It’s really hard to be as irredeemable as Wolcen to be fair.
From a customer stance not even Blizzard is, they’re a heap of… yeah… imagine then rest of that sentence 
But despite that their issues come not from the product but from how they behave as people. Their products are ‘fine’. Not great, not awful… just ‘fine’. Usable definitely.
Yeah but sadly it’s kind if the same exact scenario. Problems get more then less. Content got less and less. Story not finished. Crappy balance. Devs who were more and more unreachable. A few players who said everything is fine and Wolcen is awesome while most already said the ship is sinking and there are meassures need to be taken and the communication needs to improve 
.
To me it’s kind of a deja vu.
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oof… i honestly feel that wolcen COULD have become big. their games art style was more mainstream and i would argue looks much better than LE with so much customizations. on top of that it didnt have mtx (iirc). their passive system was quite a unique take which is somewhat copied by Oniro.
their will/rage system was really unique. but i have so much fucking hatred thinking about it. i love using 2handers, but in that game 2 handers meant only being able to do attacks and not being able to cast spells (unless you had some highly specific unique). when you attacked you generated will power as you consumed rage. the idea was that when you had a lot of will and no rage, you would use spells to consume will and generate rage. a back and forth of sorts.
but the way the game worked, i had no spells that i could cast. i spent a lot of time trying to fix my build by getting gear that reduced rage cost or generate more rage. all futile. i would have downtime where i literally had to wait for rage to generate.
i complained where ever i could. the devs DID NOTHING about this. i was hyped when they released their last batch of content, thinking they would address it. NOPE. i criticaize LE a lot but LE has never done anything as massively stupid as create such an idiotic system that wolcen did. i prefer if wolcen did succeed, but i gave no sympathy when it didnt
The campaign of Wolcen also was very enjoyable, even for repeated playthroughs. It was well designed at the beginning… though it started to fall apart as it neared the early ending (before they scrambled together some crap to ‘finish’ it).
Their major issue was going back on promises, ridiculously bad QA and one atrocious core system with their scaling power of enemies against your own attributes, which meant every level-up caused you to actively become weaker rather then stronger. Dumbest idea ever.
Not even going into the awful end-game… but it had a solid basis. Completely squandered.
And while EHG is ‘not there yet’ it’s on the way to become similar, and that’s a major problem.
despite having a huge gripe against wolcen, i would say wolcen did somewhat pave the way for POE’s settlers content. where they introduced buildings and “time gated” progression.
LE is far ahead if compared to wolcen but yeah. its still not there yet…
edit: now that i think about it, wolcen’s last content update was about hunting beasts… similar to LE’s beneath ancient skies.
oh and. i didnt realize it but they did release a new game achilles. which if i m being honest is very much something that i enjoy. tho its overshadowed by tq2. i was actually going hard on achilles until tq2 dropped. EDIT EDIT: achille has nothing to do with wolcen, wolcen studios etc. it was a mistake on my part
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PoE also had a hunting mechanic at some point (which I believe didn’t make it to core) and PoE2 also has a hunting mechanic.
Just because they failed doesn’t mean they didn’t have good ideas. Much like LE also has plenty of good ideas, even if they fail.
Who did? You seem to be implying it was released by Wolcen Studio, but that’s not the case, so I don’t really understand this statement.
you’re right. my mistake. steam bundled them together for some reason and i didnt bother to check properly. wolcen has nothing to do with achilles.
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That would be Einhar & the Bestiery league, it very much went core (after a few leagues).
No, I’m not talking about bestiary. That isn’t the same mechanic. I’m talking about some league mechanic where you went into some zone and then had to hunt around until you found the beast or whatever.
Maybe I’m confusing it with something. I seem to have some recollection that it had something to do with extra ascendancies as well?
I do know that PoE2 has a somewhat similar (albeit much simpler) mechanic.
speaking of beastiary and the others, it also brings up one thing i have forgotten to mention which i actually had on my mind for a long time.
seasonal content is very hard to sustain.
as mentioned previously poe started off with seasonal content being so damn basic its basically an extra ambush box, or just random new boss (exiles/warbands). and we were happy for this addition. i used to laugh at d3’s pathetic excuses of seasonal mechanics. but with the wealth of seasonal content that GGG is churning out, the older seasonal content that GGG put out would be similarly laughable if compared to the newer ones. and that comes with mechanic saturation. mtg is a glorious example of this. back in the day we were always wowed with new expansion mechanics. it was very fresh. but nowadays we’re jaded. “oh its just another form of cycling/madness/spellcrafting/insert older mechanic here” etc.
and in ggg’s case, i would argue that their level of seasonal content is no longer fair to call seasonal mechanic/content. its more of seasonal EXPANSIONS. its freaking deep. how can any newer company hope to have enough resources to compete with that? even if its just regular “seasonal mechanics”, thanks to GGG the very minimum bar is raised up so damn high. the closest games that i can say can compete with POE’s seasonal mechanics (not including npcs etc) is LE and TLI. TLI managed to do it coz their playerbase and payerbase are huge enough to support them.
but its not easy to get to that level. its really a sharp climb for any game dev /pub to hit.
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Metamorph?
Nah, it was something way more recent. You entered some zone and had to follow some butterflies around or something. And then you had 3 new ascendancies to choose from (I think on top of the normal ones).
Maybe it was some event from when they were on hold for a year due to PoE2? I can’t recall now.
Affliction! And no, it was a proper league.
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Yeah, that was probably it. I didn’t play it, but I saw videos of it and it’s somewhat on theme with Wolcen’s hunt. And I know it didn’t make core either.
It is core but not to the same extent. The extra ascendancies’ aren’t core.
Some maps have a hole in the ground that takes you to the wild wood area and you can collect stuff that adds more juice to the map.
Some of the rewards were added to ritual, and the monsters in ritual are also affliction mobs.
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I thought it didn’t make core at all. I haven’t played much these last 2 seasons, but I did play a bit and I didn’t find any, so I thought it was simply dropped.
Yeah, they pop up every now and then. I think they’re quite rare though.
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