Path of Exile 2 backlash gives Last Epoch a 150,000-player boost as the competing action RPG launches a major update

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As one action RPG stumbles, another accelerates past it.

The 0.2.0 update for Path of Exile 2 has not been well-received, to put it lightly. A heavy hand on the nerf hammer has driven away a significant chunk of those players who like action RPGs for the monster-blasting action, revealing a core tension at the heart of Path of Exile 2's design, as Russell Adderson put it.

Eleventh Hour Games, the studio behind competing action RPG Last Epoch, accidentally put itself in the perfect position to benefit—like Jon Lovitz lurking behind the curtain off-stage in The Wedding Singer. It delayed Last Epoch's Season 2 update, Tombs of the Erased, to avoid being overshadowed and instead launched at the perfect time to pick up a bunch of disaffected Path of Exile 2 players.

"We've recently learned that our friends in the ARPG space have chosen a release date just a couple days after ours which would divide the player base and hinder the success of our Season 2 launch", as game director Judd "Moxx" Cobbler announced on the Last Epoch forum, explaining that Tombs of the Erased would instead launch on April 17.

As SteamDB shows, it worked. Last Epoch went from a few thousand concurrent players to 150,198 when Season 2 started, and is currently number 6 in Steam's top 10 most-played games, right between Bongo Cat and Baldur's Gate 3.

Tombs of the Erased is a significant update for Last Epoch, representing "over 100 pages internally of patch notes". The sentinel class has been completely reworked and the rogue marksman given a new skill, six new endgame crafting methods added, and the titular Tombs of the Erased are new side zones that apparently form "the foundation for interacting with our new endgame systems".

It's a hefty addition and revision, and players are already celebrating its success by meming on Path of Exile 2. Still, I can't help but think it's a bit of a devil's bargain to trade one constantly updating live-service action RPG for another—especially when Grim Dawn is right there.

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Jody Macgregor
Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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