Hello all, and welcome to the second multiplayer blog of 2022! If you checked out Ross post last month, we took a break from all my techno babble to break down our various social features. Were now using a number of these changes in internal multiplayer testing. But youre not here for that - youre here for a progress update! Im pleased to say that were now making major progress in every avenue of multiplayer development. It was a very challenging process to migrate a large chunk of our backend features to be more self-owned, something I spoke about in our November update. Now that were through the major migration, weve been able to return to core game design and preparing multiplayer for our Community Testers. For this update I am going to speak directly to our status from what I discussed in December, and mention a few exciting game design tidbits.

Characters / Crafting

Weve finished all of our preliminary work here. Which means... we have multiplayer crafting!
Having crafting for our daily multiplayer testing has been a gamechanger for the multiplayer experience, and were starting to get a really clear vision of how Last Epoch is going to be played online together with friends. We have a lot more work here to do to ensure data integrity; that is, making sure all your characters and crafting endeavours can be saved and backed up safely, addressing any potential points of failure or game exploitation. This will be ongoing up and through our multiplayer betas and 1.0 release.

Deployment

While weve been working diligently on core multiplayer features, weve seen a natural increase to the complexity of the processes of creating and releasing Last Epoch builds. What does this mean? The automated system we use to build the game has become more complicated to maintain, as we now have two major clients (single player and multiplayer), as well as our game servers. We have the skills to address this all ourselves, and this is a normal part of game development, its something that will take a fraction of our attention to address whenever given issues come up. This will also become much easier once were only developing and releasing Last Epoch as an online game. With that said, were still hiring for more hands to manage the multiplayer release of Last Epoch!

Users / Game Access

Were still continuing to use our new account system internally, and we have determined that its current state will be shippable to our Community Testers when we get there. A full account migration of our now-large player base will be something we perform a bit later, closer to when we release a public multiplayer beta. Its a complex process and will require a very thorough plan to execute, so we are focused for now on delivering a testable multiplayer experience instead.

Chat

We actually have our new chat service nearly fully complete and ready to integrate into Last Epoch. This is quite exciting, as our issues with our current chat have been well known. Right now, because we have another single-player release looming, we cannot yet add it into our multiplayer environment as its a complicated process. We will have to wait until our 0.8.5 release to bring this into our internal multiplayer build, test and make fixes, and have it available for when we release multiplayer to Community Testers. This new chat wont be publicly available until we release a wider multiplayer beta.

Login / Game Server / Matchmaking

We are now ready for all of these to be tested at a larger scale, and are continuing to work at ensuring we remove as many risks to our games online stability as possible. This still remains one of the most important things we need to get right to give you all a high quality multiplayer release, so were going to always be making consistent progress here. Also, a gentle reminder that for us, Matchmaking is a more technical term that describes how you and your parties will request and receive servers, rather than some sort of party matchmaking system, which is not something we are developing at this time.

Goals for March

Our main goals for March are to ensure we are able to diagnose and debug core problems quickly, and add the last remaining game content to the multiplayer version of Last Epoch. Once we have these closed out, were going to have a pretty high confidence in releasing an alpha multiplayer version to our Community Testers, and other players soon after that.

Multiplayer Monolith

Developing the multiplayer version of the Monolith of Fate is a far larger undertaking than adding the campaign (which is already fully complete). Weve already fully designed and are executing our plan here, and this will be something I will share updates on in great detail in next months post. An exciting part of this plan is that were also going to be optimizing a number of parts about how our game loads, and overall performance, so were quite excited about this!

Diagnostics / Fixing multiplayer bugs fast

With our team size growing and with so many complex bugs and systems to have to be able to manage when we go online, its important we can read all of the information we receive quickly. Weve recognized a need to reduce the amount of noise we get in all of our logging, as well as start to mature our tools to give each of our teams the data theyll need to make good decisions. This may not sound glamorous, but its of vital importance for us to be able to diagnose problems as quickly as possible, so youre never waiting for a hotfix to a problem, or a game update.

Remaining Game Content

Outside of the Monolith, well be adding the remaining game content we dont have yet online. Were now happy to say we have enough support to be able to make progress on most of this at once. Were also nearing the finish line. Some of the main areas well target: updates to the technical aspects of channeled and shapeshifting abilities, cleaning up some other elements of the endgame such as the Arena group experience, and starting to plan out what our Leaderboard will look like on our new backend. There are a few other features that could be included here, but were starting to close it all out!

Final Thoughts

When contemplating the question when will multiplayer be released for testing? Ive learned to ask myself another question: What are we looking for with a public test? The answer to that is pretty simple. We want the experience to be mostly focused on players being able to give us feedback about Last Epochs online experience, rather than technical bugs. Our last pushes before releasing multiplayer to Community Testers will now be focused on that philosophy: when we reach a threshold that we feel well get consistent game design feedback to improve our games multiplayer experience, well release it. Ive started to build the plan with our lead network engineer to get us there. Next month well be excited to share with you some more status updates, a more technical breakdown of how the multiplayer monolith will work, as well as any reveals about our Community Testing plan if were ready. Thanks again for all of your patience and support, and like always Ill be hanging out in the comments sections to answer questions. See you next month!