Wolcen Hype Release!

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Nosferat wrote:

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.

Not dropping that much, max concurrent player was 125k during week-end and they capped it due to technical struggles, as steamdb owner said on twitter it was going much more higher than that.
Yesterday was about 86k considering we are in the middle of the week this is not a drop at this point.
Let's wait week-end before making such assumptions :)

Predicting that the player count is going to drop is about as fruitfull as saying there will be rain in the future.

Though i gotta say i dislike charans over-optimism and hype, sort of reminds me of his antics when he was initially invested in PoE.

It's so weird to shit on PoE while praising wolcen and then turning around a paragraph later being disgruntled about the solipsistic nature of PoE players framing wolcen poorly.

Both games fail and succeed depending on what your looking for and what your personal experience and desires are. Nothing wrong with either ones, though we can objectively say that wolcen is currently in the lift-off face when it comes to technical optimization so an upwards trend on that front is to be expected if they manage it propperly.

I think the critique of wolcen as a company overall is fine though, they did burn a lot of people already and behaved poorly overall.
Just thinking of the people that kickstarted umbra and are now getting wolcen...not sure how they feel about that move.

Peace,

-Boem-

I mean lets cut to the chase.

If you are comparing launches, starts, and game performance, Wolcen is better. Better art, better sound, better combat, better voice acting, more interest, and far far more players. Server issues happen, and I can guarantee they did not predict nearly 125k+ concurrent users. (For what's its worth my experience with offline was pretty much bug free)

It took PoE MANY years to develop this kind of momentum. The real test is sustainability. GGG has done an incredible job of building PoE, and their service to the game is pretty much unprecedented in the industry. I cant think of another comparison that would do the team justice. (Maybe Fornite?)

So let's see where it goes. There is a patch next week. I will be curious how the Devs handle "success"

^People seem to forget this game has had seven years in the making of hype.

I think what we currently see is a crunch of all that anticipation.

I would also argue they utilized the "promotion machine" a lot more heavily then GGG ever dreamed of in its initial push to success.
I think people rightfully claim PoE wouldn't be what it is today if D3 wasn't a "failure" for the arpg deep dive crowd.

I literally had to search between dozen of streamer video's to find a few that werent bought promotional add video's.

I don't even think the infrastructure was solid enough to do this when GGG launched at least not to the extend it currently can and with the current reach. It has bassicaly become an oiled machine in the last five years to funnel and directly "attack" players attention.

I don't particularly disagree but i find the false equivalence comparisons sort of weird as if you can control for a single factor and pretend everything else is static.(i know your not attempting to do that, but the polarized and binary positions in threads like this naturally boil down to that)

I think if they play their cards right we have another solid game to look forward too which highly likely will receive expansions in the future.
Alternatively they will go the online route and attempt a competitive "raid" like ranking system as far as i can tell.
Or a mixture of both those angles.

I like choice and competition so as a consumer im glad either way.

Peace,

-Boem-

^ I dunno.

It's sort of sounds like you are saying their excellent marketing and promotion was a negative (which is kinda weird unless I misunderstood the point)

The reality is comparisons were going to happen. The similarities of Wolcen, D3, and PoE slap you in the face. It's not unreasonable to make those leaps imo.

Again, Wolcen had the far better start. PoE has set the bar extremely high with their live sevice commitment.

Let's see what Wolcen does.

And I totally agree. Competition, choice, and variety are great for industry, and consumers. Pushing devs to stay on top of their game, normally leads to better products.

Game is so good that it's Reddit is >50% of "WoLcEn FaShIoN".

They simply promised way,waaaay more than they could ever hope to deliver. This game reminds me of no man's sky. It could be good,in about 2 or so years,with constant patches and fixes.

The fact that so many jumped on the hype train should be also quite worrying to GGG, unless POE 2 will be the mother of all hack&slash looters, a lot of people will flee to other games of this genre.

But the right game has to appear,wolcen does not even come close to be considered as a contender,as something that those who play diablo and poe would actually consider in the long run.

I mean the game devs themselves do not understand the passive tree and what the skills should do in the passive tree. No joke on that, they simply can not give any explanation as to why certain skills act the way they do,because they do not understand what the skill is supposed to do in the first place.

They bit way more than they could ever hope to chew, and it shows. They should have kept it clean and simple,and add stuff as the months go by, instead they went overboard,released a completely broken game that can in the best circumstance be considered as an alpha.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

^ I dunno.

It's sort of sounds like you are saying their excellent marketing and promotion was a negative (which is kinda weird unless I misunderstood the point)

The reality is comparisons were going to happen. The similarities of Wolcen, D3, and PoE slap you in the face. It's not unreasonable to make those leaps imo.

Again, Wolcen had the far better start. PoE has set the bar extremely high with their live sevice commitment.

Let's see what Wolcen does.

And I totally agree. Competition, choice, and variety are great for industry, and consumers. Pushing devs to stay on top of their game, normally leads to better products.

No i was pointing it out as a counterweight to your praise of their launch.

Different era, different developed tools for marketing etc

I think those are false comparisons similar to how people judge the past history by the standards of today.

I would be a lot more interested in how much both company's spend on PR and then comparing the results for example.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Boem wrote:

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DarthSki44 wrote:

^ I dunno.

It's sort of sounds like you are saying their excellent marketing and promotion was a negative (which is kinda weird unless I misunderstood the point)

The reality is comparisons were going to happen. The similarities of Wolcen, D3, and PoE slap you in the face. It's not unreasonable to make those leaps imo.

Again, Wolcen had the far better start. PoE has set the bar extremely high with their live sevice commitment.

Let's see what Wolcen does.

And I totally agree. Competition, choice, and variety are great for industry, and consumers. Pushing devs to stay on top of their game, normally leads to better products.

No i was pointing it out as a counterweight to your praise of their launch.

Different era, different developed tools for marketing etc

I think those are false comparisons similar to how people judge the past history by the standards of today.

I would be a lot more interested in how much both company's spend on PR and then comparing the results for example.

Peace,

-Boem-

To be fair, PoE still exists now, so I dont know how a "different era" applies (unless we are only talking about a singular launch event)

PoE league and expansion marketing & press tour hasnt produced results like Wolcen's launch. Perhaps GGG should grab some lessons here. Focus more on content creators & community, than article embargos with PC Gamer?

Idk this isnt my area of expertise, but I would imagine Chris and GGG were like "Really?" seeing the crazy numbers Wolcen was putting out on steam and twitch.

Again, perhaps this is fools gold, and a flash in the pan. Wolcen has to sustain to be on PoE's level, but I think there is no denying this was a good start (despite what you might read) overall.

Thats why i mentioned the 7 year run up to this launch. Your bassicaly crunching a lot of anticipation in this release event.

PoE's initial launch didn't have this anticipation level or build up, neither did it have this amount of visibility in the gaming community because of PR.

For example, how many people only became aware of PoE after the D3 failure and were totally oblivious to it's existence prior to this event.

As far as i recall they had one high profile streamer with market
relevance(kripp) advertising their platform, while wolcen has around 30 or so with similar or more viewcounts then kripp had at the time.

And the different era applies because you specifically stated "wolcens launch" so the comparison is with "poe's launch".

The real question will be if this is an elation spike as a result of the seven year build up or if its sustained relevance in the years to come.
It will be interesting to put the total participation counts next to one another in like five years time.

I agree with you that the launch was better then poe's launch as far as baseline numbers go, i simply think your comparing apples and oranges when doing that excercise.
I don't see a comparison thats viable at all when we consider context.

Peace,

-Boem-