Last Epoch
About the game
Last Epoch is a loot-and-build ARPG from Eleventh Hour Games, a studio that grew out of a Kickstarter and spent five years in Early Access before its 1.0 launch in February 2024. It drops you into Eterra, a world laced with time travel: you leap between eras to face dark empires, wrathful gods and the corruption of the Void. The campaign carries you across those eras, and the time-jumping isn't just narrative dressing — it's part of how the game frames its zones, its enemies and its endgame.
What sets it apart lives in character building. There are five base classes that specialize into fifteen masteries, over a hundred skill trees that reshape each ability until it's unrecognizable, and a deterministic crafting system: instead of praying to RNG, you shape the item you already have and know exactly what you're upgrading. That blend of freedom and control is its signature, and the reason it routinely gets named alongside Diablo and Path of Exile without feeling like a knockoff.
How the endgame plays
Once the campaign is done, the real game begins in the Monolith of Fate: scaling timelines you run again and again to farm loot, push corruption and chase unique bosses, plus a handful of dungeons with their own mechanics. It's built to be ground a thousand times without feeling like a punishment. Around it sits co-op multiplayer, clans and a trade system that coexists with a self-found alternative for players who'd rather not lean on the market. It's as welcoming to newcomers —clear tutorials, cheap respecs, low friction— as it is deep for veterans squeezing every last point of damage out of a build.
What you pay for and what you don't
Last Epoch is buy-to-play: you pay once —around USD 35 on Steam— and that gets you all of the game content, no fee or subscription. Ongoing development is funded by purely cosmetic microtransactions (skins, pets, portals), an explicit studio choice to keep the game free of pay-to-win. The first big expansion, Orobyss, arrives free for existing owners; the only paid extra alongside it will be its new Paradox classes, sold as DLC. In short: you pay the entry fee once, and anything else that costs money is optional and cosmetic.
Where the game stands
The game has been live since 1.0 and now runs on a seasonal cadence, each season bringing a new mechanic, fresh itemization and class tuning that renews the reason to roll a character. It has passed 3 million copies sold, and in 2025 the studio was acquired by Krafton for around USD 96 million, staying on as an independent subsidiary that keeps creative control. Console versions (PS5 and Xbox Series) are on the roadmap but still without a firm date. It's worth saying plainly: the PC population has dropped considerably from its all-time peak, so outside each season launch you'll find fewer people in public zones and in trade.
Who it's for (and who it isn't)
If you love theorycrafting builds, experimenting without fear of ruining a character, and chasing loot with a system that respects your time, Last Epoch is among the most generous games in the genre: it lets you try weird ideas and actually make them work. If instead you want an ARPG with a massive population and an always-hot economy, or you expect a blockbuster-tier campaign, you'll feel its limits today — the world feels most alive at the start of each season rather than mid-cycle. It's a game made by people who clearly love the genre, with a clean business model and a solid foundation; jumping in when a season launches is almost always the best way to experience it.