Wolcen Hype Release!

I somehow doubt many people purchase a game with the mentality "I bought it, now I'll wait a bunch of months, even years until they fix it".

That's the ridiculous part. It's not broken. I've been playing all day, online. Not a single crash. A few bugs, sure. Some skills not working as they should. That is not a broken game. Error 37. That was broken. There was absolutely no way to play that game while it was going on. Anthem, there's a broken game. Insane resource hog with frequent crashes, and that's assuming you can get it working. Also online-only, so if the servers ever go splat, that's that.

But if I can play a game all day with no issues beyond a few spawn bugs, balance discrepancies and some non-functioning features, I simply can't declare that broken. Because if I do, then PoE is also broken, because I *can't* play that all day without crashes and disconnects. I put up with a week of that during late Morph and was like nope, fuck this. Was it me? Probably. But to me, that was broken and I absolutely couldn't be arsed figuring out why. So maybe I just got lucky with Wolcen. If so, so did everyone else on my steam list playing it quite a lot.

I suppose it comes down to one's idea of 'broken', but in my 30 something years of gaming, Wolcen isn't even in the top twenty broken-on-release games I've experienced. And some of them were before the internet, so that was a barrel of laughs too.

I repeat: the entitlement.

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https://wolcen-universe.com/ -- It's a bit janky, and definitely a WIP, but decent enough for planning, saving and sharing builds.

The only thing I had to do was change my PoE server and the crashes disappeared. Guess I was lucky because out of my dozens of hours in Metamorph I did not experience a single crash (other than the game getting fucked when I alt+tab from full screen mode).

Well, there's no way of getting around this one. The new/possibly always intended sound for Slayer's Flurry is hilarious. If they were going for 'lots of slashes in rapid succession', they failed. But if they were going for 'oh, so that's what turbo-fapping sounds like', then it's an absolute success.

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Well, there's no way of getting around this one. The new/possibly always intended sound for Slayer's Flurry is hilarious. If they were going for 'lots of slashes in rapid succession', they failed. But if they were going for 'oh, so that's what turbo-fapping sounds like', then it's an absolute success.

I've been running Slayer's on my main char for the past week. I thought pretty much the same thing you did when I heard the changed sound heh, and I thought it was perfectly fine before. At least it's amusing in its own way. Not as bad as the frozen shatter sound in PoE being changed to a wet noodle slap anyway.

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I still can gain something more than just some self satisfactory pleasure for beating the game when I can get something that someone else wants which is a higher ranked spot.

Rank #0 is exclusively reserved for you. Nowhere to go but sideways, and no one to stand in your way.

I was thinking more Huntsman Spider, but I'm Australian. We're always thinking Hunstman Spider.

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As for the dropping player count, I don't see it as a failure. I see it as an approach to normal figures. 127k for a game like Wolcen is ridiculous. It's not free to play, it's not built to be streamed, and its multiplayer is rudimentary at best.

So how can we see what's 'normal' for a game like this? Easy, we look at its only real competitor and parallel: Grim Dawn. Has online, but also has offline. Is indie. Is buy to play. Is almost certainly steam exclusive.

Therefore, steamcharts comparisons between the two is somewhat legit, certainly more so than using steamcharts for PoE analysis.

Here we go.

Wolcen
https://steamcharts.com/app/424370#All
24,019 playing 38 min ago
45,082 24-hour peak
127,542 all-time peak

Grim Dawn
https://steamcharts.com/app/219990#All
5,700 playing 42 min ago
11,505 24-hour peak
61,093 all-time peak

This shows you just how tough buy to play ARPGs have it. Grim Dawn is a BETTER GAME than Wolcen. By far. I don't find it as fun to play, but by all accounts it's a perfectly functional, expertly crafted ARPG by some of the best in the business. And its all-time peak, which we'll assume was either release or near release (in fact I'll check in a bit) was barely *half* that of what Wolcen had to face. Consider also what Wolcen's concurrency looked like before release. Barely a thousand at best.

Actually, nope. That 61k spike for Grim Dawn was in May 2019, when the game was 70% off briefly. Well, that explains a lot.

Before that, its highest concurrency was 20k. Its official release in February 2016 received a paltry 15k max.

So that should help put some perspective on why Wolcen's 'dropping' player numbers aren't that alarming. It has a way to go before falling below what I'd consider normal for a buy-to-play indie ARPG.

A few others:
https://steamcharts.com/app/200710
Torchlight II
652 playing an hour ago
1,126 24-hour peak
54,010 all-time peak

https://steamcharts.com/app/215530#All
The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing

26 playing 37 min ago
61 24-hour peak
4,210 all-time peak

All this tells you is that player concurrency is NOT that important for a buy to play ARPG (or any game really) to succeed. It's all about units sold (and not refunded, of course). And the company has no obligation to reveal that number.

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All this tells you is that player concurrency is NOT that important for a buy to play ARPG (or any game really) to succeed. It's all about units sold (and not refunded, of course). And the company has no obligation to reveal that number.

Sales is all that matter. Review bombing is a dirty business where the intention is to harm a video game commercial performance.

I'm not really committed enough to conspiratorial thinking to believe review bombing is somehow orchestrated or weaponised. Most of the time I think it's a snowball effect, a more active version of the downvote one. But I also think after the NMS debacle and Hello Games' subsequent recovery, the very idea of a destructive review bomb is a temporary issue rather than a permanent one.

Considering that concurrency, the likely low rate of refunds, unit price...I'd say Wolcen Studio took in between $5-10m USD. Respectable but not an amount that's going to keep a game going for years. And lord knows how far in the red they are overall.

I expect we'll see cosmetic mtxes before too long. How many of those will sell after such an ungracious release may well make or break the game for real. I'd love to be wrong, but there's very little chance of them being able to go the paid expansion route, and slots for mtxes were already 'removed' from the game in a recent patch.


https://www.escapistmagazine.com/v2/wolcen-lords-of-mayhem-zero-punctuation/

Oh man, this was hilarious. I don't normally dig Yahtzee (he's like a weird mix of Gervais and Brooker for me, both of whom can grate like fuck when they're not tempered by good material) but when he's clearly not taking it seriously, he can be very entertaining.

Obviously it is not orchestrated. Understanding the psychology behind mob mentality activities is that people must be a willing "victim". They are conspirators doing it in an foreseeable anticipated fashion waiting hopefully for their desirable event to happen.

It take effort to do so because I don't normally write reviews for bad games. It is time consuming. I'll just uninstall.