WOLCEN : Lords of Mayhem (Indie ARPG)

[Echeyakee]

I'm about halfway through the endgame, and I haven't experienced any game breaking bugs so far, except the occasional crash or a dungeon that cannot be completed.

But I do have my concerns. The obvious issues of build diversity and broken passives. There is no real point playing anything except bleeding edge right now. Well, you can, but it's like playing MM instead of BM right now. You can do it, but the results are underwhelming. And that spells are not even remotely competitive in the end game. The game feels like it never really left the early access, and the weekly patching cycle does nothing to alleviate that feeling.

Then there are the broken mechanics. Like gold drops being useless from level 10 and up, magic find on gear doing nothing, expeditions (follower missions) bringing in better rewards from "partially failed" results over "success" ones, crafting buildings locking you out of the game, iffy collision and pathing, explosive barrels damage being unmitigable and becoming the biggest enemy in the end game...

And then you have the division 2 loot syndrome. Maybe there are players that enjoy going through several inventories of loot without ever seeing even a usable item, much less a marginal upgrade, but it rubs me the wrong way. It gets better when you start getting reliable legendaries and unlock the high end crafting options, but it's a long way to that from the campaign end. And uniques being uniquely trash does not help.

All in all the game reeks of either negligence or incompetence, not sure which is worse. It obviously should not have released in this state. If it wasn't for extra long January drought this year, it would of already been forgotten by the majority of the players. But they got lucky with that, so now the devs need to get their asses in to gear and get it to a good state before things like doom and mount&blade release, or they might never have server capacity issues ever again. There is also division 2 expansion that might pull players away before that, but I don't really have confidence in that game any more.

And all that is a real shame, because the game has a lot of potential, and we need more players in this area, since aRPG fans have nothing to play long term but PoE, and looter players are stuck between disappointments that div 2 and destiny 2 are. At least there is still good old reliable warframe, if you don't mind taking a semester to learn the basics.

[CostinR]

Got to Act 3 after powering through A1/2, enjoying it quite a bit even if I'm just skipping all the story stuff now. Had a few crashes and bugs so far but nothing too outrageous, so I guess I'm pretty lucky with that.

Really looking forward to starting endgame after seeing my brother do some bits, seems like the kind of grinding that's right up my alley. Now I just gotta figure how my initial build will ultimately shake out, currently using a 2H and shrecking shit but I'm not sure where I want to eventually go. Kinda wanna try a sword and board build still, but maybe after I start with endgame and get shit figured out fully.

If you've gotten to act 3 then you shouldn't worry too much about beating it. Final boss is a buggy nighmare ( he can get invulnerable and stuck ) but it's not hard.

[Baconeggcheese]

4 years for a 14 man dev team isn't as much as it sounds.

They started with 13 people, they ended up with over 40. Still a small team, but not as tiny as they started out.

That said, I'm just saying why I think the community is as volatile as it is given the circumstances. You don't need to defend them to me.

[OBM]

Saw a Mage build where someone was just spamming Frost Nova (I think that's the name) and it was doing something like 10,000 damage every .5 seconds or something stupidly fast.

I haven't played all week, but have been trying a poison build. I don't know the name of the ability off top of my head, but it puts a circle around you and when an enemy dies it explodes with poison damage. I've pulled some pretty large groups and instant wipe all of them once a couple mobs explode and causes a chain reaction, but it's no where near as fast as the build I listed above AND boss damage with this poison build is absolute ass.

Would love to see "aura" abilities that passive put poison stacks on enemies. Maybe that would make the poison build better, or maybe there are items that do this. I don't know.. I haven't gotten a single legendary outside of the story quests or a unique.

[Wildmoon]

Wolcen's spike in popularity kinda shows how unestablished the genre is. It's quite volatile with no game having a grip on it.

[Baconeggcheese]

Wolcen's spike in popularity kinda shows how unestablished the genre is. It's quite volatile with no game having a grip on it.

It really boggles my mind that Blizzard abandoned Diablo like they did for so long. Its like they hate money or something.

[Wildmoon]

It really boggles my mind that Blizzard abandoned Diablo like they did for so long. Its like they hate money or something.

They abandoned it precisely because of money. It has no ongoing revenue. Creating a WoW mount is problably more profitable than trying to set up the system to get MTXs going in D3. I am sure they have done the evaluation that further investment is not worth it relative to other things they can do.

[everydaygamer]

Wolcen's spike in popularity kinda shows how unestablished the genre is. It's quite volatile with no game having a grip on it.

I imagine it's because these types of games don't translate well to consoles so most Devs don't bother trying to make one.

[Onikaroshi]

I imagine it's because these types of games don't translate well to consoles so most Devs don't bother trying to make one.

Having played both d3 and Poe on console, they seem to play pretty damn good in console imo

[kaintk]

question : is the game ok now ? i heard that the laucnch was chaotic , bugued and multiplayer was not a thing

i want to play it but not with a bad experience

[beanman12345]

Having played both d3 and Poe on console, they seem to play pretty damn good in console imo

Add torchlight 2 on that list as well, Though I hate that you can't mod it to add a respec potion in there.

The only one that I played that didn't translate well to console was Titan Quest.

[Denizly]

Hey y'all.

I'm interested in picking up this game, tho i heard a lot of bad press about server stability, buggy abilities and game braking bugs in general. Also item / gold dupe.

Did the state improve by now? Honestly just waiting for bug fixes and stable servers to start it.

[msdos]

Wolcen's spike in popularity kinda shows how unestablished the genre is. It's quite volatile with no game having a grip on it.

All the games in this genre are good, but each of them is missing something. Path of Exile could probably benefit from an AH. Also the performance on that game is sketchy. The trading aspect keeps a lot of people out of the game.

Diablo 3 is missing complexity. It also hands you what you need over time without having to put thought into anything. Crazy af sets would just appear in your stash over time. Really easy to get into, easy to get bored of.

Grim Dawn is single player/co-op. Pugging isn't really a thing. You either have 3 friends who play or you don't. That aspect no doubt hurts it. If Grim Dawn had fully fleshed out massive multi player support, I would probably never touch Path of Exile.

If you could find a game that successfully melds all of that together and makes everything work, it will probably dominate.

[Cairhiin]

Game is alright, endgame is kinda boring (same 5 dungeons with the same 5 monsters over and over), and the itemization is also quite boring. I am not really a fan of the dual resource system either but that's a personal preference thing. Overall, the game has huge potential but it needs a lot more content. Given how many bugs they need to fix, extra content isn't going to happen anytime soon I fear.

[Aliven]

All the games in this genre are good, but each of them is missing something. Path of Exile could probably benefit from an AH. Also the performance on that game is sketchy. The trading aspect keeps a lot of people out of the game.

Diablo 3 is missing complexity. It also hands you what you need over time without having to put thought into anything. Crazy af sets would just appear in your stash over time. Really easy to get into, easy to get bored of.

Grim Dawn is single player/co-op. Pugging isn't really a thing. You either have 3 friends who play or you don't. That aspect no doubt hurts it. If Grim Dawn had fully fleshed out massive multi player support, I would probably never touch Path of Exile.

If you could find a game that successfully melds all of that together and makes everything work, it will probably dominate.

In your opinion.

Both PoE and Grim Dawn for me are not appealing at all in the terms of builds.
In PoE we have no easy respec so a instant no for me. I dont care about rest of the game.
In Grim Dawn we have deeply flawed skill system.

D3 is the golden standard for me for all arpg. You get your toys (skills and runes) and go have fun, go nuts. You can also scale difficulty so even if you play wacky build, completly off meta you can use difficulty that suits you and be both challenged and have fun. You can also buff those off meta build using Legacy set / Gem.

[Skorpionss]

The game is full of issues, and some of them are pretty fundamental. An ARPG with no animation cancelling and no move only option in 2020 is pretty shocking. The game also lacks in skills, particularly for ranged builds. Then there's the skill tree where half the passives are broken, and only includes additive damage increases. Not to mention the plethora of game-breaking bugs, days of server issues, ugly artstyle and ridiculous character models. Still, some of the textures are nice and the voice acting is a step up from something like grim dawn I guess.

You do have a move only option though, I bound mine on W like I do with all ARPGs. As for the ugly artstyle and ridiculous character models, I can't agree with you there, it's definitely one of the better looking ARPGs that came out in the last few years.

[Gorsameth]

Wolcen's spike in popularity kinda shows how unestablished the genre is. It's quite volatile with no game having a grip on it.

Also a good release window. Both D3 and PoE are at the end of the season cycle so a lot of people had time to jump on Wolcen waiting for the next season to start.

[Skorpionss]

They abandoned it precisely because of money. It has no ongoing revenue. Creating a WoW mount is problably more profitable than trying to set up the system to get MTXs going in D3. I am sure they have done the evaluation that further investment is not worth it relative to other things they can do.

They already have a system to get MTXs going in D3, they are just not using it in the west because people would lose their shit. It's fully functional in china though.

[Tang0]

You do have a move only option though, I bound mine on W like I do with all ARPGs. As for the ugly artstyle and ridiculous character models, I can't agree with you there, it's definitely one of the better looking ARPGs that came out in the last few years.

Yeah, it’s not hard to be “one of the better looking arpgs”. You could compare it to popular arpgs like diablo and Poe, which are super old. Or some indie arpgs that probably didn’t have that EA money to start things off. Wolcen looks ok, but don’t run it off as something spectacular

Personally would take much worse visuals for any semblance of coherent endgame, but that’s not coming any time soon.

[Biomega]

They already have a system to get MTXs going in D3, they are just not using it in the west because people would lose their shit. It's fully functional in china though.

I suspect that they're not doing it because that would give people only more ammunition to demand things, and they'd rather put their resources into building an entirely new game in D4 rather than trying to fix the conceptual problems of D3.

At this point they're probably happy to rest on D3/RoS sales and play maintenance mode with the occasional small-team update like the new sets (which quite evidently did not have a lot of work put into them given) rather than run the risk of gambling on MTX and possible PR headaches resulting from a new influx of customers paying money and demanding more content they don't want to spend money to provide.

I'm not saying that's a GOOD decision, but the evidence seems to be pointing toward it.

The future definitely belongs to MTX-based models, and I'm fine with that. D3 missed the boat, that's all.