Wolcen Hype Release!

I have incredibly mixed feelings about my last sword. A friend pointed out that it's sometimes hard to decide if the writing or the voice acting is at fault for those more awkward moments. I choose writing because I paid for the voice acting and it wasn't cheap so I want to believe it was great. But eh, whatever. The sword is not a good representation of my writing style, only a somewhat hamfisted attempt at forcing it into someone else's work. Last fuckin' time I do that!

Enough off-topickery.

__

So I gave up on the story mode offline. I've already played it online and it's kind of boring repeating a game's story mode (don't tell anyone at GGG that, they'd look at you like you just claimed clouds are made of marshmallow). So I totally cheated -- downloaded a character that had finished Fury's Ascent, unlocked CoS, deleted said character.

Holy SHIT is low-level CoS hard without twink gear.

That said, seeing a roster of 30 or so names, all level 1, gives me the tinglies. I am going to clear 1k hours on this game, easy.

Unlocked everything in Stormfall, got all but the grindiest Steam achievements, and gear upgrades are so few and far between now that the repetitiveness wore out its welcome many gameplay hours ago. Changed my build numerous times to mix things up a bit, but that does little to make up for the absolute lack of anything that resembles variation in the gameplay.

Made it to around 240 total hours and uninstalled. Would definitely check it out again if/when the game receives some substantial updating beyond the basic polish and bugfixing. Really nothing left for me to do until then except hit lvl 90 on a char, but the endgame loop is far too basic and unrewarding to grind out tens of thousands of expeditions to get a char to 90.

You know your 'gritty, dark' ARPG has gotten too big when you're forced to remove the pentagrams. ^_^

I am level 79 online in Wolcen. Their sim city end-game feels like a real "hideout." Certainly pros and cons in the game which would take too long to write up. I love the champ mode and I like the fact that I can use the city to basically create the poe-equivalent exalt without having to grind my fucking life away for the same result in PoE.

I'm also playing Doom Eternal; lots of pentagrams in that game ;) Oh and it's basically an RPG with all of the Slayer upgrades you can do (like legit there are points and shit you can spend to upgrade guns!).

Between Wolcen and Doom Eternal I am slowly losing interest in this game. I still love this game but I'm getting tired of the dangling carrot and there are other games out now that are grabbing my attention. I'm super hyped for BG3 and D4. I'm sure PoE2 will be great and all but.. again.. dangling carrot that will require just a lot of time so I know what to expect there heh.

I played a bit of last epoch. definitely way better than wolcen. wolcen is a d3 clone, LE is a d2/poe clone, at least in terms of mechanics.

there are some things I wish weren't in the game, such as idols which are pretty much charms (they dont take regular inventory space, rather its a fixed sack for idols only that expands to some fixed space).

but systems-wise, it's miles ahead of wolcen. I only played void knight and beastmaster, and definitely feel like rerolling more, especially since I got many of the necro set pieces. wolcen never gave me a reason to reroll characters, just skills.

I do wish they experimented a little bit more, skill like volatile reversal which make you go back in time, are really cool ideas. whereas, copying some d2 or poe mechanics/skills seem a bit...repetitive. sure, people love themselves some hammerdins or whatnot, but what made diablo 2 d2 is that it introduced iconic skills, and not just paying homage/copying d1.

LE definitely worth 35 bucks even in beta state where 2.5 acts are available and there are some severe balance issues.

lol what happened to this game. 5k players at most, used to be over 100k.

"

Johny_Snow wrote:

lol what happened to this game. 5k players at most, used to be over 100k.

popularity was due to hype and lack of poe/d3 league. popularity is rarely an indication of quality, though.

the lack of reasons to reroll, very naive system mechanics-wise (scaling off, easy to min-max/easy to travel wheels for whatever you need) all ultimately lead to lack of replayability unless you really like the combat in arpgs (I dont care much for that)

They wanted to make a cash shop though, they clearly expected retention.

Nice little moment recently: I was hacking away in a caves area and noticed that the crystal shards studding the pathways were accurately reflecting my character's actions. Good usage of Cryengine right there.

Oh *damn*. So one enemy type, the Pacified Hierophant, has an innate trait called 'Dome Shield'. As you'd imagine, it's just like PoE's proximity shield. So, naturally, you want to close distance even if you're ranged. Get inside the dome, fire away...simple, right?

Except for one easily-overlooked reality: a dome is three-dimensional. So anything that falls from the sky will just hit the dome even if you cast it point-blank next to the Hierophant.

Annoying but I can't help but admire the way my meteors just hit the invisible dome and explode against it. That's fucking awesome.