Quick Look: Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

'Sup with the audio lately? Why does it sound like everyone's sharing a single mic, placed in the middle of the room?

This game looked interesting but this QL really turned me off from buying the game for now. Cracked up at Rorie's reaction after he put in that talent point though.

"Lifting inspiration" is a hell of a stretch from what I've seen. They can't even come up with their own icons or UI layout.

Yeah this game isn't really worth buying right this moment. It's a lot of fun but wait for them to finish it and polish out the bugs and balance issues. They seem dedicated to fixing things but also they are a team of 13 people.

re: the money issues ingame I never had trouble affording things past act 1, but also I was picking up literally everything that dropped and selling it. Which I imagine would be tedious for other people. Then you get to post game content which really needs a ton of gold. I think the economy will probably be something they fiddle with.

@mortimer: They are having issues with the mixer, I believe.

Seems like they spent most of their time polishing the presentation rather than the actual game. Sad, but hopefully they can fix most this stuff, but having skill tree points off by an entire decimal point to make the character 100x more powerful randomly just seems like something that shouldn't happen (even if your happy at first when it does lol). Hopefully they get it together in a decent time table.

damn, at the end you can tell the super move is hitting for 100 and the regular is hitting for over 1000 lol. Man.

Seeing Rorie put down the Act 1 boss like that makes me feel bad for going down the sphere grid like I did.

Also the game doesn't really tell you, but the transformation mechanic/aspect of apocalypse doesn't need a full bar to trigger. You can go in and cancel and go back in and cancel again as much as you want as long as you have some meter - which makes it useful to soak damage basically.

The Aspect was doing less damage than the base form with the bugged skill-point, probably because no shield multiplier?

@mortimer: agreed. Seems like everyone has a hot mic

After watching this whole thing, it seems like a bunch of engineers confused their 1.x for their o.x in several cases.

Is that a Skill Tree or a Celestial Star Chart?!?! WTF?!

Wolcen is a solid base for the developers to potentially build off of but the game has got too many bugs right now for them to be charging $40+ for it. Right now it feels like a "final" beta before the 1.0 launch later this year. Even the movement is a little too cludgy

@nodehtldippin: Don't feel bad. That is a hard fight when played normally. That node he used is completely busted, and known exploit.

I really like the idea of these games and I'll play any number of them. Grinding for loot can be relaxing.

But I absolutely hate how there are only two aesthetics for ARPGs. It's like 80% ridiculously grimdark, and 20% cartoony like Torchlight. Give me something in-between.

@darkside1337: After launching on GOG, not updating it for 2 years and now pulling it from sale there for launch, I don't have faith it'll get to a good spot anytime soon. Looks nice though. Seems like a small team that didn't manage their scope/time and had to just say it was done.

i love t he devil

Can a game be sued multiple times for copyright infringement? You've got the blades from God of War, a ton of the interface and font seem lifted directly from Diablo 3. The skill grid from Path of Exile. Pretty sure I've seen those exact potion and town portal icons somewhere before, too.

And if nothing else, Anthem's got 'em dead to rights on the "item stats that don't do anything" issue.

@mortimer: It sounds to me like their voices audio are bouncing right off the walls and back to their respective mics.

They record these Quick Looks in the same room they record UPF AFAIK. Lots of bounce or "standing waves".

There is something to this game. If you like ARPG's is pretty good fun to play but some of the bugs have been so bad.

:Bosses in T-poses,Losing gear from rewards and from chest,No audio,Disconnects. The game needs work but I am enjoying it still.

You know what, if a UI design is well made, why make your own from scratch? Why not standardize something like that. I'd consider that to be more accessible for people already familiar with similar games. Looking at the UI in Wolcent I already know what everything is thanks to playing Diablo 3, and I don't have to spend any time at all realearning a new one. Kudos for that, honestly.

Man, I thought this was a game featuring Tom Hanks' soccer ball buddy!

This game was in beta for 4+ years and it still feels like it's in beta. With that said, I'm really enjoying the game. People whining about copyright infringement is kind of cute when literally every ARPG currently existing does virtually the same deal.

I was having a ton of fun with this game until the Act 1 boss on his 3rd phase literally one shot me with everything he did. It really reinforced that not all builds are viable even if it's just for the campaign.

I'm really excited to check this out. I got way into Diablo 3, and I've been playing Path of Exile continuously for years. This game looks great and seems like it plays really well.

I found the story in this easier to follow than most arpgs and it wrapped up at the end while the time skip gives you something to do for endgame stuff. I played it mostly offline, and did run into a bug where my progress got reset, but was able to edit the save file to fix that since I was offline. If I was online and couldn't do that, I probably would have stopped playing.

@rorie you should be using all the skill orbs you find even if you don't ever plan use the skill. If you re-use a skill you already have, assuming a monster dropped it and you didn't buy it from the vendor, you get 100 of the essence instead of the 10 you get from selling it.

I'm playing a caster and I had a lot of trouble with that act 1 boss. I eventually beat him after 10+ deaths by buying a random bow in the shop and auto-attacking him to death...

Needless to say, this game is very unfinished. The final cutscene had me sliding over the floor in a t-pose, sound cuts out randomly, you can get stuck in level geometry and invisible boundries, enemies glitch and teleport around and much, much more. Honestly, I don't even think it looks that good besides some of the vistas in the background.

I do think their approach to skill combinations is very interesting, lending itself to unorthodox build discoveries. I do wish respeccing was free, since the system right now discourages experimentation and some skills just don't work like they're supposed to.

I am really excited about this. Unfortunately I didn't know about the long development or anything, and had some friends tell me about it during release last week. I had time this past weekend and was excited to play, I bought it, and couldn't play. Could have played "offline" but every time I tried to log in over the weekend (multiple times, different times of day both Sat/Sun) I could not and the servers just failed. I thus returned it on Steam. I was bummed, I only have so much time. I also didn't know about all the bugs due to the dev cycle or being early access for so long, so I think for the moment I took the right course.

I will revisit in a couple months and see where its at. I really would like to play it, but I think waiting for the technical issues to be resolved mostly, is the best bet at the moment.

LOL the talent point increasing the damage by x5. I think this dev is very good, they just got overwhelmed by their own ideas trying to mix a lot of PoE and Diablo in a single product. Still, a nice first effort, and they got the animations just right. Swinging a 2H weapon in particular is very satisfying.

Also I agree with Rorie, that one shot spell used by the Act 1 boss is soooo cheap and comes out of nowhere.

Rorie is taking literally zero damage lol.

@benderunit22: lol I had that too. Post game cut scenes had me sliding in a T-pose across the floor with no mouth movements. Oh boy...

Yeah like others have said: wait. Wolcen has potential, but it's not ready at all. You know that ACT 1 boss that Rorie killed? I went full-on summoner aka all my summons admired the boss instead of attacking it (their AI likes to just.. turn off). You know what it's like to auto-attack an act boss down, who's 1 of the only 3 hard fights in the game?

I dunno, I'm 9 hours in and I'm really enjoying this. Besides some random and hilarious T-posing, I haven't run into many issues. Guess we'll see if I'm still on board when I get to Act 3.

For those wondering, "Wolcen" is short for "woluntarily cenobite".

That's great to know, I'll try it out!

Ben: "This looks a lot better than Path (of Exile)"

The pervasive notion that Path of Exile looks bad or particularly dated is a bizarre one.

I think it was a volleyball

Being overwhelmed because your product was exceedingly successful must be a really weird situation for them

Was really enjoying this game, then I randomly lost all of my progress after ~30 hours.

@stuntaneous: There's a lot of artistic choices in PoE that makes it look way worse than it technically is. Stuff like the landscape and monsters generally having fairly flat color design while effects are very sharp. You also have a lot of UI elements that cut hard, adding to the clashing design. And then there's the animations which tends to be on the snappier side compared to most aRPGs, almost to the point of making them look like flashes of sprites rather than fully animated actions.

Basically, it comes down to the good old "style" thing. And while it certainly works for some people PoE breaks with a lot of traditions for how you design games like this, without really establishing a unique or fresh alternate take.

As always, it's fun to mow down a bunch of enemies. But we have a bunch of games that do that well already. This makes me more excited for my savegame in Grim Dawn or to get back in POE than to buy this game that has a bunch of glaring issues to iron out.

Only Fart can save the world.

I'm an idiot who really loves dopamine loot drips and ARPGS so i may get this even being broken. But I've still got Grim Dawn yet to really play and Path of Exile to get into if I get a chance so I really really shouldn't.