assassin, barbarian, and necromancer. But this is just the basis for your hero. After a certain time, the opportunity to choose an additional specialization opens up, and more interesting things begin there. For example, an assassin could become a blade dancer, focus entirely on archery, or learn to summon a faithful falcon, as well as use traps, bombs, and other traps. Each of them is naturally supported by many active and passive skills. Among them, there is all this +2% to critical damage for each skill point, but most still give more visible changes. And even within the same subclass, there are opposed development options – for example, you can pump up your attacks more in melee or, conversely, in ranged combat.
In Diablo IV, we also chose a girl with blades and a bow, who, naturally, also has access to different development options, but all specializations open one after another gradually and, in general, seem a little more traditional and a little less variable. After reaching level 15, each class in the Blizzard game has the opportunity to learn an additional specialization, but this, as a rule, only gives one effect – for example, a druid will be able to summon animal spirits.
The situation with active skills is even more indicative. Diablo IV and Last Epoch can be upgraded, but at Blizzard, these improvements are meager and mainly come down to enhancing the effect – the skill can be enhanced, basic, fundamental, and so on. And in the brainchild of Eleventh Hour Games, each skill has a huge, in the spirit of PoE (but more understandable), tree of auxiliary upgrades, which can be opposed. For example, an assassin’s dash skill can be upgraded to a melee weapon, so that when used you can deal an additional blow, or so that the skill can simultaneously restore health and throw shurikens at enemies. In this way, you can upgrade up to five active skills in depth. The equipment works in unison with this. Many types of equipment have bonuses to certain active skills, to the restoration of health or mana. And besides, they can open up new possibilities – for example, enhance the effect of using healing potions or increase their maximum.
Diablo has some unique items that make you more powerful. However, equipment in Diablo IV, as a rule, does not enhance individual skills. The last Epoch again looks more flexible. Even within the same specialization, we can quickly change not just equipment, but, in principle, the fighting style itself. Equipment can be improved by inserting shards into it, which give bonuses and modifiers (affixes), or even randomly changing them to others. True, each item has a limit for such upgrades. What’s important is that you can improve it directly in your inventory, and not in a forge located in an unknown location.
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MMO elements
One of the main complaints about Diablo IV is that the game has devolved into an MMORPG with all these daily quests and PvP zones. Last Epoch again wins from this point of view – there is only co-op here, and even then limited in places. Maybe because of all of these facts, Last Epoch has 76 points on Metacritic. In general, the overall impressions of the creation of Eleventh Hour Games are positive. The process of shredding monsters is dynamic and convenient – you pass through enemies like a knife through butter, reveling in how famously you can juggle skills without losing rhythm. The only thing missing is stable server operation and an ideal interface – in the heat of a fight, the cursor often lands on loot and the screen is covered with item descriptions. There is, of course, a loot filter, but it only partially helps. It’s about the same thing when forging things – the description of the properties of the fragments interferes with normal visibility in the interface of the portable forge.
Diablo IV doesn’t have these problems. But for some reason, the ability to pick up loot with the press of one button, so as not to poke at each item separately, is neither here nor there. However, even in the recent Chinese diabloid Tales of Spark, this function is present. What’s also really missing is the ability to pin weapon tabs and switch between them.
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Summary
One of the advantages in favor of Last Epoch is its dynamic and convenient gameplay; flexible and varied building construction; a huge number of opportunities in equipment management; advanced endgame; and interesting co-op. The downside is the weak story campaign, which lacks complexity; The interface is not entirely user-friendly. At the start, we can say with confidence that Last Epoch already looks preferable to Diablo, but what will happen next remains to be seen.
