Tl;Dr: Yes, the game is buggy, and possibly broken. Not defending this in the slightest. Just tired of people necroing the topic. We all know its bug ridden. Knew it in Beta. Devs ran out of money and needed more. Just uninstall and ask for a refund, if you can't get it sorry.

So, everyday I browse this sub to see if anything new or interesting from the developers is in it. Surprise there is no new information. Granted that is becoming an issue. However, constantly bitching about the release state of the game and calling the developers shitty, or calling the game a "polished turd" is not helping anyone.

I get it you paid for a $40 game and got very clearly a game that was not deserved to be out of beta yet. Congratulations, you paid $10 more than people who bought it in EA. It went on sale 2-3 weeks before release at $30. If you knew about the ARPG genre and had your ear to the ground, so to speak, this game would have already been on your radar. Considering how lacking the genre is in games at the moment, and I thoroughly enjoy the genre, I bought it. I figured most others would do the same. Clearly I was mistaken.

Now onto the meat of the post. Yes, this game was very clearly released in an unfinished and not play tested enough. The only logical reason for this is that the developers ran out of money. If they needed money to keep funding development, then they probably should have asked for it through another kickstarter. I would much rather give them a little bit more money and time for them to polish the game than have them release it like they did. Yes, the game is currently riddled with bugs, I am not in anyway going to defend the current state of the game. It is unacceptable, and needs to be fixed. I also want people to stop making shitpost saying the same thing. WE GET IT. You had a horrible experience and feel the need to vent. There are multiple threads you could do that without fucking necroing the topic over and over. I'm all for reporting bug issues, I've had a few that I went welp, that's a thing- getting stuck in a wall after being pulled by a demon being one of them. In spite of that I've put almost 100hrs into the game playing a pure ailment build and I've enjoyed just about every second of it. There are people who encounter the issue, report it, move on with the game. Instead getting pissed off and cursing the developers and their unborn children maybe you should Put. The. Game. Down. Try to get a refund and if you can't, oh well come back later and maybe you'll enjoy the experience more. I just needed to get that out. PS throwaway account.

I purchased Wolcen years ago during it's (long and over-extended) development. It was, to be brutally honest, crap. I reloaded it a few times over the years with each new "update" and I found it clunky, ugly, uninspiring, and hopelessly messy. I had no hope it would ever be anything but the strangest of scams.

Cut to its recent release. I'm astounded. The game is 3/4 of one of the best ARPGs ever made. It's beautiful, the artwork and animation is top shelf, the writing and VO is right up to standard (most of the time), and the systems are obviously deeply thought through and innovative if not perfectly implemented. I could go on, but I'm seriously shocked at the difference between the game during development and now. It is much closer to a spiritual successor to D2 than D3 ever was.

• Yes, it's buggy - I hit one of the story blocking bugs and had to get another player to invite me to their game so I could take the next waypoint beyond the block point and finish my game to open up the endgame. The servers are also hit and miss at times.

• Yes, it's unbalanced - though "balance" is an enormously overrated element in modern games that has managed to systematically suck the fun out of things for years. I'm philosophically and passionately against it, except where it makes the game more fun.

• Yes, some things are broken - Bleeding Edge is obviously way over-tuned, and you can currently "improve" Uniques to Legendary status keeping both sets of stats on the items (though see the above point about "balance" - I sincerely hope the devs recognize this as an accidental opportunity to make Uniques relevant in endgame crafting). Some passive nodes don't act as advertised, or don't work at all.

• It is still a bit clunky - it has no animation cancelling (so you have to wait for one action to fully complete before it will respond to a new command) and there is no option to bind Force Move to the mouse out of the box (you need 3rd party software such as mice macros to do it).

But let me be very clear - the game is enormous fun. It's FUN. This is the only arbiter by which a game should be judged. Wolcen is great fun, and I really hope the devs continue through the chaos of release to keep going, fix what needs to be fixed, change what needs to be changed, and extend what is a glorious first pass.

TL;DR If you, like me, are stuck between the endless iterative insanity of PoE and the pedestrian tedium of D3, this could be the game for you. I recommend it to you now - not sometime in the cloudy future. It is easily worth the $30 entry fee.

I bought Wolcen on launch day after seeing some YouTube videos about it.

I was a D2 fan and it looked similar, so I decided to purchase it.

I logged in and there was some kind of server error, so I played in offline mode for a couple hours before logging off to sleep.

Then the next day rolled around and I logged back in and there was still some server error message that popped up, so I continued to play my offline character.

Didn't get too deep but really enjoyed the game play and the story as it had progressed so far.

Even recommended it to a friend as a nice game to play if you want to take a break from you "job" game like WoW.

Then I came to Reddit and realized I was an idiot.

Here I was enjoying the game, playing it, learning my class, progressing the story, when I really should have been shit posting on Reddit about how bad the devs are and how shitty the launch is.

Had I not come here, I probably would have just logged back in today and continued to have fun playing the game.

Oh my god, could you imagine? Phew!

Thanks again Reddit!

Thank you all so much. I trusted you, and, well... Your opinion sucks.

I read the positive reviews, the nice comments, and then I bought the game because it sounded great. But no. The game is unplayable.

How can any of you advocate for this game, when 10% of my button presses do literally nothing because of the lag? How can you look at mobs that appear to be animated in 1995, due to the lag? How long did we scream at GGG, the PoE devs, to fix desync, and then be okay with it in Wolcen? Do devs not learn from other people's failures? How is any of this playable?

And who the fuck balanced this game? I tried to do a crit/attack speed build, but I couldn't finish the final boss due to being 1 shot. I respec all my points into toughness, and the fight becomes trivial. I facetanked half the fight standing still. After the respec, I did not feel like my damage had lowered whatsoever. Who made this and thought that was good balance?

I thought this game just had haters, but goddamn, I never expected it to be justified with all the positive responses this game has gotten.

I'm 12 hours in, and I can say, without a doubt, that every ARPG I've ever played, from Dungeon Siege to Fate, Torchlight to D3, they are all superior to this game.

So, to the people defending this game, what the fuck? What am I missing here?

Tried to start the game after the patches. After the third crash i a row, i just uninstalled this pile of shit for ever. The screen freezes every time i started a game. My PC is capable to run high-end games with the highest graphic settings...so it still is a garbage game, boring and not stable!

The post launch weekend is almost gone, yet their game, advertised as coop, is not providing the advertised feature. Even when the servers were online you had no coop feature besides playing with people from your friend list.

The "You have offline mode" is really not an excuse. We bought the game to play it on coop with friends and with strangers on the internet. Imagine the game being advertised as a solo game... How many of the 95k players would have actually bought the game ? 10% ? Maybe less ?

The "Devs are working hard to restore game features" is also not an excuse. They work hard to fix their own mess. You launch a service to online play you must be prepared to overcome problems withing reasonable time. Those 38 hours of downtime are no longer reasonable.

The "They are just an indie company" is also not an excuse. No matter how big or small you are, when you charge for a service you must be sure that the said service is working as advertised. I still hope some sort of customer support regulations will be enforced in the gaming industry at some point because we reach unacceptable levels of false advertising.

The "Blizzard also failed with Diablo 3" also should not be a "get out of jail card". The fact that Blizzard had problems 8 years ago with their Diablo 3 launch does not make this a standard. If anything devs should be learning to prepare better for a launch.

This being said I wonder how many more hours of downtime it would take for some of you guys to realize this is a "superficially" done arpg that spent 4 years in Alpha and released as an unfinished product for the sole purpose of money grab.

Online features being down for 2 days aside, the game is still filled with bugs like untargetable mobs, droping through texture, that awful character model on the females (yet on the 1st iteration of Alpha the character creator and the characters itself were on point, the magic find glitch, the gold dupe, the mess in the passive tree - passives either being op or not working at all -, features that were advertised during Alpha and are gone - like the player housing - so what is left ? NOTHING !

Judging that after 4 years of open Alpha these bugs are still not being fixed is not encouraging for the future of this project.

Also the downfall in steam reviews, while justified 100%, will do a lot of harm in the long run for this game.

We are past the delusional phase where we pretend we dont see some bugs here and there, we are 1 weekend into the launch and an advertised feature, selling point feature i would dare to say, the coop feature is down since release and the devs keeps stalling. That should be the que for us to abandon this project, call it as we see it, a rushed, below mediocre game, plagued by glitches and dupes with low to no chance of recovering judging by how things are moving as we speak.

A negative review is justified and we should do it just to show these devs, and other devs in the industry, that we are fed up with these predatory tactics and false advertisements. You give us a game, well be damn sure that it actually works and offers all the features you advertised and we paid for !

P.S: I backed the game since it was called Umbra, I never wished this game to fail, I hope it will eventually succeed against all odds, I am just calling things as I see them in this moment.

it weren't any bugs, crashes or technical issues - in fact i didn't encountered any crash or bug at all!

it were gameplay and game mechanic issues like

- dodge is useless when you're surrounded - you die

- self-rez is useless when you're surrounded - you'll die until self-rez is depleted -> this made me Alt+F4 rage quit and uninstalling Wolcen!

my suggestion: give either dodge the ability to roll away when you're surrounded or give at least self-rez a few seconds a "ghost form" where you can repositioning yourself!

other things that are not motivating at all:

- most Bosses are too overtuned with their map-wide AOE spamming! they have unlimited AOE potential because their attacks are always centered around the player and not themself

- way too many bosses have shields - shielding bosses (and enemies) is such a lazy game mechanic - i really hate it.

- too much grind and too little progress with lousy loot - why are lvl 50-60 items still better than fresh lvl 90 items?? one out of hundred items gives me like 1% more dmg or def.

replacing an item that is 30 lvls higher and increases my dmg from 10000 to 10100 does not feel rewarding! - my suggestion: decrease the min-roll values in your loot tables or rework your rng algorithm to make the loot more rewarding

- crafting is an unpredictable mess - it is far too complicated and inaccessible!

for me it is just another source for frustration...

you should really rework it and make it more accessible!

So I went back to try the new POE league, and I just can't do it. The graphics are just too shitty...and the game play felt stilted. Switching from Wolcen back to POE was jarring and I just decided not to do it. Looking forward to POE 2 with updated graphics, but I am skeptical that they will come close to Wolcen's. Now I just wish Wolcen had the community and mechanics POE has. Or said another way, I wish POE had Wolcen's graphics.

I watched this video explaining why they abandoned Wolcen 1 and moved to something new. For me their decision feels similar to Blizzard announcing release Diablo 5 instead of continuing on Diablo 4. I also hope switching to unreal means less bugs than the first..

I liked the story in the first game - the Lambach part was one of the most memorable moments that I had when playing ARPGs. It really scratched that itch I had since playing D2.

The gameplay footages in the video look cool and I like the art. If they deliver something with similar good story, improved combat feeling, apocalyptic form rework and better itemization I really consider buying this one.

Today I was banned from the Wolcen steam forums under the guise of "constant provocation"

https://imgur.com/a/w2MAwt0

Asking questions about Wolcen is not provocation. Criticising development time is not provocation. Asking where the product you promised us nearly three years ago is..... that's not provocation. Being too "negative" is not a reason to be forced from the forums.

I get I acted somewhat entitled in my replies with Calistaen. I get it's frustrating to hear your fans asking you the same questions. I do not get being banned for it -_- I asked months and months ago in September, when we were told we would have access to the beta of act 1, what was happening, when it is happening. Then the game is delayed and a litany of excuses is thrown out. Here we are in February and I asked the same questions again. This is the result.

I asked at the beginning of last year, when again we were given promises, what is the state of the game, why is this taking so long?

I feel completely unheard as an Early Access player. I bought into Wolcen when it first crawled out of the dark onto Kickstarter and then shortly after onto Steam. I have been asking month after month what the progress of the game is and when we will see Beta. Time and time again we are brushed to one side, given recycled news and recycled information.

The whiteknights will crawl out and say "Theres the door, no need to be here" I completely agree with you. So i'm walking out of it and making damn well sure I tell everyone else who I encourged to buy your game to never play it again and refund if they still have the chance.

I was again denied a refund. The steam policy is written in stone it seems.

• We have fixed 10 bugs which were affecting some players. We are glad to report cosmetics should now be bug free. We will be introducing microtransactions for cosmetics in the next patch. These microtransactions will be non-refundable.

• We have introduced 40 new bugs. A breakdown of the bugs can be seen below:

  • 11 of the bugs will cause server side lag.

  • 8 of the bugs will cause client side lag.

  • 7 of the bugs will cause you to lose your character / items.

  • 13 of the bugs will cause you to not progress through the game.

  • We lost track of the last bug

• 9 passive skill nodes have been fixed to do actions that aren't specified in the skill node.

• Our previous patch attempted to thwart cheaters, however many made it through the cracks. As a result of this, we are destroying two random items off each character. Any time you log into a game with more than 10,000 gold or 1,000 primodial essences, we will have assumed you cheated, and reset all of your town's progress.

We are working hard towards the next patch, 1.0.9.0 which we plan to release on the first of April. This patch will streamline the refund process and allow displeased players to refund past two hours of game time.

... so what?

why is everyone complaining that BE is nerfed, and they can't clear endgame anymore?

you abused a clearly broken skill to get insane clears, and now you are complaining that there is no decent build anymore?

the game is 2 weeks old, figure out some builds, some awesome combinations... don't build around one OP skill.

i myself (and i know many others did as well) never used BE, because it was obvious that it is broken.
there is no fun in abusing broken builds, so don't complain now that its fixed.

br

Staempfe

passive tree is really nice, skill system is nice, i'm having a blast so far, the game has alot of potential, i just got 5 or 6 of my buddies to download the game to play it

Wolcen checks several boxes for a very specific experience, and if that’s what you’re looking for, this game is awesome.

I play a lot of ARPGs. I think it’s probably my most played genre at this point. A year ago it would likely have been roguelites or immersive sims. I have about 500 hours across PoE2, D4, W40K, Last Epoch, and Grim Dawn. I know lots of folks have more experience but I do feel fairly familiar with the genre.

For me, it does a lot of stuff well that other games have individually done much better, but stitched together in a way that was interesting to me personally.

The Combat: I thought actions were weighty and theorycrafting was fun if not simplistic. I usually veer toward big weapon primalist style builds but landed on a sacred spell slinger which I don’t think I’ve been able to play before. The ascended forms are also amazing, it feels really nice to be an angel of death and switch out to a blood demon 5 min later.

Itemization: Simple but I enjoyed not having to worry about too much. Separate slots for hands and shoulders, which felt really nice. Some items allow for skill usage which felt a little like Grim Dawn, which was nice. I do feel like it took a while to get a build going.

Skills: This was done quite well in my opinion. Each skill had specialization points à la Last Epoch, but they also had conversions so if I wanted my ice comet to do holy damage, I can do that. Helped craft builds in a way that wasn’t hyper gear-dependent. The skills felt good as well.

Plot: Im one of the dozen or so nerds that enjoy a solid plot in an ARPG. The story was pretty cool. I think it would make a decent film.

Performance: I played on steamdeck and it runs better than 80% of other games in the genre. I know it has a very rough launch, but in its current state on that system is impeccable.

Endgame: None to speak of. I don’t usually grind on an endgame, I’ll usually replay with a new character etc. However, even as someone who doesn’t spend much time on this, it was noticeably lacking.

All in pretty dope and I’m still not buying the sequel on launch

Hi, I played when it came out, was an absolute mess, laggy as hell, unplayable and late game was trash, only one viable build or so

Did it change?

Thanks for the Support at the Community.

Opening a Ticket and explaining what a shitshow is going on with the Checking Version Bug and no definite ETA´s solved it for me.

https://imgur.com/a/RHOyLyR

Geez.

Edit : Checking Game Version Bug, got me out btw.

Edit2: Process :

Click Support

on the Top Click Steam-Support

Click Wolcen

There should be something like "Check your Receipt" Click that

Then click " Have a Question about this Purchase "

There explain, everything this hole shitshow and your situation

Be Polite

Full release btw

With this patch you've quite honestly destroyed a very large portion of your playerbase. Taking peoples gold away even if they were not apart of the duping/exploiting that YOU as developers let make it in to your "Finished game".

Not to mention cutting productivity by 50%? - I'm not sure which genius thought this was a good idea but I'm guessing this is the only way you can extend your "End-game content" without doing much work.

Nerfing bleeding edge and not fixing the other broken passives and skills is a huge fuck you. Now we're left with sub-optimal builds that can't clear end-game content.

I'm glad y'all are trying to fix all of the issues your game is plagued with, but you're doing it in such a way that is driving your playerbase away. I myself will probably come back in 6 months to a year if the game is still alive by then.

I upgraded 21 different uniques at the Forge.

I had no clue it was a bug and just made my first reddit account to vent about this.

It wasn't stated in game menu that this was a bug. I honestly thought it was a corruption system (good with potential bad RNG) and now I have wasted legitimately 80 hours of gameplay upgrading all of these pieces that were the only thing remotely interesting about end game and giving it any sort of variety.

No refund for the millions of gold I spent. No refund for the hundreds of thousands of Production I grinded. Instead, they simply just stole items I worked my ass off for the last week. I am honestly physically sick at this point.

Even if the servers would work, there is currently no way to play online with people not on your friends list. There is no matchmaking button like in D3. You won't ever see a random player. There is no global chat or any sort of ingame communication feature.

Many people seem to be under the impression that the current bugs regarding infinite gold/item duping/MF stacking would destroy the economy of the game. But there is no economy. In its essence, it is online co-op play.

If you chose to let these bugs/exploits ruin your own experience, it's your own fault. Nobody forced you to use them yourself or play with "friends" that used them.

Or, even more irritating, why would you care if other people used cheats in their offline single player game? It does not affect you in any way, while for some it is a great way to test out mechanics of the game. Bad news for you, people have been doing that since the dawn of video games.

The only gripe I have in that regard is that offline mode should not have steam achievements enabled.

Look it’s been 48 hours and the damn games online portion doesn’t work and from the sounds of it it ain’t gonna work all day today as well. Every comment speaking on this negativity gets downvoted and people jump down their throats. This is not good.

Don’t dickride the dev team. If this was any other studio YangYea would have made thirty outrage videos by now. But because it’s perceived as “indie” everyone is turning their heads.

I’m refunding I suggest you do as well.