Wolcen Hype Release!

^ I guess no point in dwelling on it further. We will just agree to disagree.

I didn't & dont feel forced or pressured or otherwise disenfranchised by Wolcen. I dont feel victimised by predatory salesmenship.

When I mention accuracy and fairness of the mechanics, I mean that perception is a problem. If the game allows you to stack block chance and block efficeny to 100% through gear, gems, and passives, that is an error in balance, not an exploit. If a skill modifier node provides damage per aliment, but the game doesnt cap the stacking, that is a mechanic balance issue, not an exploit. Hell even the tyranny node, with an obvious typo giving you up to 2000% damage, is doing what it says. It's not an exploit. It's way out of balance. (Like Minion builds in PoE. Not balanced, but certainly not an exploit)

Duping gold & items, crashes, disconnects, player & stash deletion, progression errors, etc...are highly problematic and deserve all the scrutiny in the world.

As far as your personal crusade to call out whatever practice and behavior you deem questionable, well good luck. I'm not sure what it accomplishes, maybe you feel good? A majority of people I suspect, just say meh, and move on. But you do you.

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Tsokushin wrote:

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Oh, the irony of a Tencent supporter sermonising on cash-grabs.

ANYWAY.

Deeply enjoying the tactical possibilities of Evasion. Kind of brilliant of them to make it dash in the opposite direction of the cursor. I've taken down much stronger enemies than I could merely facetank just by learning their attack patterns and using a mix of Evasion and the dodge-roll. Satisfying!

I'm chiming in here after playing about 60 hours of Wolcen.

If you are indeed Charan, I remember your post from way back that spoke along the lines of PoE failing in combat because it doesn't really scratch that itch in a one vs many type combat. I may be misremembering some details of the post, but I do remember walking away with that type of understanding of it, how combat feels against many targets in PoE compared to Wolcen.

And I can say that after Wolcen, I completely understand and agree with you 100%. Combat is just amazing in this game. The absolute highlight of the game for me. I myself am an Anvil of Woe man. It's very interesting coming up with your own impromptu combos like taking Pugilistic Momentum for the stun on basics, Intravenous Neural Cord for attack speed, and the Charge talent on Anvil of Woe.

The second highlight of the game though has got to be the game structure itself and the capacity for offline play. It's a liberating feeling when I can boot it up, and not have to worry about a single thing like busted mechanics, currency/hr, if I'm going to lose a character to a stutter on a $1600 machine or ping, or the RNG^RNG^RNG based loot/progression involved. I just can't stand the RNG treadmill for PoE, I think one of my first posts on this account was about the 6L system.

I'll split my post because I doubt everyone will agree with my next points.

And this is why I uninstalled PoE the day Wolcen came out. That and for some reason it kept crashing or disconnecting every second or third time I zoned. Because everything I wanted from PoE, Wolcen does. Everything I wanted from D3, Wolcen does. Does it do them better than either? No, and in some cases it does them worse, but it's sort of like a meal with just two of your favourite dishes done well versus two meals with just one of your favourite dishes done really well, but that one wedged between courses you can't stand. Ha, now you know it's me, because I just can't resist a food analogy when it comes to ARPGs. And yeah, the supremacy of aoe/ranged over single target/melee? Not even a thing in Wolcen, given every attack and skill has some form of logical, appropriate AoE. If anything, the opposite is the case, because the vast bulk of clearing mandates/expeditions is focussing down very durable big bads while managing adds. Several of my builds have come undone due to insufficient single target burst. Go figure!

The big shame of Wolcen right now is the meaty game play, the real 'gotta keep going' mode, is locked behind a clunky, unbalanced and in some cases outright broken story mode. As I noted earlier, I personally enjoyed the experience but I was one of the lucky ones -- few crashes, and no walls other than the difficulty jump of Chapter 2's boss. I had to help a friend of mine *edit his character's file* just to get past the last boss of Chapter 3. We neither of us like cheating, but when said boss goes invulnerable due to a bug, well...that's that, really. Awful thing is you can only do that offline, so we can't even play together yet. Which sucks because we're both local and that Australian server is awesome ping. Better even than PoE's.

And that meaty game play, Champion of Stormfall, is as difficult (and diverse) as Maps, if not harder, *from level 1*. I like to mule down a bunch of enneracts to give a new character a bit of a boost (and access to the more interesting forms of their chosen skill) but this is hardly potent tweaking. Especially for casting, which tapers off as you level due to poor scaling right now.

Anyway, glad you're enjoying! So much fun. And I agree about exiles. Reluctantly. This past week has been a real eye-opener.

edit: just so you know what passives not to touch right now, in case you have avoided the reddit (and who'd blame you?):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wolcen/comments/f5plgd/can_we_make_a_list_of_broken_skillspassives/

Most of them are either carry-overs from beta or rushed-out-the-door third wheel game-changers. I don't think it's large enough a list to declare the game 'broken', but it's definitely going to keep Wolcen Studio busy for the coming months, given they're looking at one patch a week right now.



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86,992 right now. That's a lot of people not refunding so far. Maybe they gave up and just decided to enjoy the game they were stuck with. Heh!

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I never did check the character slot limit online during beta, but right now it's 6. That's really disappointing. I smell mtxes...and before you get all uppity, Wolcen would hardly be the first buy-to-play with character slot mtxes. Even the sacred, untouchable Guild Wars 1, without which you wouldn't have some of PoE's biggest innovations as an ARPG, had them.

I defended GGG for years for their utterly terrible desync issues, so I can't shit too much on Wolcen. It would be hypocritical. But I'm definitely waiting for a couple of patches until I dive deep into the game. Probably until I get bored with PoE 3.10, so around 6-7 weeks from now. Godspeed devs.

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Xavderion wrote:

I defended GGG for years for their utterly terrible desync issues, so I can't shit too much on Wolcen. It would be hypocritical.

thing is there's nothing to "defend" to begin with unless you're willing to talk to walls here (poe loyalists that see every other arpg that's not poe a competition to find whatever flaws it has to start talking shit on them) I understand that a launch game can't be perfect but some of this people clearly are the typical twitch poe fanboy.

more arpgs out there = better.

"

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wolcen/comments/f5plgd/can_we_make_a_list_of_broken_skillspassives/

That's helpfull, already found out some of them myself but a list spares me some effort.
Ill check the link tomorrow and compare it with the passive system tomorrow so i have a mental map to avoid.
Not having a search function in the passive system is also quite unfortunate, its weird how people forget these basic things when being too deep into a project.

Probably going to start a CC+DoT caster tomorrow, my melee character is at 71 currently doing i think lvl 110+ content now. Game is fun so far and im wondering how high they will allow the enemy scaling to go.

Peace,

-Boem-

One of the biggest issues I have with this game, is I have zero faith in Wolcen Studios. I mean zero. Like, everything they do seems to be a red flag, or just grossly incompetent.

They come off as swindlers/dishonest, and as people who have no clue about their own game. Like, tons of bugs from EA made it into the game. They didnt fix any of it. They bricked their entire game for 40 hours, with a hotfix. They cant even patch their game. They are currently only patching their game once a week. There are people like my friend, whose game is just bricked from using an end-game mechanic, just hast to wait on his patch. They cant seem to prioritize anything. You got people playing offline whose characters are being deleted and they post stuff about fixing it later in the week. They take 40 hours to even get their servers back up, and continue to have issues.

They give excuses left and right about why the game is bad, but never their fault. They blame Gamestar for reviewing a bad copy, but it sounds like they got the exact copy we all got. They keep blaming their "partners" for their server issues. I'm pretty sure no one else is having those issues with that same "partner." They are now blaming their "partner" for only being able to patch the game once a week. They also even blame the popularity of the game for them cheaping out on servers. The game is so riddled with bugs, its almost like no one tested it at all.

I mean I could keep going and going. Price increases, complete lack of game Queues, or login Queues(something even D2 had 22 years ago), just poor everything.

Even if the core gameplay mechanic is sound(its basically non-set vanilla D3, even down to the itemization, which is good obviously), I dont have any faith they can ever get it working correctly.

I mean I had faith that GGG could make PoE decent, even while I was rubberbanding like I was on a bungee cord, while doing my 2 acts and Maelstrom of Chaos back in the day. Same goes for D3, which turned into a pretty good game even if the people here dont think so. But this company here seems lost. They actually seem completely lost. Like someone else made the game, handed it to them, and said release this. And thats what they did.

They are so many things that in the beta they were wrong and that in the official release they remained exactly the same, as if people had been testing in vain.
There are so many things that do not work as they should or simply do not work at all.
There are so many basic things badly done, like sometimes you must do up to 3 times click on an item for the game to respond and be able to sell the item to npc.
There are so many things that fail, that for me this is another No Man's Sky. Maybe in a couple of years it's a decent game, or maybe it's still crap.

It is even curious. Until 1 week ago I had the Beta installed on my PC and there it was, waiting to be played again at some leisure time. Now it is just another uninstalled game that I don't even keep a good memory. Just a fiasco.

"

thing is there's nothing to "defend" to begin with unless you're willing to talk to walls here (poe loyalists that see every other arpg that's not poe a competition to find whatever flaws it has to start talking shit on them) I understand that a launch game can't be perfect but some of this people clearly are the typical twitch poe fanboy.

Man, I hate this attitude. You don't like X because you like Y. It is arguably worse than the "you are just jealous" response.

Wolcen's level of quality in terms of aesthetics is almost unjustified. Almost.

So, there's a lot of voice-work in both the story mode and Champion of Stormfall. I don't think there's ever been an ARPG where the town npcs sass the player character quite this much. Even Mohabi gave me shit for trying to buy something I couldn't afford. So much for me being his 'friend'.

The credits state that all of the voice recording was done in London, and it's known that Heimlock's actor is an accomplished TV, film and game actor, Steven Hartley (such a distinct voice!). Valeria was voiced by the same actress who does Kerillian in Vermintide (stairs, mayflies. stairs) and the female inquisitor in Dragon Age. These two characters *are* the story, and bad or incompetent voice acting would have ruined it. Destiny aside, few games get to go back and fix bad voice acting. Voice changes are usually the result of logistics issues post-release.

Now, I know a bit about how much voice acting costs for games even in a dinky little place like New Zealand, and there's no way in hell Wolcen skimped here. Between that and the live orchestral score (roughly 13 hours of material recorded, about 3 used), there's a level of polish here that divides the buy to play from the free to play in terms of expectations. And sure, you can say that money could better have been put to testing/development on other fronts, but Wolcen sells itself on its shininess, visually and aurally. Keep in mind that Chris himself doubted many people would pay the usual indie ARPG price for PoE back in 2011/2012 (free to play was both a safe route and a risky one, depending how you look at it), so to ask $40-50USD (which at this point I consider the idiot tax; smart people got it when it was $10-20) you want to present at least a veneer of triple A trappings. Disastrous launches and early bugs people typically forgive if the underlying product is good, once the smoke clears. But a cheap-looking or sounding thing with a serious up-front price-tag? Not easy to sell.

And another thing: if you don't handle the aesthetics in your release, you'll probably never get back to doing them properly. Again, PoE is a major example of this. Y'all *still* don't have voice work for acts 5-10. You don't even have green text. Zone transitions are still solid white blocks. After years. Because GGG are left chasing their own tails on much more important matters, like juggling a ridiculously unstable metagame and making sure they can land 4 support-worthy leagues a year without the plane crashing on arrival...and, of course, selling as many associated support packs as possible.

So my hot take is that Wolcen Studios made the right call in investing in proper voice actors, a lot of incidental dialogue and events and a clearly high quality score. These bring both the story and its setting, Stormfall, to life, make them memorable. Everything else? They can fix that as they go. But you don't get a second chance to make a first impression aesthetically. Not even No Man's Sky did that -- the utterly catastrophic release was, aesthetically, not that different to what is very successful today -- and anyone saying otherwise about NMS' impressive recovery is just holding a grudge at this point.

But if you're wondering why non-Exiles recoil from PoE (and I doubt many of you do, or even realise they do), part of it is because it still, to this day, doesn't feel finished or confident in itself. It's a work in progress not just in terms of mechanics but also in terms of aesthetics. Voice actors get recast. Stories and lore get retconned. Animations are updated. The score is replaced. The entire endgame gets overhauled. Skills, passives and items are constantly being fucked with. Path of Exile is a classic Ship of Theseus, and people are right to hesitate in investing in that. Will it be the same game after years of this wholesale component replacement?

For all of its faults, Wolcen is not a Ship of Theseus. Moving forward from where it landed in a very damaged but functional state is a clear process not of replacing bits and pieces per the Ship of Theseus concept but of simply repairing what was meant to work but doesn't. And having a solid and consistent approach to aesthetics from the get-go goes a long way in subconsciously reassuring players that what they see and play now is roughly what they'll see and play years from now. Assuming they choose to, of course.

Like I thought,after the initial hype dies down, people will see the game for what it is. Huge potential,in a giant crapstorm of bugs,broken skills,items being deleted,items being completely broken,game crashes and devs not really understanding what a lot of the things do or are supposed to do in the game. Hence you get a ton of broken skills,broken builds,etc.
Imagine people defending it like "well don't play the broken skills then" as if THAT is normal, not that the game should be balanced or something, it's that you are at fault for seeing that there are dozens of abusable skills that were not implemented in the game correctly.

I did find the entire city upgrading stuff interesting,the idea behind it(reminds me of the old hideouts and how you unlocked them). I wonder if we could see something similar return to POE. Be it for hideout or something like upgrading the main place where you land. Like for instance upgrading some stuff in oriath shores, that will give you maybe a +5% to maps if you do certain upgrades or something like that.

The player rate for wolcen is dropping hard, from well over 100K playing peak,to 80K peak playing in just a couple of days. A week from now if that number will be at 50K peak it will be a pretty optimistic number I think.

The average number will drop down to 20K, as most of the streamers,most of the people who jumped on the hype train will have abandoned it.