Wolcen Archives - Page 3 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Wolcen Release Day

February 13, 2020 by Belghast

I didn’t think I had a post for today and then suddenly I did. Today is the day that Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem leaves Steam Early Access and officially releases. This has been a day that I have been waiting for and quite honestly it snuck up on me. I’ve talked about Wolcen before, but for the uninitiated it is an ARPG in the style of Diablo 3 from the eponymous Wolcen Studio from Nice, France. It began its life as a Kickstarter for a game called Umbra, which shifted into the game that has been available on Steam in Early Access for the last few years. In the time it has been on my radar it has changed significantly and morphed into a really enjoyable gameplay experience. It is a game where you more or less “build your own class”, and the initial decision that you make on character creation can be undone and changed at pretty much any point during the process.

Your character is effectively made of up three components, the first being the gear that you wear. This gear gives you specific stats that will ultimately dictate whether or not you can equip specific abilities. Through gearing you can choose to go all in on a more melee tanky warrior build like I have, or split down the middle and maybe focus on Strength and Agility both to do more of a tricksy light fighter with some ranged abilities. The third component is a complicated sphere grid style talent tree which allows you to rotate sections of it to match up what is your ideal build. I would say it is less complicated than Path of Exile, but definitely less straight forward than Diablo 3 skills.

The biggest change since I first started playing back in February of 2018, is that the game has a proper story line with what appears to be a rich and interesting world. I admit to date I have purposefully limited my play time with the thought of wanting to be able to experience the game proper once it finally and officially releases. At first glance though the storyline has deep undercurrents of feeling similar to that of Tyranny, which ranks among my favorite RPGs. You start out potentially not one of the good guys, and through actions completely out of your control are branded a pariah by your own people. You travel your path with two companions and I am curious to see how the intertwining story arcs play out in the end.

Since release appears to have come with a character wipe, I plan on playing around tonight and restarting the mostly tanky character that I had been playing previously. This means likely my adventures in Star Wars Galaxies and my play through of Mars: War Logs will be put on hold for a bit. In my experience in playing a lot of the games waiting in the wings all vying for the Diablo crown, this is the one that was the most promising. Others like Last Epoch are on fundamentally flawed ground and still more like Torchlight III formerly Frontiers are still gestating. For the time being however this is probably the best new Diablo game we are going to get at least until the release of Diablo 4. I know Grace has access to Wolcen as well and I am hoping to see how good or bad the group play is at some point once she finally gets internet again.

Yesterday a brand new trailer arrived in honor of the release day and it hints at some of the story elements. The game itself is roughly $30 on Steam and in my humble opinion well worth picking up if you like Action Role-playing Games.

Halo and Wolcen

December 4, 2019 by Belghast

Halo Reach

I have to admit I got caught up in the Halo hype last night like so many other players. The key difference for me is that I have never really been a Halo aficionado. I never owned an original Xbox and I first played the game with the pretty tragically bad PC port that came significantly after the fact. At the time I thought Unreal 2 was a much better game and doing a lot of the same things that Halo was. However there are times when you see how much a franchise means to people that you respect, and you desperately want to understand what they like so much about it. This is why I keep throwing myself down the path of Halo games and trying to figure out how to flip the switch inside of me that makes me love them.

With the PC release of The Master Chief Collection, Microsoft has opted to dole the games out one at a time rather than giving us all of them at once like exists on the Xbox One. The first game up is Halo Reach, which came out in 2010 and is in theory the second game chronologically, centering around the defense of a planet called Reach. That is pretty much all I know about the game because at this point I am only two missions into it. The controls do not feel amazing by modern standards and the voice acting in 2010 was significantly lower fidelity than what we are used to today as well. Both of these things lead me to bounce out pretty early last night on the campaign.

The core problem that I always have with Halo is its weapon system. There are weapons that feel good to use, but they are generally the Spartan weapons and while out in the field you can never seem to find ammunition for them. This means you are going to ultimately have to keep throwing away the gun that you like and picking up some random piece of trash just to survive. This gameplay feels awful to me, and I am super thankful that Bungie went on to create Destiny… a game largely focused around playing with amazing feeling weapons. I appreciate that Halo exists because without it I wouldn’t have gotten Destiny, but I am still struggling to glean what makes the game so magical.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

On a whim I decided to reinstall Wolcen the other night, because it had not significantly played the game since February of 2018. At that time I believe my assessment was that the game was “very alpha” which is my polite way of saying it is a buggy and formless mess. In the months between then and now the game has completely changed into something that is extremely playable, and to the best of my understanding has at least one act completely finished. There is also a planned launch in January, which would indicate to me that we are getting pretty close to its final form.

The end result is a game with a pretty solid storyline and good voice acting, as well as combat and systems that feel pretty polished. Gone is the complete free form system and instead one that sort of nudges you into one of three paths largely centered around melee combat, ranged combat or magical casting. However you can at will jump off the rails and go in whatever directions you want to because in theory there isn’t much difference between these paths at the beginning of the game. You pick up spells while roaming through the world and these serve as your abilities. Each one has specific weapon requirements, leading your way down those three paths for the most part.

Combat feels solid and fluid and a seemingly good blend of difficulty, where it is absolutely easy to sink into but can be punishing if you are not paying attention to your surroundings. There is a dodge system bound to the space bar and it follows a pip based system giving you 4 charges of dodge before you have to wait for them to regenerate. Shocking to no one I am largely centered around a melee build and have an interesting blend of abilities including: a leap attack, a charge, a death grip, a warcry shout of sorts and a big hammer that I slam down dealing AOE damage. The interplay between abilities feels really good and they have added little perks like you automagically charging into combat with your primary attack as a gap closer if you were out of combat.

The gearing system all seems to more or less be standard fare for an ARPG, with the added element of wearing armor of a specific play style giving you extra attribute points for that play style. So ultimately your “build” becomes a combination of your skills that you use, your talent picks and the items that you happen to be wielding… all of which sort of adding up to a total character identity. I’ve more or less stuck to heavy armor which greatly increases my resistances, but there have been moments when a significantly better item drops of another armor family, and I was able to freely swap stuff around to fit the need.

I know Grace also has Wolcen and at some point I would like to group up with her and see how the group play feels. Ultimately that is going to be the make or break for the game, because while I enjoy playing an ARPG solo… there is limited life in doing that. We come together each Diablo 3 season because group play is fun and rewarding, and while I want to see the story play out in Wolcen, unless it also has rewarding feeling group play I am not sure if it becomes a real option for the long haul.

Wolcen Alpha Thoughts

February 5, 2018 by Belghast

This weekend was a largely chill en devour that focused on lots of gaming while either upstairs in my warm warm office, or downstairs snuggled into a blanket on the sofa. It was my original intent to spend lots of time hunting monsters with friends, and I did in fact manage that for a bit Sunday afternoon. I also managed another goal which was to craft the Horizon Zero Dawn set of Palico gear which Kenzie is currently wearing. It admittedly feels a little weird at times to talk about Kenzie in game versus Kenzie the real life cat, but I still feel like if you didn’t name your Palico friend after an actual cat you are a monster. The other big happening of the weekend is that I dove head first into a game that I had been wanting to try for a bit.

Wolcen Lords of Mayhem is an Action Roleplaying Game that draws its inspiration from Diablo 2, Path of Exile and to some extent Diablo 3. It’s funny how a genre that largely spawned from a single came can branch and wind up fairly divisive. There is an entire community that feels like Diablo 2 was the ideal version of the game, another that feels like Path of Exile is the true successor to the throne… and a whole other group of people that care nothing about that noise and happily play Diablo 3. Wolcen is this weird amalgam in which I can see some of the best traits of each of those camps, as well as pulling in some other games in the genre like Titans Quest and its eventual successor Grim Dawn. Essentially it is a good start at trying to build a brand new modern ARPG.

The game itself is completely gorgeous, which admittedly was the first thing that I noticed about it. I stumbled onto this game when D3 community YouTuber Rhykker did a video talking about it. I have been trying very hard to avoid playing alpha/beta/early access games because they tend to sour my impression and excitement when the final product is released. However when I saw the game play I promptly threw that rule out the window and slammed my $19.95 on the table to join the testing. Firstly please note the game is very much an alpha build and in my short time playing it I have encountered all sorts of bugs including being hit by a monster a few times and having it teleport me back to base without actually dying.

This is absolutely a buyer beware sort of experience, but for me at least I felt like I wanted to help fund the games development because they have some pretty big plans. They are even brave enough to post their long term roadmap in the form of a Trello board for the backers to look at and comment on. Similarly there is a community Discord available as well so folks can leave bug reports, comment on game play and leave feature requests. The little bit of time I have spent roaming around the chat channels have made me realize that the game already has a super devoted following. As far as the lineage of this game goes… it is my understanding that it originally started out as a mod for the game Crysis designed to allow folks to create an ARPG on the CryEngine. From there it turned into a Kickstarter project called Umbra, and then at some point the name shifted to Wolcen which I find insanely awkward to pronounce.

What makes the game extremely interesting to me is the fact that there are no classes. You start as either a Male or a Female character with pretty robust sliders and character creation options. From there your character becomes whatever you want it to be in the form that everything is treated like a spell… be it a melee attack or an orb of lighting being hurled at the target. How you begin to spec out your character determines how effective you are going to be in your goals. Not surprisingly I have largely focused on melee with a sword and shield build designed to get in… dish out a bunch of damage then use the games active dodge system represented by the green pips above the skill bar to get out safely.

Admittedly it does not always work because the monsters in this game hit super hard and involve a lot of movement to be able to take them down successfully. I spent some time streaming Sunday morning and died over and over to all sorts of silly situations, and with no difficulty slider currently… it could get frustrating if you are not willing to keep throwing your face against this game. As far as speccing your character you are given a combination of the traditional stat based system that allows you to allocate points each level into the core areas that you want to be improving. On top of that each individual skill has its own tree of sorts that largely involves you choosing one of two options… with one focused on efficiency and another focused on either dealing more damage or increasing the effect of your attacks.

Lastly you have the “Gate of Fates” or what I tend to call it the Sphere Grid, which is a sequence of thematic choices you make as a character in how you want to build it out. Now when I said there were no classes in this game… in theory that is probably a lie because you could think of the skill trees presented on this grid as classes. On the inner ring you have Arcanist, Guardian, Legionary, Thief and Hunter. On the second ring you have Elementalist, Warden, Maleficent, Gladiator and Trickster. Then on the third ring they have a single tree so far called Assassin, but I fully expect that their goal is to keep expanding outwards. What makes this interesting is there is an NPC in town that allows you to rotate the rings connecting up any first tier tree to any second tier tree. So as a result right now my Legionary tree is rotated to meet up with Gladiator and in theory your “Class” becomes the combination of which trees you choose to mash together.

Admittedly it was in the sphere grid that Path of Exile largely lost me as a player because it kept expanding… and keep seeming more and more like nonsense. However with Wolcen it feels more manageable because essentially I am making one of five choices… each time I move outwards on the grid and can feel pretty happy to just stay within those lines. There are a lot of things not messaged well in the game… including this sphere grid. So for example I did not realize I could rotate it until I had already started putting some points into Guardian. That said it doesn’t necessarily feel like those points were wasted either because I am getting the blended effect of both trees at the same time. I would imagine late in the game you would have more than one tree fleshed out on each of the rings… and as such keep tweaking the subtle nuance of your character design.

Essentially I broke my no alphas rule… because I really want to see this game come to fruition. What is there right now… has an awful lot of potential and I can see how it could be turned into serious competition for the Diablo 4 throne. I will always love Diablo and the action rpgs that have spawned out of it. I’ve spent many an hour playing games like Titans Quest or even the MMO variants like Devilian. Already Wolcen has managed to capture the essence of what makes a Diablo style game good… all the while taking this raw material and blending it into something fresh feeling. They are taking the genre into an interesting direction that combines the accessibility of Diablo 3 with the madness of Path of Exile to produce something that I think will have staying power. I fully expect that this is going to be one of those games that I keep popping back into as new features are added. I am sure it is still a few years away from exiting early access, but the product that is there already feels good to play. If you are so inclined and are willing to deal with a slightly buggy product… I highly suggest checking it out.