''This game will dethrone PoE''

The women certainly have legs that go on forever!

I've spent a good amount of time into Wolcen so far. While I've spent an inordinate amount of time in D2, D3, and PoE, I'll compare it to PoE.

Pros;
Visually very nice, while some areas were meh, there were more 'whoa this looks cool' areas.
Character Xmog system is fantastic. I'm convinced most of their time was spent on it.
Continuing the theme of graphics, most skills look nice as well.

Unfortunately, a very short list compared to the cons.

Cons, In no particular order;

Gigantic, super, game breaking bugs. From screwing over your low level buddy who gets instantly pulled into your act 3 questline, unable to go back, to straight up locking you out of the game (currently happening to players who upgraded a specific city building thing). Stashes STILL being deleted / rolled back.

feels more clunky then not, especially melee.

No force move option, can't rebind left click off of basic attack.

Looting, placing items, dropping items, vendoring, stashing ect feels awful. There's noticeable server lag when trying to do any of that.

Have to click multiple times to loot an item / hover multiple times to see tooltips correctly.

While the dual resource could be a good idea, it starts off as a generator / spender system like D3, and generally feels pretty bad to play with until you 'solve' it, by stacking RRC, taking certain nodes in the passive tree, and then spamming skills other then your basic attack to generate it.

Casters are absolutely trash at the moment. There's no base damage to multiply off of, unlike attacks which have weapons.

Broken passive tree, broken nodes, and broken stats. I'm reading a ton of complaints about stats not doing what they say they do, and I've experienced that myself. Everything is additive (except for some things that can be considered multiplicative, but good luck figuring out which ones actually do that).

VERY unbalanced skills. Also unbalanced damage types. What do you think is better, going for just attacks and crits for your dude, or going for attacks and crits and then stacking the ailments they cause up to 30 times? Yea, ailments obviously, which means your tree is far more determined then you think because of all the ailment nodes you need.

Endgame is literally just rifts, and greater rifts. However I will say they're better then the D3 variant, because you can spend gold to add affixes to them.

No search function for the passive tree. Have fun with that!

Unspeccing your tree means removing EVERY node, not just a couple. Have fun with that too lol.

Gear upgrades are very linear. It seems about every 10 levels you'll just start dropping gear that will completely invalidate what you're wearing.

The lowest level uniques seems absurdly overpowered. I couldn't find an upgrade to my 2 hand weapon that had over 80 damage to save my life at level 17. A level 10 unique found off the vendor had a range up to like 223.

That said, the uniques I'm finding in end game don't seem good at all, however I haven't seen a list of what's available and maybe some good ones are just very rare.



Anyway I'm worn out, maybe I'll add more later. However I will leave it with one final complaint, offline play.

Yes yes, offline play sounds great. However, that means the entire game is on the clients computer, which means the source code. This has ALREADY lead to people pouring through it, to find the most broken / OP interactions. And while that alone wouldn't completely ruin any mystery, being able to so easily edit offline heroes does.

Doesn't matter the patch, the content ect, players won't be able to just only theory craft, but also create an infinite amount of builds with all the gear they want to test out every combination. If they add leaderboards, the 'best' will be found within days of any content.

Edit. I guess I should leave my opinion as well as if it wasn't already clear. Wolcen might very well do 'better' then PoE in terms of players, but it's absolutely another D3 clone with a couple extra ideas. There's still VERY little depth to the game, almost no endgame to even speak of, and with this entire release so broken (and I very much doubt play tested), good luck to Wolcen ever getting out actual content.

PoE still reigns, and PoE2 will crush it.

At this point in time ARPG genre is basically dead.

At least when you approach it as a developer. If you decide "Yo, I want to make a nice Dungeon Crawler or ARPG or any kind of Diablo clone" you take a look at the market and see PoE. Now you have to come out with a game that beats PoE in one of two ways. Either through content (which tbf is almost impossible as PoE has 10 years worth of content, even more if you look at the usual developement cycle of other studios) or through mechanics which promise to beat PoE in the long run. But in either case you still have to at least compete in the other category. Like, it is an almost insurmountable challenge. And you have to beat the current PoE with your newly released game. Like, out of the gate. How is that even possible? And where do you go from there? Like, you can´t promise to be better than the current PoE in like 10 years. Which player is going to play your game for 10 years for it to be, at that point, better than PoE was 10 years ago? I´ll leave the answer up to you... but the correct one is "noone".

I mean sure, it´s a fairly easy task to beat PoE when it comes to graphics and performance, I´d imagine. I mean hundreds of games have done it, even games with intense fast-paced multiplayer action. But at the end of the day that´s just not enough. Because if it was, Blizzo would have beaten GGG years ago. But they didn´t.

So how can you do it? How is it even possible? It isn´t. That´s the simple truth. PoE is just too much. Too much content, too many mechanics, too deep of an item system, too extensive an economy. Even if you think (and so do I btw) some of these are flawed, take a step back and seriously think about how a game would have to look to beat or at least be equal to every single one of these aspects. If you are a developer and you look at this abomination that PoE has become you just walk away. The ARPG genre is dead, there´s nothing to gain anymore.

I get where you are coming from, yet I dont necessarily agree.


PoE is tailored and marketed towards a more hardcore minded playerbase. Which is fine, if you happen to be one of those players and its horrible at the same time, if you dont happen to be one of those players.
Forums and Reddit are proving this pretty much on a daily basis. More casual oriented players are complaining about difficulty, time investment needed, complexity and so on. Which is true from their point of view and totally wrong at the same time, if you take the more hardcore-oriented point of view.

So if you want to beat PoE, you have to tailor and market your game towards a more casual crowd. This crowd is way bigger than the hardcore crowd anyways, which means it could work out just fine.

That said: The crowd that PoE is tailored to wont give a damn about a more casual game. They will most likely stay right here and keep going.
Which means to 2 different types of ARPGs can easily coexist w/o actually competing with each other.

However, the more hardcore-niche is firmly in GGGs hands.
I cant see another ARPG taking over this niche anytime soon. The more casual-niche is free for the taking though.

After ~12 hours of play time in the release version I can confirm that Wolcen is a broken mess of a game. PoE wasn't nearly this broken at release. And I'm playing offline. I hope the devs go to work with all that money they got (at least half a million games sold, probably closer to a million) and deliver a functioning game within the next 6 months or so.

Wolcen is a solid entry, or better to say will be one, when its developer fixes all those bugs and does some rebalancing of the skills and tree. You still can have fun with the game in its current state but it will be a temporary endeavor. Wolcen has currently no staying power that you can compare to PoE.

It is visually attractive but for all its flashiness and fancy details, the game slows down, clutter screen and provide poor viewing angle.

Its end-game while "fresh" at the moment is again only one-time effort and once you have done it once, you have seen it all.

Unless Wolcen developers can come up with a post-launch support model that would deliver new content regularly, Wolcen would be just another blip on the radar that will be forgotten few weeks down the line.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

"

Aynix wrote:

Peak of PoE is 200k+. It was in Legion or Betrayal. Also Wolcen will be dead as soon new league of PoE will appear.

For six weeks maybe lol.

Also you literally made up those Betrayal and Legion numbers.

no

https://gamingbolt.com/path-of-exile-betrayal-hits-nearly-189000-peak-concurrent-players-at-launch

What I DO like about Wolcen is the mini-dash you do with melee attacks.

"

Azdrubel wrote:

At this point in time ARPG genre is basically dead.

At least when you approach it as a developer. If you decide "Yo, I want to make a nice Dungeon Crawler or ARPG or any kind of Diablo clone" you take a look at the market and see PoE. Now you have to come out with a game that beats PoE in one of two ways. Either through content (which tbf is almost impossible as PoE has 10 years worth of content, even more if you look at the usual developement cycle of other studios) or through mechanics which promise to beat PoE in the long run. But in either case you still have to at least compete in the other category. Like, it is an almost insurmountable challenge. And you have to beat the current PoE with your newly released game. Like, out of the gate. How is that even possible? And where do you go from there? Like, you can´t promise to be better than the current PoE in like 10 years. Which player is going to play your game for 10 years for it to be, at that point, better than PoE was 10 years ago? I´ll leave the answer up to you... but the correct one is "noone".

I mean sure, it´s a fairly easy task to beat PoE when it comes to graphics and performance, I´d imagine. I mean hundreds of games have done it, even games with intense fast-paced multiplayer action. But at the end of the day that´s just not enough. Because if it was, Blizzo would have beaten GGG years ago. But they didn´t.

So how can you do it? How is it even possible? It isn´t. That´s the simple truth. PoE is just too much. Too much content, too many mechanics, too deep of an item system, too extensive an economy. Even if you think (and so do I btw) some of these are flawed, take a step back and seriously think about how a game would have to look to beat or at least be equal to every single one of these aspects. If you are a developer and you look at this abomination that PoE has become you just walk away. The ARPG genre is dead, there´s nothing to gain anymore.

i'm gonna destroy your whole argument with 1 phrase.

"an arpg with well-implemented pve co-op and pvp"

in my humble opinion PoE shifted from the arpg genre towards the pachinko genre.

from someone who still play and rotate between Torchlight 2 (modded), Titan Quest (new expansions) & Grim Dawn (picked recently since i was waiting for a definitive edition).

i hope PoE 2 will fix something, but i have learned to not have high expectations in the gaming industry.

"

DiabloImmoral wrote:

The women certainly have legs that go on forever!

I found that pretty creepy... but not game breaking.

RMT guilds and whales bragging about their Headhunter builds while the entire game goes to garbage because of horrible balancing is finally a thing of the past.

I personally think poe died with 3.9 and I am ecstatic that a new arpg is out that I can play instead of ever touching this [Removed by Support] You made your bed now you have to lie in it :D