Wolcen Hype Release!

Well, there's no way of getting around this one. The new/possibly always intended sound for Slayer's Flurry is hilarious. If they were going for 'lots of slashes in rapid succession', they failed. But if they were going for 'oh, so that's what turbo-fapping sounds like', then it's an absolute success.

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The_Scourge wrote:

Well, there's no way of getting around this one. The new/possibly always intended sound for Slayer's Flurry is hilarious. If they were going for 'lots of slashes in rapid succession', they failed. But if they were going for 'oh, so that's what turbo-fapping sounds like', then it's an absolute success.

I've been running Slayer's on my main char for the past week. I thought pretty much the same thing you did when I heard the changed sound heh, and I thought it was perfectly fine before. At least it's amusing in its own way. Not as bad as the frozen shatter sound in PoE being changed to a wet noodle slap anyway.

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Twitch_Kopogero wrote:

I still can gain something more than just some self satisfactory pleasure for beating the game when I can get something that someone else wants which is a higher ranked spot.

Rank #0 is exclusively reserved for you. Nowhere to go but sideways, and no one to stand in your way.

I was thinking more Huntsman Spider, but I'm Australian. We're always thinking Hunstman Spider.

____

As for the dropping player count, I don't see it as a failure. I see it as an approach to normal figures. 127k for a game like Wolcen is ridiculous. It's not free to play, it's not built to be streamed, and its multiplayer is rudimentary at best.

So how can we see what's 'normal' for a game like this? Easy, we look at its only real competitor and parallel: Grim Dawn. Has online, but also has offline. Is indie. Is buy to play. Is almost certainly steam exclusive.

Therefore, steamcharts comparisons between the two is somewhat legit, certainly more so than using steamcharts for PoE analysis.

Here we go.

Wolcen
https://steamcharts.com/app/424370#All
24,019 playing 38 min ago
45,082 24-hour peak
127,542 all-time peak

Grim Dawn
https://steamcharts.com/app/219990#All
5,700 playing 42 min ago
11,505 24-hour peak
61,093 all-time peak

This shows you just how tough buy to play ARPGs have it. Grim Dawn is a BETTER GAME than Wolcen. By far. I don't find it as fun to play, but by all accounts it's a perfectly functional, expertly crafted ARPG by some of the best in the business. And its all-time peak, which we'll assume was either release or near release (in fact I'll check in a bit) was barely *half* that of what Wolcen had to face. Consider also what Wolcen's concurrency looked like before release. Barely a thousand at best.

Actually, nope. That 61k spike for Grim Dawn was in May 2019, when the game was 70% off briefly. Well, that explains a lot.

Before that, its highest concurrency was 20k. Its official release in February 2016 received a paltry 15k max.

So that should help put some perspective on why Wolcen's 'dropping' player numbers aren't that alarming. It has a way to go before falling below what I'd consider normal for a buy-to-play indie ARPG.

A few others:
https://steamcharts.com/app/200710
Torchlight II
652 playing an hour ago
1,126 24-hour peak
54,010 all-time peak

https://steamcharts.com/app/215530#All
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

26 playing 37 min ago
61 24-hour peak
4,210 all-time peak

All this tells you is that player concurrency is NOT that important for a buy to play ARPG (or any game really) to succeed. It's all about units sold (and not refunded, of course). And the company has no obligation to reveal that number.

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The_Scourge wrote:

All this tells you is that player concurrency is NOT that important for a buy to play ARPG (or any game really) to succeed. It's all about units sold (and not refunded, of course). And the company has no obligation to reveal that number.

Sales is all that matter. Review bombing is a dirty business where the intention is to harm a video game commercial performance.

I'm not really committed enough to conspiratorial thinking to believe review bombing is somehow orchestrated or weaponised. Most of the time I think it's a snowball effect, a more active version of the downvote one. But I also think after the NMS debacle and Hello Games' subsequent recovery, the very idea of a destructive review bomb is a temporary issue rather than a permanent one.

Considering that concurrency, the likely low rate of refunds, unit price...I'd say Wolcen Studio took in between $5-10m USD. Respectable but not an amount that's going to keep a game going for years. And lord knows how far in the red they are overall.

I expect we'll see cosmetic mtxes before too long. How many of those will sell after such an ungracious release may well make or break the game for real. I'd love to be wrong, but there's very little chance of them being able to go the paid expansion route, and slots for mtxes were already 'removed' from the game in a recent patch.


https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/wolcen-lords-of-mayhem-zero-punctuation/

Oh man, this was hilarious. I don't normally dig Yahtzee (he's like a weird mix of Gervais and Brooker for me, both of whom can grate like fuck when they're not tempered by good material) but when he's clearly not taking it seriously, he can be very entertaining.

Obviously it is not orchestrated. Understanding the psychology behind mob mentality activities is that people must be a willing "victim". They are conspirators doing it in an foreseeable anticipated fashion waiting hopefully for their desirable event to happen.

It take effort to do so because I don't normally write reviews for bad games. It is time consuming. I'll just uninstall.

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The_Scourge wrote:

I expect we'll see cosmetic mtxes before too long. How many of those will sell after such an ungracious release may well make or break the game for real. I'd love to be wrong, but there's very little chance of them being able to go the paid expansion route, and slots for mtxes were already 'removed' from the game in a recent patch.

Wondering where the mtx's were showing, I never noticed. I didn't catch this change at all or notice there was a slot for Mtxs. Do you think they did this because they may be jumping ship or that they may be changing direction? I have the same feeling you do on them not having much money and the little they have left won't be enough to sustain for a long period of time. With the bad launch and bad taste in many peoples mouth it's going to be hard to undo the damage in the future.

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ZACHWILDCAT wrote:

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The_Scourge wrote:

I expect we'll see cosmetic mtxes before too long. How many of those will sell after such an ungracious release may well make or break the game for real. I'd love to be wrong, but there's very little chance of them being able to go the paid expansion route, and slots for mtxes were already 'removed' from the game in a recent patch.

Wondering where the mtx's were showing, I never noticed. I didn't catch this change at all or notice there was a slot for Mtxs. Do you think they did this because they may be jumping ship or that they may be changing direction? I have the same feeling you do on them not having much money and the little they have left won't be enough to sustain for a long period of time. With the bad launch and bad taste in many peoples mouth it's going to be hard to undo the damage in the future.

They were greyed out but on the far right of the B screen on my admittedly kind of wide monitor. Stuff like cape, pets, weapon effects, footprints.

So I don't think this is because they're jumping ship or changing direction. I think it was always part of the plan. It's interesting because there was an argument once that the reason PoE was online only was because of mtxes, because people like to show them off. Well, that never really happened. We didn't get a big town hub for showing off shinies. We don't even have a forum-based gallery. And yet mtxes sell very well, which indicates that people other than me do buy them purely to enhance their personal experience. Which in turn means Wolcen could very well sell mtxes despite having a relatively robust offline mode. The issue for me is unlike PoE, Wolcen already has a built-in transmog and dye system and armour skins look pretty fucking great, so that need to 'pay to not look like a hobo' is somewhat reduced.

But as with PoE, if buying mtxes means supporting the game and helping ensure it doesn't die, I'll do it. Probably not to the same extent as I did PoE (if only because my stocks are *tanking* right now, as are everyone else's I imagine) but I do think I made off like a bandit getting this game for $20USD.

Review bombing only works for the more famous games and or F2P games where its easy to create new accounts and drop a review. Nobody is purchasing multiple copies of wolcen just to slander it. Maybe some but not enough to be statistically important. Further, it can be clearly seen when the biggest drops happen - on patch days when yet another poor attempt to fix the game (and no attempt to fix the bigger bugs) fails. Finally, from what I see the negative reviews are mostly people who are simply disappointed and wanted more. For example, Game of Thrones Season 8 wasn't review bombed, it was simply that bad.