Diablo challenger Last Epoch dips to Mixed reviews amid strained servers, but its founder thanks fans for "patience and kindness" anyway

Last Epoch was enjoying a hugely successful 1.0 launch earlier this week with over 162,000 concurrent players and favorable comparisons to Diablo's hack 'n' slashing. All that success has unfortunately strained servers and caused multiplayer issues for those not playing offline, leading to some mixed user reviews, but the studio's founder has thanked the hundreds of thousands of fans for their "patience and kindness" anyway.

Eleventh Hour Games is a relatively smaller team, so its founder Judd Cobler has jumped onto social media to explain the situation behind the development curtain. "I want to thank all of you who showed us some patience and kindness in our first big release," he says. "Even though we felt we were prepared and came in with a high level of confidence - even feeling that we overprepared - we were shown that in a real-world situation things can go wrong that just simply do not in simulated scale testing," Cobler explains.

Cobler also mentions that 150,000 people logged in within the game's first 20 minutes of launch - something that both excited and scared the team as the wave of players put servers to the test. "And unfortunately a service failed in a way that we didn't expect," the developer continued. 

While Last Epoch's all-time user reviews still sit at an impressive "Mostly Positive" rating, recent reviews on Steam have dipped below "Mixed" with some fans blasting the multiplayer issues infecting the game since launch. Cobler is looking to turn that tide again with a hotfix coming soon and a development team currently working in the "war room" - AKA a Zoom meeting filled with software wizards. "We are excited as heck that we have built a community of this size that we get to create content for, for years to come," Cobler continues.

Meanwhile, Diablo 4 players are less than happy with its latest $30 microtransactions.