Last Epoch is the not-Diablo game every generation must have

polygon.com:

It is written that whenever Blizzard releases a Diablo game, players will get annoyed with it — it’s too dark, or not dark enough, or too grindy, or not grindy enough, or the loot is no good, or it doesn’t work, or its business model is suspect. It’s also written that a challenger shall arise, a game from a scrappy independent developer that looks like Diablo and plays like Diablo, but is pure of heart and shall deliver to all those frustrated Diablo players exactly what they wanted but Blizzard refused to give them.

Right now, that game is Last Epoch from all-remote global indie studio Eleventh Hour Games. Last Epoch came out on Feb. 21 and has been doing very well on Steam, where it’s sitting comfortably inside the top 10 most-played games at the time of this writing. As can be seen on Reddit and elsewhere, many players can’t help but compare Last Epoch to Diablo 4. Many Diablo fans are treating it as a refuge from a troubled period for Blizzard’s latestthat included a disastrous reception for its first season and a generally underwhelming response to what has followed.

However, it’s important to note that Last Epoch has been in development for a long time. Its first free playable demo was released back in 2018 alongside a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. In that sense, it can’t exactly be framed as a reaction to Diablo 4, which wasn’t revealed until late 2019 or released until June 2023. For its developers at Eleventh Hour, Last Epoch is presumably a pure expression of what they want this specific kind of action role-playing game to be.

We’ve been here before. Diablo 3 had a very tough first year, the launch in 2012 overshadowed by login issues, a wildly unpopular real-money auction house, and a flamboyant art style that many fans felt betrayed the grimdark stylings of Diablo 2. Some of the game design was controversial, too. Character classes had no skill trees, and players were given complete freedom to swap around their skills and skill-altering affixes,