^ Now we're finally getting on the dark side
I recently played Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem
It's an interesting, but not necessarily new take on the ARPG genre. You start as one of 3 classes, who are all exactly the same except for the starter weapon. You have stat points you can allocate, you have a huge passive skilltree like PoE, but not quite as big, and your skills are based on relics that you can find and learn.
The amount of skills you can potentially have is very limited. Merely 12 or 13 skills for dexterity based and warrior based builds, which isn't a lot tbh. Only mage has more variety. In addition to that the balance is simply horrible. For example, there's a kind of black hole skill that pulls enemies in. It's just absolutely OP, killing all minor and medium mobs, while almost killing big mobs single handedly.
Skills can be upgraded with a rune system like Diablo 3, but instead of being able to pick only 1, you can pick multiple that require different amount of points. For example you get your first point when you level the skill to level 5 the next at level 10 if I remember correctly and so on. Then there are different kinds of upgrades. For example for the skill I mentioned above you can spend 1 point in order to increase the AoE of the skill, and you can spend 2 points to make it last 2 seconds longer. There are multiple different options, which I guess is meant to lead to build variety.
Honestly, I like this skill system, but it's not 100% perfect since there are some upgrades that are absolutely necessary. The Frost nova for example only receives an AoE buff at level 11. So you can't really use it up until that point.
The fights usually take some time, especially when there are summoners somewhere that you don't see on the screen. That grants the game a medium difficulty, which is at one or another point unfair, but most of the time it's fair. So difficulty wise, it's in a pretty good spot and only requires minor tweaks.
You have 4 stamina points (which can be increased later on) that you can use for a roll. That makes it easy to get across the map from 1 mob pack to another, but it also helps tremendously in sticky situations like boss fights.
Then there's something regarding combat that I didn't use at all, unless I was forced to: When you fight you get some kind of resource that you can spend to turn into a huge angel or devil with a completely different skillset. You can choose 1 from 4 and unlock the others later on automatically. I personally didn't like it, but some boss fights required me to use it since it makes you invulnerable. And some bosses can also use this, so you simply need to either use it or run away or you get instakilled.
The itemization is okay, but it could use some more depth. However as a baseline for future updates it's okay for now. I just noticed that there are some legendarys that are absolutely insane. I found some gloves that only gave me 10 health and 3 resist, compared to the gloves I wore with 280 force shield and 220 health, but they had this fantastic modifier: "Enemies killed explode in an AoE for 500% weapon damage" which I of course needed.
Some background to Wolcen: It released in february 2020. Then it got a huge shitstorm because of all the bugs and the lack of content. A couple of weeks ago they released a new content patch that was supposed to fix most bugs. Well, they didn't and instead introduced new bugs. For example there's the new blood trail mechanic, which was stolen from PoE. Those bloodtrails are usually in front of some story bosses and when you follow them you can fight against another boss before the story boss, which also grants items that are stronger than usual, but also add some minor negative effect that makes you weaker. For example: you get +30 Force Shield but you have 5 health less. In general it's always a buff still. Anyway, I got sidetracked. Those bloodtrails however were bugged for me. A bloodtrail usually requires you to walk from 1 location to another multiple times. However, sometimes the locations just don't spawn. You only notice that when you get there, that you can't continue the bloodtrail because that bone pile is missing. That wouldn't be an issue. But listen. Unless you finish a bloodtrail, you can't progress in the story, because some kind of barrier is built up. Like a door that will only open after you finished the blood trail. That means that this bug is absolutely game breaking, because when you get this bug once, you will get this bug again and again and I have no idea what I did to cause that bug. Anyway, on one of my characters I tried the same map 5 times and the bone pile just wouldn't spawn. So my character couldn't progress and I had to start over.
After that I encountered that bug AGAIN. So the only logical thing I can do is simply not play with blood trails (which you can choose on character creation)
This is essentially a complete and utter rip off. A new mechanic was added that fucks up the game. Old bugs weren't fixed. Minions clipping into walls, constant laggs whenever some boss spawns, progression lock...
This is really sad. The developers don't give a f* about the community. That's also visible when it comes to reviews. In the recent weeks the reviews on steam went from "mostly positive" to "mostly negative" in merely 7 days.
And all of this makes me kind of sad because this game has indeed some potential. The graphics is stunning, the game is fun, builds are pseudo-deep enough to force you to test things out, but I simply can't go on playing this game because of all those bugs. I played through the mainstory at least (which I didn't care about) and the endgame only consists of a Diablo 3 rift-like system, which is really not that great. In addition to that the game suddenly changes when you play through it. You become the lord of the city and you can grow the city and build new things, and depending on how far you got in the last rift you finished you get time points which increases the progress of the buildings. For example a 1-stage rift merely gives 16 points to all buildings in the building queue, but you need 100 for the first few buildings. However, if you die in the rift you get nothing.
Honestly, I don't understand the design decision behind that. Why would you turn your ARPG into a RTS all of a sudden? Doesn't make much sense to me tbh. It's like that one WoW expansion (I believe it was Legion) where you could form an outpost and farm the mines in that outpost, build things, get crafting materials, send hirelings on missions and so on. To sum it up: boring.
Anyway. Bugs and lack of endgame content, skills, and balance aside, that game does have potential. But as it is now, it's just a sad rip-off of other ARPG's and Hack'n'Slash titles with enough gamebreaking bugs to make you furious.
Should you buy it? Well, if you want to waste your money, sure, go ahead.
