I'm more surprised people are so harsh on an indie studio.. I mean expectations need to be not the same as say Blizzard or or big company(Ubisoft,EA,Microsoft etc etc). I dunno.... think people are a bit too quick to anger but I have looked at the steam rating. Mixed...well it keeps me away for a little bit.
#TeamLegion #UnderEarthofAzerothexpansion plz #Arathor4Alliance #TeamNoBlueHorde
Warrior-Magi
I think its that there hasn't been a solid ARPG since D3 was abandoned (PoE is aite, but despite its annoying ass community its still very much a niche game) and the community is hungry AF for a good one. This one showed a lot of promise and has really good graphics AND was in development forever so people are holding it to a higher standard than would be typical of a small indie dev.
..and so he left, with terrible power in shaking hands.
They made huge mistakes that show their inexperience as a new studio. With 13 people you don't go from an EA game with 20 levels, 1 act, half the skills, and everything, to a game with 90 levels, 3 acts, all the skills and everything that comes with it without some sort of testing.
They probably should have done some sort of stress test, have a free weekend before launch to see if the servers can handle it, do something.
The last time Blizzard made ingame cutscenes like these they decided it's too much work and scrapped the whole thing - Wc3:Reforged.
I won't trust Blizzard with anything anymore until I get to see it in a game they actually release.
Either way, the ingame cutscenes and worldbuilding in Wolcen are miles ahead of Blizzard's aRPG title... and that doesn't even mean that Wolcen is the holy grail in that regard.
Last edited by KrayZ33; 2020-02-22 at 08:23 AM.
Ingame cutscenes are not really that important and could be harmful to the tone too. It's a plus that D2 and D3 have none and little of it. The same goes for Dark Souls games.
It's not that hard to do proper cutscenes if Blizzard really wants to commit to that. I would rather they avoid cutscene heavy approach though.
Last edited by Wildmoon; 2020-02-22 at 08:33 AM.
What do you mean "1 time makes a trend". Ingame cutscenes don't exist in their other games other than WoW, in which they are really bad too but I chose to ignore and not even mention that because the game is extremely old.
I didn't move goalpost either, my point is that Blizzard would never deliver these until I'm proven otherwise, so far they didn't. The latest example proves it.
And if you really think that there isn't a "trend" as you put it for at least a few years already, I'd consider you to be blind. WC3 is just the latest example, and not the "start" of that. It's already funny enough that you believe Blizzard when they said the scrapped the new ingame-cutscenes because fans didn't want them.
D3 has absolutely 0 atmosphere. If it weren't for the cinematics, it would've been a complete disaster and a borefest.
The boss fights are extremely boring too, they copied quite a few of them from Dungeon Siege 3 too.
Wolcen even has the clearly superior version of the Belial(d3)/Corrupted Creator(DS3) fight and even mini-bosses are staged in a more interesting way than D3s.
The good thing about D3 is the combat and item system - it's enough to carry the game. It's an absolute shitfest pretty much everywhere else
Even if we ignore all that. D3 storytelling is done by picking up a book and listening to a voice and a character portrait in the lower right corner.
It really doesn't even compare to the ideas that indie studio had.
I'm so sorry that I badmouth Blizzard here, they deserve it, no reason for you to feel hurt about it though.
Since they didn't show us a reasonable amount of effort when it comes to these things, I'm just going to assume that they are not able to.
Last edited by KrayZ33; 2020-02-22 at 01:59 PM.
4 years for a 14 man dev team isn't as much as it sounds.
D3 was in development for over a decade and had around 60 devs at that time doing all the work, and they still didn't nail launch or the game experience.
Even when D3 made $2 billion in gross profit, they still couldn't figure out the direction of the game. Let alone fixing things then realizing it still worked as pre fix and taking them an additional two patches to fix it. Then let's not even speak about how bad their launch was.
PoE has had bugs that aren't inherent to a mature gaming companies either, critical memory bugs, memory leaks, critical errors every launch. If you look at their servers, it took them 28 weeks to sort of fix some regional servers because their pepega brains couldn't properly figure out IT server things, that for a company which received a $100 million dollar backing from Tencent.
All in all the wolcen launch wasn't even remotely as bad for the limited experience they had dealing with a player base that was 100 times larger than their previous maximum player base. Taking into account that Wolcen only has one server coder, it's pretty impressive that he managed to fix most things.
I saw a good example at blizzcon 2018 with Warcraft:Reforged too.
I saw a lot of good things from Blizzard before they released the product. WoW included. Starcraft included.
Last edited by KrayZ33; 2020-02-22 at 02:17 PM.
After now playing it for a bit I have to ask.
In the EA version enemies standing in water were dealt extra damage when electrocuted. Is this still in the game? I haven't seen any water puddles yet.
I would consider the itemization in D3 to be absolutely horrid. Most ARPGs, your build determines what items you're looking for, but in D3, your gear determines what build you're going for; specifically, your builds are limited to the handful of sets available to whichever class, then you augment it with 1-2 other items, and use mostly the same passive uniques on most builds as well. Sure, you can play around with some creative builds early on, but once you get to a certain Rift level, you either shift to one of the pre-determined builds, stop progressing, or pretend you are contributing while your friends carry you forward. For example, I loved my Ice Wizard, but at a certain point the only thing I offered my team was a small amount of freeze on groups of minions that typically died in 1-2 seconds anyways.
Now that you mention it, I recall this in the early Alpha as well, but I don't recall seeing this once they added in Act 1 during Beta. My guess is that this was scrapped, or shelved for the time being; similar to item customization, housing, and a few other things they had in place early on, but aren't in release.
----
Summons are doing quite a bit better after the latest patch. They still need some work in the AI department, "Why aren't you attacking this guy 6 pixels away?", and their damage output still needs to scale with the player, but I've been doing a number of expeditions and only lose a melee minion every now and then, typically during a boss fight, and maybe a ranged one on rare occasions. The Vigor Mortis tank just doesn't die, but I'm thinking of converting it to the melee DPS variant, just to see how it fares, and hopefully boost my clear speed slightly. I'm working towards my 5th slot now, so I can get Parasite back in there, which should help a bit as well.
Sure, summoner is still in a pretty bad spot, and is slow going, but it's fairly fun to play. I've been a minion player since I had my massive horde of skeletons in D2, so I'm hoping Wolcen is able to iron this style out over the next month or two. While they're improved with this patch, they're still going to hit a wall at a certain Expedition level.
wolcen team is 40 man not 13 or 14... and they had Tencent on board for like 2 years now .. could you guys stop defending Wolcen because "oh small indie company with limited finance/staff" they fucked up hard no excuse they had the manpower and they had the money/support for more if needed but they didn't
#TeamLegion #UnderEarthofAzerothexpansion plz #Arathor4Alliance #TeamNoBlueHorde
Warrior-Magi