WOLCEN - Lords of Mayhem

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Xavderion wrote:

Is it worth downloading now or should I wait for the "untechnical" beta? Seems it's very laggy for many people in Steam forum.

Stick with the original - the technical beta has stripped out most of the gameplay and graphics from the game - very dissapointing compared to what it was!

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鬼殺し wrote:

You clearly didn't read a word of what this phase of the beta is about.

I did - but after spending the afternoon downloading it I was annoyed that the game I'd happily spend hours testing out had been replaced by 'my first hack'n'slash' - why they couldn't include some actual content to keep people interested for more than an hour is beyond me.

My first "impulse buy" in quite a while. I had some money in my Steam wallet and I'm a sucker for customizable characters. It seemed inevitable, so I decided I might as well get in on it early, on the cheap cheap.

Now to wait patiently while it matures into a release version. I got enough on my hands.

i got to have more of this game. they actually know how do to melee combat properly. I can dash in, I can move forward while attacking, I can cut animations to cancel and dodge out if things go wrong, the targeting actually fucking works, etc.

I am happy. I am in a great space mentally. If a telemarketer calls i am will be buying the shit, etc.


Spent hours in the alpha, took a break and came back for the beta, and now i am waiting for more stuff.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Im just glad its not f2p because Id support the shit out of it.

I'm glad it's not F2P because I've seen the ways it can affect a game's design, almost exclusively for the worse. While you're referring to the "temptation" for the players, I'm referring to the same for the developers.

e.g.
- Decision A would make the game better
- Decision B would make us more money
- *goes with B*

Make a good game and I'll buy it. Make a good expansion for an already good game, and I'll probably buy that too. I just don't have the heart anymore, to see potentially great games ruined by the pressures of the F2P model.


I know this isn't the place for a long-winded discussion about F2P (and I realize it wasn't your intention), I just wanted to get that out of my chest. Sorry everyone.

Unfortunately time has proven that to go buy once to play is fighting uphill to make it, and had it been free to play it would have gotten a much larger audience and more money for funding the game because of f2p nature of attracting larger audiences.

It's true, often f2p relies on abusing psychology to get the most out of people, but f2p is many times more competitive, it expands faster and becomes more popular(a requirement to take games to the highest level - cultural momentum, funding, confidence and even belief).

The reason f2p is more competitive and attracts larger audiences is because it is much easier to get people to give it a chance. For many games including the likes of HoN vs LoL, we've seen that the ones who were first free to play ended up completely dominating the market.

I personally believe the best system works out something like this:
Free to play at least a good chunk of the game, maybe even most of the game, then to get full access you buy 1 time purchase. With this 1 time purchase you can keep playing will never be forced to pay again(unless expansions etc). This should be supported by ingame shop only for cosmetic items or small advantages, nothing in-combat BiS for sure, because one time purchase isn't enough to afford development unless you are one of the biggest games out there and even then it is hardly enough to fund top level development on a larger scale, including cinematics etc.

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鬼殺し wrote:

you have a funny idea of long-winded...

Or maybe I have a funny idea of brief.

PoE resisted a lot of bad game design choices regarding f2p. A heroic amount, really. But once you see some of them, you can't go back to the not-seeing-them days.

Hah! I guess you haven't seen my pages and pages of page-long posts under some hot topics like "trade" and "pay-to-win". Nah, I just meant that even if nobody gave a fuck about my little off-topic rant enough to turn it into a discussion, I'd be okay with it.

And while I believe what you said about PoE (I wasn't referring to it specifically), I remember me saying something along the lines of:

"F2P has the potential to turn even the most starry-eyed enthusiast into a min-maxing accountant; the temptation to cash-grab is simply too great."

In other words, it's a F2P problem, not a PoE problem. Like I said, I just can't bear to see any more potential squandered in this way, so I avoid new F2P games like the plague. PoE is very likely to be my last.

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Crackmonster wrote:

I personally believe the best system works out something like this:
Free to play at least a good chunk of the game, maybe even most of the game, then to get full access you buy 1 time purchase. With this 1 time purchase you can keep playing will never be forced to pay again(unless expansions etc). This should be supported by ingame shop only for cosmetic items or small advantages, nothing in-combat BiS for sure, because one time purchase isn't enough to afford development unless you are one of the biggest games out there and even then it is hardly enough to fund top level development on a larger scale, including cinematics etc.

It sounds like you're in favor of both beefy demos and open-ended development. I'm a big fan of the former, but not so much of the latter -- I prefer making one or two payments and getting access to the whole, finished game; whatever that "whole" may be.

Even when some developers make a bazillion "micro DLCs" out of things that should have been in a "complete" game (presumably to see how much bullshit they can get away with), you can wait for the "Complete Edition" and buy that instead. If it's too expensive for one complete game, you can wait for a sale. In short, there are fail-safes.

For customers with my mindset, there is no way to "win" in open-ended development, because in most cases there's no definitive "finished product" to begin with.


Btw, what you described in the quote is pretty much like PoE, if PoE had a fixed entry fee on top of microtransactions. Do you think that kind of system would work? Wouldn't that go against the biggest "lure" of F2P?