Tired Of ‘Diablo 4’? Definitely Play ‘Last Epoch’ Instead

The Diablo 4 live service seasonal cycle is…fine, I guess. These days it revolves around a short seasonal storyline, grinding 1-2 newly introduced activities with some unique build options, and figuring out how deep into the endgame you care to get. This season, that hasn’t been very far for me.

I have no doubt that Diablo 4 will live on for a long while, and I will be back in full force for its big expansion this year, but until then, I have been introduced to Last Epoch, the new ARPG channeling aspects of the more casual-focused Diablo and hardcore-focused Path of Exile, striking a middleground between them.

This wasn’t really on my radar until a bunch of readers suggested I play it instead of Suicide Squad, which I’ve now been doing. I’m enjoying it a lot, with the exception being the game suffering from massive server and connectivity issues since launch last week. They got so bad I’ve had to often abandon my online character and play an offline one instead in a different realm. But hey, at least that option exists in the first place.

Sure, part of the appeal of Last Epoch is just that it’s a new, competent ARPG, where Diablo and PoE content may have long gotten stale for many players. The storyline is whatever, but I do enjoy the idea of time skipping around through different eras of different locations, that bit is fun.

But of course the appeal is going through leveling different classes and subclasses, and one significant difference from Diablo 4 is that there is a good amount of commitment required to a class and build. It doesn’t hard lock you in to all that much, but there is definitely a weight to it.

You are eventually told to pick one of three subclasses, and that you have to commit to for the long haul, making it possible to run at least three wholly distinct versions of all five classes, plus whatever builds you can make within those subclasses.

The game also has a Skyrim-ish system where you can level up individual skills the more you use them when you designate that your build “specializes” in them, upgrading a ton of their functionality in a way that might only be reserved for legendary affixes in Diablo. But here, it is very cool that each and every skill has a skill tree you can build out, but to change your build and those focused skills, you do have to set yourself back a bit and re-grind what you lost if you want to respec. But it’s not overly oppressive and I think it works well. At least so far.

As for gear, I am not deep enough into the game yet to really go nuts with full-on endgame builds and such. I’m only just really starting to get into the vibe of crafting and upgrading your gear in the game’s Forge, which looks like a deep system that will take some time to master, but again, is more involved than Diablo 4’s re-rolls.

What’s clear is that this is a solid entry in the ARPG genre, and it really is doing quite well on Steam, peaking at a quarter million concurrent players just a few days after launch, and it may surge higher than that if server issues continue to lessen. I’ll be playing it for a while, that much has become clear to me.

Follow me on Twitter, Threads, YouTube, and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.