Last Epoch has its date. Season 5, named Rage of the Frostborn, opens on Thursday, October 1, 2026. Eleventh Hour Games announced it in the July edition of its monthly newsletter, alongside a teaser lasting a handful of seconds.
The news matters beyond the regulars. This season slots between Diablo 4’s season 15 and the 1.0 release of Path of Exile 2, expected in December. For anyone playing all three, the quarter is filling up.
A teaser that says almost nothing
A few seconds of footage, no more. You hear a plainly furious voice, you see an axe formed of blood and ice. Nothing on mechanics, nothing on classes, nothing on the endgame.
The July newsletter also carried a build spotlight and a new column devoted to pets. The next issue lands in September, roughly three weeks before release.
Maxroll, which follows the game closely, puts it bluntly. Beyond a name, a date and a visual mood, the teaser hands over nothing usable.
Six months between seasons, and it grates
Season 4 started on March 26. Six months therefore separate the two launches, where Diablo 4 runs on roughly three months and Path of Exile 2 works in shorter cycles.
The response under the teaser was cold, and that is putting it kindly. Massively Overpowered reports general weariness in the comments, on Twitter as on Reddit. One jab captures the mood, pointing at the irony of an ice-themed season for a game moving at a glacial pace.
The complaint deserves some nuance. A long cycle allows for meatier seasons, and a share of players prefers that pace to a permanent race. The criticism targets the silence filling the wait more than the wait itself.
What Last Epoch’s season 4 left behind
Shattered Omens, out in late March, brought genuine additions. Omen Windows, Echo Chains, Idol Altars, Corrupted items, new Rogue skills, and a pinnacle boss called Vision of the Observer, reachable from 400 Corruption upwards.
The studio published its numbers in July. Players shattered 17.4 million Omens over the season. On classes, the Sentinel leads with 30% of characters, while the Primalist trails at 11%.
One figure was missing from the official roundup, and it stings. After peaking above 250,000 concurrent players on Steam in February 2024, then bouncing back to 150,000 in 2025, the game now runs under 2,000 players at peak. Those wide swings come with the seasonal model, as the outlet that dug them up points out. A seasonal game lives in waves, and this wave sits at its lowest right before the next one.
A studio acquired, an expansion at the end of the road
Eleventh Hour Games now belongs to Krafton, the Korean publisher behind PUBG, which bought the studio in 2025. The team spent its summer on two parallel projects, season 5 and the expansion called Last Epoch: Orobyss.
That puts the calendar back in context. Season 5 is not an end in itself, it serves as the last step before a full expansion. Both 2026 seasons were framed from the start as the road toward that launch.
Where it lands in the quarter
For an action RPG player, autumn is taking shape. Diablo 4’s season 15 owns the back-to-school stretch, Last Epoch takes October 1, and Path of Exile 2 moves toward its 1.0 expected in December.
That October 1 slot makes sense. It gives Diablo 4’s return room to breathe and wraps up before Grinding Gear Games sweeps the genre’s attention away. Six months of waiting still leave Eleventh Hour Games in an awkward spot, the studio that has to win back players who went elsewhere.
Content details land in September, with the next newsletter. Until then, there is a date and an ice axe. August belongs to gamescom 2026 anyway, which opens next week and will take up all the room.
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