I've heard good things about this! Maybe we'll check it out on the stream today.

I haven't been able to play it today because I'm still at work. What I played of EA was pretty good. I wouldn't say a 2nd coming or anything. I'm hopeful.

It looks cool, but they still don't seem to have added controller support which was one of the first things they said they were doing. But they completely changed the game from conception though, it looks a lot like diablo now instead of the crazy open world thing they were going for.

As someone that plays crowds of ARPGs hoping to chase that high that the D2's Necromancer gave me (D3's Witch Doctor is good too): I've been really enjoying myself. This is exactly what I was hoping D3's direction would go in as it developed. It has:

• Nice big passive skill tree and stat attributes that you can refund at any time.
• 40~ skills all with multiple runes to turn on.
• Award worthy sound design that makes me legitimately surprised at how much a game can improve the sound of video game lightning.
• Actually interesting approach to stats. Usually it's just "mages dump 75% of points into wis/int" but this one spreads all damage types across 3/4 of the stats (like STR affects spell damage and AGI spell speed). They then have damage scaled higher per your 1st most used stat, then 2nd, and so on.
• Voice acting is real solid.

I can't wait to get home and play more. Granted I've never heard of this game before it got out of Early Access, and I'm still in the first act: but it's just everything I envisioned I wanted so far. Let's hope the summons are fun.

Servers were taken offline late last night eu time and are due to be back up at 5pm utc. The online mode was deleting stash and progress. Not the best start but stuff happens. Don't go into there discord, its the worst of toxic internet in there.

I'd never heard of it before and when it popped up I immediate put it on my wish list. I've too much on my plate at the moment but this looks great.

Don't think it was on many people's radar until recently. So i'd say this already exceeded the hype.

I've spent 5-ish hours with it since the proper release and it's... fine? The moment to moment action is snappy, though I wish the dodge roll came out more quickly and fluidly. The narrative is sleep-inducingly hackneyed, and all of the progression systems seem immensely over-engineered. It's cup also runneth over with (so far mostly minor) bugs -- untargetable enemies, UI elements not rendering, and at some point one of my skills just stopped dealing ANY damage until I relaunched the game.

I'll stick with it -- as I said, the action is nice, and hopefully the heft of those progression systems actually manifests as depth later in the game -- but mostly due to my academic interest in ARPGs.

Seems everyone on Steam is throwing hissy fits because online isn't working. I've just been playing offline. Strange how you always hear complaining when a game is online only... This can be played offline and no one seems to want to.

My experience so far has been mostly fine. I'm at the end of Act 1 and enemies for the most part are super easy, very few do any real damage. Bosses can 1 shot me though. There are a few bugs and an odd type of input latency. Sometimes clicking does nothing. Whether it's clicking on an item in the inventory, or an enemy, sometimes you just have to click again. I'm not online either. Also Pugilist's momentum doesn't work for the staff. I'm thinking about taking a break from it and waiting for a patch.

Oh I also find it very annoying that loot labels only show for 3 seconds. Makes me wonder who was the guy who thought this was a good idea?

These devs are literally a small team and some steam users will just not cut them any slack which is sad and hypocritical in itself. I've played it offline for about 10 hours so far and aside from some minor bugs it's been a blast.

I read people are losing progress on their offline character and for the people who want this for online, your offline character is completely separate.

Small team or not, they are charging a lot for this game (for an Arpg) and it's broken, the reviews are understandable.

They intervened pretty quickly in regards to the progress loss and had to turn off 'online mode'.

With the exception of PoE, they charge significantly less than any other ARPG that had a price tag upon release. Small team is actually excusable in this instance (to me) because they're literally a small team and not some notable big-named dev with fuck you money to back it up. People have defended way more egregious things in recent gaming history. It's truly some entitled gamer shit to crucify these guys over problems that most games have had at one point another.

It feels like the game should have probably not been released yet but I don't think most of the reviews are justified. Just reads like a bunch of kids screeching for the sake of it.

@arcadefire: Besides Diablo I've never paid more than 25 bux on an ARPG. POE is free, Grim Dawn is like 10 bux, Warhammer 40k is expensive but they do 50% sales so I got it for 25$, Van Helsing, Victor Vran, Titan Quest, Torchlight etc were all cheaper etc.

Not to mention they steadily raised the price on the game. You put a game out at a pretty high price point, small team or not, it should work. Especially when it's been in "early access" for like 5 years.

Not that I am for these type of review bombs though, I just mean they are expected and understandable. And lets not forget, most of them probably are kids.

I will probably pick this up on sale in a year or so when it's "fixed" and adds controller support. Although, I'm not to sure they are actually going to keep that promise.

So just got back online after the days long outage and my stash has disappeared and the story progress is back to act one when I made it to act 3. On top of that there is a gold and item dupe active online. I tried the gold dupe and its really easy to do. I think i'll leave this alone for now and see how things go with it.

I get why people are annoyed though. I don't condone "review bombing" but if people are not getting what they paid for, why can't they complain? Yes they are a small indie company but are charging quite a high price. With that comes certain expectations.

@oursin_360: I only paid $15 for it. Figured it would be smart to buy it on sale during early access because they said they would increase the price once it went gold.

Hm. Gonna give an honest warning: I would wait. The online is a mess, I'm getting heaps of gameplay bugs, and the overall experience is lacking as I am near the end of the story. It'll be good down the line, probably... but right now $40 is asking too much.

Bugs for those interested:

• Some bow skills glitch flying enemies so they become un-targetable. This leads to a daisy chain of bats hounding you with ranged attacks until you exit the zone.
• Minion AI often don't attack despite being hit in close proximity. Even more worrying: minions don't target act bosses, the only hard fights in the game.
• Minions like to get stuck outside of invisible, arena walls which leads to underpowered fights due to not being able to resummon (the minion button skill makes them perform an ability).
• Game crashes upon hitting "exit game".
• Online just doesn't work at all. I've seen them try to fix the servers but sounds like they're still pretty borked for the 10 minutes you can get on.

There are probably more but I'm just exhausted from trying to enjoy the game.

Wolcen has got me unexpectedly hooked. Seems like it might be worth waiting for some crucial fixes but it's a solid base for them to build on with the combat and class creation systems being my personal favourite of any arpg to date.

Let's just hope they patch it up right.

Yeah, I remember when it was like 20 bux and I almost bought it but it was wayyy in alpha and I wasn't sure how that game would turn out and they didn't have any progress on the supposed controller support they said they were going to do. Turns out it's almost completely different than what it was supposed to be (not saying that's bad) and I'm still not seeing much in terms of controller support (granted they are busy fixing the game as is).

I just got to Act 3 in this game and I gotta say, this game is straight up fucking broken. I've gotten stuck on geometry or fell straight through the floor multiple times during pivotal moments like during boss fights and have had to completely restart multi-stage fights from all the way from the start. Plus, loot also seems to wildly fluctuate your damage in ways that just makes the game feel completely unbalanced.

I really like this game and havent had that many problems so far luckly up to act 3 which is the final act. It seems hit or miss with bugs, however I just logged in and lost a unique item I just got. (Unique is the highest rarity) I have gotten 3 in the several hours I have played (easily 20+). Its just gone from my stash and right now the only fix is to keep logging in and out till it shows up, no luck as of yet.

It was fine. I had a lot of fun with it, despite the server issues and bugs. Using a two handed sword I was able to do ridiculous amounts of damage, and it was always fun tearing through groups in seconds.

There are a lot of bugs though. Mostly I didn't have problems with bosses, except for on the final one I got rid of all its HP and it just stood there doing nothing and not moving on to the next phase. I had to quit and try again from the start of it. With ability bugs there are passives not working at all or not doing what they say they do, ability modifiers that don't work, etc. I mostly was able to get a build that did what I wanted but i've read a lot of people with different stories.

Speaking of stories, this one doesn't have an ending yet. It just stops, implies further action is undertaken, and then skips you months forward to the post-game without saying what happened. So yeah this game isn't finished, there's a hypothetical Act 4 out there somewhere in who knows what written state or maybe just in their heads still. Also during the post-game cutscene my character was T-Posing the entire time.

I played for about 90 minutes, and I feel like it's more like a title entering early access than leaving it.

Actual bugs:

* Voice lines sometimes double play when skipping through dialogue

* All sound effects disappear until going back to the main menu

* Character sometimes floats above the ground and moonwalks after loading into a zone

* Tooltips not working until I click on my inventory

* Trees are a piece of stump and a few leaves

* Items not selling when I right-click on them at a vendor

Things that aren't bugs but should be better:

* Character pathing is very bad, especially to get in the middle of things to AoE

* Skills have huge blocks of lore text instead of stats (damage, cooldown, range) before you get them

* Voice acting and writing feels off

* Poor notification of damage over time effects

I've played and enjoyed the hell out of most of the games in this genre. Wolcen feels like something I should come back to in another 6-12 months.

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