Wolcen: BloodTrail is POE killer

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innervation wrote:

10% chance it's a Wolcen employee role playing as the above for an excuse to do some underground advertising, and honestly I would respect that hustle lol.

Definitely not their style.

This thread will not age well as his predecessor.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2767816/page/1

People are excited and crave for every bread crumb, considering the long content and informations drought, so they came back in droves to check out what is new.

This explains the (for this product) surprisingly high numbers which will go back to sub 2k in the next 2 weeks.

What i read from early reviews.

While adding minor side content (act 4 still in making), new patch seems to repeat the same mistakes as in february with lots of crashes/bugs/disconnects while still having old issues like endless-loop-sound, no click-to-move, queued potions, bad minion AI (same as Last Epoch).

I do own Wolcen and it was fun to play through the story too, but let's be real, it will not compare to POE. I do wish them the best with the Update and i commend them that they actually try with the game, but i don't see it yet. Who knows, maybe it will be a no mans sky situation and they manage to turn it around.

Its hard to fix something when you are this incompetent.

Specific to Bloodtrail, Wolcen handles its chronicle/league content far more deftly than PoE ever did. Instead of having it shoved in your face every second zone throughout the story's progression, you are introduced to the chronicle change early on in the story, do a single quest with the related npc, and then hear nothing from him until after the main story is complete. Then you spend a lot more time with him and his, making the chronicle feel more like a solid mini-expansion rather than a gimmick. As for the 'hunt' feature, it's introduced with the chronicle npc, and pops up a few times throughout the story, but is largely relegated to the post-story game mode.

This is so much more palatable to me than what PoE does. It doesn't impinge on the story, and it gives the chronicle material its time to shine. And it's about as cinematic as anything else in the game, which I found surprising. I honestly wasn't expecting that much from it. A lot of voice work brings it all to life, some new areas add variety, engaging cinematic sequences, lore for several previously only mentioned areas. I loved infiltrating a certain camp and just hearing the enemy soldiers in their tents talking like normal people, discussing their woes and fears and uncertainties. I was really hoping they wouldn't emerge from their tents the whole time. It was quite tense...

Also, I deeply enjoyed playing through the 3 chapter story from scratch again, and was pleased it wasn't buried under the flavour of the month as PoE's story is. This is probably because I am not forced to play said story over and again, so voluntarily revisiting it after months of just playing the random dungeon/city builder mode was a pleasure and a reminder of how different story mode is to the random, more concentrated ARPG loot-kill-upgrade loop mode. For a start, it's a hell of a lot easier...