Wolcen now on Early Access on Steam

Lets not forget the Kickstarter too :smile:

To be fair to Wolcen (just a tiny little bit) - they are releasing ‘officially’ about 5 years after their KS. Grim Dawn released officially about 4 years after its own KS. A years difference. Wolcen probably could have released in a similar time-frame if they hadn’t of screwed the pooch so much.

The differences between Wolcen and GD’s early access periods tho is vast and Crate handled theirs just flat out better in every single way in comparison to the way WOLCEN Studio managed Wolcen.


And lets not forget that WOLCEN Studios is sitting there with their now 40 frikkin’ devs in comparison to Crate’s meager 13 devs (and they only built up to that number over the years, slowly).

…plus WOLCEN Studios had a little “help” even from Tencent! which explains how they could even afford to pay the salaries of 40 employees year over year…

https://medium.com/@projectmq/tencents-games-without-borders-support-for-indie-devs-worldwide-b69d1ecb3b9

I dont know @powbam but these guys dont look happy at all, there eyes, i can sense the sadness, and the fake smiles… You will see what I mean when u compare it with Crate here:

Wolcen passion aint there :laughing:

Cratemen are the most happy looking devs in the business.

P.S. We need an updated photo… this thing like 5 years ago smh, and Zantai look thin here compared to the :rofl:present

also further edit: It looks and feels like Zantai is the owner of the company cause medieera always likes to stay in the background :sweat_smile:

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I’d rather argue there is another, even bigger “issue” or better say “difference” between Wolcen Dev and Crate, which can be seen quite often in the “Indie-Scene”. Wolcen with it’s core idea was way to over-ambitious, especially for a Newcomer Team(and if i’m not mistaken a few have only experience in Modding… there are Hardly [?] any Veterans there), meanwhile Crate is Dev-Team made of mostly (?) if not all(?) are Veterans to this Industry. From my Experience Veterans tend often to lower their Plans, “Promises” and Expectations and approach a project in a more “realistic” way… funnily though that this Games still tend often to end bigger than firstly planned / expected (see as example Grim Dawn or It Lurks Belows).

It kinda feels like that Newcomers of tend to be dreamers, (sometimes even with a hint of saltyness and dissapointment about the "Big Industry), which want to create their Passion Project, are over-ambitious and do promise/plan to much but once they open up to the dev cycle they see how hard and unrealistic their Project is, especially for a reasonable timefrime, and than need to scrap stuff.

/Edit:
Though that’s the “Reason” why i’m not even “angry” at the Wolcen Dev. I loved the Alpha “Idea” and really would’ve digged such a huge open World ARPG, but based on their Dev / Update History and the basic / core ideas of their Game it was for me from the beginning pretty obvious that if they want to finish that in the next few years, they need to scrap some ideas and handle the project more realistically. For me it’s also “more” “Important” for majority of Games to see / play what i really get with the final game, instead of focusing too much on what could’ve been or “devs” planned or spoken. That’s why i’m still excited for Wolcen, even if it’s a more compact Game… and that’s why i for one enjoyed No Mans Sky at Release, because i really care more about what i see / play or a Dev Deliever, than instead what is shown / blabbered beforehand… even if that means i will get attacked by the overhyped fanboys which reads into much or give too much damn about what Devs / PR Folks say about their Game. (For Real i got attacked from pre-release NMS Overhyped Fans for pointing out the Game-Footage they’ve shown shows nothing more than a mere space walking simulator, meanwhile they believed it really would be a (visually) cheaper Star Citizien… overly complex and stuff…)

That’s also a Reason why i kept an eye on Last Epoch, because the first Public (Alpha?)-Demo didn’t impress me, and i still wanted to wait for a more polished state / release. Now one year after i really love that game.

We have 13 devs but only 9 of those ever worked on GD or it’s expansions. The rest were hired for the town-builder and another project. ; )

I think it’s true though, that experience and trying not to get too out of control with ambitious features is what allowed us to be efficient and ship with such a small team.

It can be very easy to get caught up in grand features or pushing visual quality beyond the point of diminishing returns because you want to feel like you’re AAA, you want respect, you want to compete with Blizzard. However, I’ve always tried to remind myself and the team, we don’t have Blizzard’s budget, we don’t want to have to get tangled up with investors and so, it isn’t realistic to think we can set out to make a game that is the best to the widest audience and competes on all fronts - but we can make something that is the best to a narrower audience, by honing in more on things that audience wants and creating our own unique experience that will be appealing in a differentiated way. Then you have to just hope that audience turns out to be big enough for you to do well and ignore the people who criticize your game, where you recognize they’re just not your target audience and they’re not who you built the game for, so if it isn’t to their taste, that’s fine.

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Is that “other” project the one Zantai is working on?

(as detailed here):
Possible new Crate project in the works

Note: and feel free to comment in that thread anymore details on it you want to reveal :slight_smile: We like info around here!

No, Zantai is working on the other, other project. Grava is working on the first other project.

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Interesting… so that means there are 3 new projects total.

  1. The town-builder
  2. A ‘Grava’ project
  3. A ‘Zantai’ project

Can you give any hints about the Grava one?

Nice. Cant wait to see who comes up with the better final product , Zantai or Grava :grin: Let the CRATE GAMES begin!

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Oh, so 2 possible projects in the works. Nice Medierra. :slightly_smiling_face: Don’t be shy about telling us MOAR! We’re all ears. :smile:

Is one of those other projects the xbox version? Just want to set appropriate hype expectations…

Also, will either of the other projects open up to the GD style community interaction/feedback in future? Because Crate are awesome at that, even though I assume it can be quite taxing to deal with that

No, I don’t think so. That’s been in the pipeline for some time now and Rhis has been working on that. Not sure if anyone else has been helping him except for the other programmers.

As for commuication on future games well, that did get discussed in another thread a while back.

Will we hear more during development of future projects? We can only wait and hope so.

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I tried the last beta they had. Its a completely different game from alfa.
1)Can’t build a character. Can’t even create a girl. Dafuq? I’m suppose to farm on guy butt for 100500 hours?
2)Art look exactly like Warhammer.
3)No rotation of camera. Horrible.
4)combat is click to win. Probably that’s what a mobile arpg feel. Creeps do nothing, just roll and die.
5)Game lag horribly on my gtx1060. Even on all settings on low.
6)To skip a cut scene (they are horrible, btw) holding a button for few seconds is required. >_<

It seems that you didn’t explore any of the new information about the game before posting. I’ve been hyper critical of this game in the past because of the constant changes in direction, but I think they’ve come a long way and I think it is absolutely worth checking out if you’re a fan of the genre.

  1. You can build a character, both male and female, with some customization options. Certainly more options than Grim Dawn. They temporarily disabled it awhile ago to finish some polishing, but it will be coming at launch on the 13th.

  2. Not going to comment on the art as different people like different things. I’m a huge fan of GD art style, but many people complain about it.

  3. I agree that the lack of rotation feels bad after playing GD, but most games in the genre don’t have a rotating camera so I don’t necessarily think this should be viewed as a deal breaker. They did originally have the rotating camera, but I think they had to remove it because they were struggling with their environments.

  4. I find this point to be completely incorrect. There are many, many enemies with a variety of differing abilities/attacks that require positioning and active response. Yes, early game is very much click a target and it dies, but is that surprising? Every game I have played in the genre is like this (it’s been my favorite genre since Diablo 1), and the enemies quickly become varied. I don’t know how you could remotely compare this to mobile. It is NOTHING like a mobile game, especially once you play for over an hour.

  5. Can’t speak on this, I have no technical expertise. I have a 980 TI and I am playing on the highest settings, with almost no issues, though I did have issues in earlier builds.

  6. Most games require you to hold a button so you don’t accidentally skip something that you had hoped to watch. This criticism seems to be a tremendous reach.

That said, I do think there are some issues that will hopefully be addressed at launch. The biggest issue is game balance. Some skills are grotesquely OP (look at videos of turret) and others seem completely worthless (Stings, for example) because of long animations/low overall damage. I anticipate many of these will be non-issues at launch or cleaned up shortly thereafter. Stats seem to have similar disparities in power – many people build with ferocity because Crit damage/Crit Multiplier is strong (this same issue existed in GD, I might add. I’ve been around long enough to remember when OA was just OBSCENE).

Anyhow, we can get into the entire backstory of Wolcen and whether our hopes and dreams were shattered about what was originally promised when we backed the KS (which I did), but I think if you’re able to get beyond those feelings (or never had them), you’ll find a solid title. Hopefully the release is smooth because this game has massive potential. I had completely given up on it, but reinstalled at the beginning of February since I saw release was 2 weeks away and the Steam reviews had risen from Mixed (nearly negative) to Mostly positive (very positive in last 30 days) and I was shocked to see it given my previous feelings. I played from 7 hours to 40 hours over the last week in preparation and I’m still excited about build ideas/concepts and those ideas/concepts are only going to become more varied at official release when all features are implemented.

Hopefully this clears things up for people on the fence.

My experience with the game is looking at streamers that played the game. I have seen quite a bit. The movement speed seemed a bit slow to me. Also the game kinda wants to be half warhammer half diablo? i dont know but the gunplay in my opinion just doesnt fit. Some of the effects i like and so on but I mostly what i worry about is that it improves very little and also is like sort of undecided what it wants to be. Ow yeah and not worth 30 bucks

Not sure about passion and stuff. The beta i played feelt like a poor D3 clone and D3 was the only game i tried to refund and the reason why i sold my BN account and said blizzard good by.
MB something would change on release. I hope ppl that worked on alfa got paid .

I do want to ad that i am excited about wolcen, because level cap will raise from level 20 to 90 so there will (hopefully) be a lot more to do especially endgame. That is when i would consider jumping in if you can comfortably do stuff in end game, that its fluent and stuff sure but does it hold up until the later levels and beyond is the question. Right now you can do whatever combinations and do anything you want basically, i 'd rather see that there is more defined paths to take that are better so basically more restricted but more suitable for endgame, more specialized.

There are a variety of ways to increase movement speed – particularly “rogue” armor types – and it is just as fast as most other ARPGs, especially when you factor in rolling/movement skills. If you don’t like the 30 dollar price, you’ll be sad to hear that it is increasing upon official launch to 45 I believe.

I don’t understand this criticism. You haven’t played the game, have watched some streamer footage, are upset that there are a variety of viable builds and want it to be more restrictive? Also, there are plenty of things that are not viable at this point as you can push monster level higher and higher. Help me understand what you are saying because I don’t get it.

Definitely seems like you are hellbent on not enjoying the game, which is fine, it is your experience. However, given that you didn’t play it long enough to have an informed opinion – as demonstrated in your earlier criticisms/complaints – it seems odd that you are being so outspoken about the game. The skill system certainly has more depth than diablo’s and the passive tree is far more interesting than anything Diablo offered, but is not as complicated as Path of Exile’s. Well, I’d argue PoE isn’t that complicated, more so just punishing, but most tend to think it is.

Well it is still not yet clear what the game at full level cap will be but lets say in my experience it is that games that make that freedom of creating builds very great often fail at making more specialized paths that are more restrictive but in the end more rewarding. Right now i have the impression(which can change ofcourse) that almost anything goes. its not so much a criticism yet but a worry. Specifically about endgame.

What do you mean by “more restrictive” and more rewarding? Like building around a single skill or damage type?

well lets say its all gonna depend on how the game is at max level(lvl 90) what kind of end game builds are there and are there a nice variety and balance of different builds available which we can fiddle with what i mean not a full melee guy that can also use fireballs, it seems rather odd to me. But we will have to see right now there isn’t that much to talk about yet so i am walking ahead of the game but we will see how they have arranged endgame gear and skills to function. Playing til level 20 seems fun and fluid. lets just hope that they keep that up.

btw you have seen these turret builds right? what do you think of that.