Virtual 100 – Game 11
I don’t know how to pronounce this. Wool-sin? Wole-kin? Walkin? It’s all a big mystery, and it’s just one of the many things the game doesn’t explain. So if I don’t explain something properly, or at all, it’s because the game literally left some things up to the imagination, both in the story and in the menus.
I’m often confused in video games. I’m old, and new things confound me. This is understood and accepted, and I came to the conclusion long ago that some games will have mechanics or gameplay loops that either don’t appeal to my feeble brain or are just so far beyond my comprehension that I will never understand them, no matter how hard I try.
Wolcen is not one of those games. It’s not a real-time strategy game, or a city simulation game, or even a classic role playing game. It’s an action RPG in the vein of a Diablo or a Path of Exile, and its mechanics are really quite simple. Since this is a Side Quest post, I’ll begin by describing just what kind of Action RPG Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem really is.
Classes: There are no classes. Any character build can equip any armor, weapon, or skill. This is a selling point by the developers for the game. Does it work? We’ll see.
Companions/Party/Solo: The game supports an online and offline mode. There is online co-op but I played in offline mode. The character mostly runs solo, with no party-building. A.I. companions come and go.
Customizeable Appearance: Player can choose from a selection of faces and hair styles, choice of a male or female body, and a starting gear set. During the game, gear and weapons appear on the character when they’re equipped.
Adjustable Camera Angle: Camera can be zoomed in or out, but is otherwise at a fixed angle.
Map Type: Map type is a linear map, broken up in to chapters. The player can move freely between the zones in their current chapter, but cannot go back to previously played chapters.
Player Progression: Player progression is based on XP earned by killing enemies and completing chapter quests. Players earn one skill point per level to use on a passive skill wheel and ten points to use on attributes. Skill moves level up by killing enemies while having them equipped, and each have their own pool of points to distribute between different perks of that skill.
Inventory: Inventory is grid-based. Items either take up one or two squares on the grid, and once that grid is full, no more items can be picked up until something is removed.
Endgame: The game does have an endgame mode that was added later, after the game released. It changes the formula and consists of a base-building mechanic, and rather than the map opening up for free-roaming, the character does short combat-heavy missions on pre-set maps from the game.
So that sets up the basics. Now what about the game itself? Was it any good? Did I enjoy my time with it? Actually, I kind of did, when the game let me. The truth is, the combat was fun, but the package it’s wrapped in fights you at every turn. Some of the design decisions in the game are just downright baffling. And cluttered.
The menus, the piles and piles of menus, literally overlapping each other, not only get in the way of playing the game, but some never even tell you what they’re for, or why they’re there.
I’ve played these games before. In fact, I’m quite a fan. There’s a reason I have a category called “Side Quest.” I play them often. I’m familiar with gem crafting. I understand the concept of enhancing weapons and armor. I get what a skill tree is. These things are staples of the genre and I understand their functionality.
But you, as a developer, still have to tell me what YOUR menu does. How does YOUR crafting work? Because they’re all, of course, a little different. Wolcen presents you with a menu that says “CRAFTING” that consists of two slots. Okay. One of them apparently is an item you want to change or enhance. Got it. The other slot is for the thing that will do the enhancing… I assume. Mousing over it doesn’t really tell you anything. Nothing highlights to let you know what is acceptable to use or not. I just kinda randomly grabbed items in my inventory to drop onto the slot to see if it would fall in or not. Most things didn’t, until I came across one that actually did. Only then did I realize what those items were for.
Okay, crafting – check. I still never managed to make anything decent, all it did was take a weapon or armor and add a random effect to it. None of it was really all that compelling, and I only used it once to see what it would do. It went largely ignored for the entirety of the story campaign. If there was a good reason to use the crafting function, I never found it, and the game never explained it to me.
The game also has a skill bar, and to the game’s credit, there is a pretty hefty selection of skills to choose from. The character does not have a set class, which is one of their big bullet points when looking at the game on the Steam store or wherever, and it’s true; you can equip any weapon or armor set that you want and use it effectively.
But here’s the deal— and it’s a big deal, in my opinion. The game only has one skill bar, and one equipment set. Meaning if you want to run with a sword and board, but also have a bow or a pistol in your back pocket for those fucking irritating ranged enemies, you have to not only equip and un-equip them every time you want to use them, but you’ll also have to drag and drop each skill you want to use with them onto your skill bar. You’ll have to do this every single time. So essentially, even though it’s “classless” your pretty much picking one class and one set of skills and sticking with them throughout the game.
The only time my skills changed was when I found a skill that seemed more useful than one I had. Some of the skills for a given weapon type can be a bit redundant. For example, one of the skills for a melee character is an axe that swirls around the character and hits anything in a certain radius. But then there’s also a skill that lets the character swing a sword around in a circle, Diablo-style. These both do area damage and it just doesn’t make sense to have both of them taking up slots in your skill bar. So as I said, you’ll find the ones you like and stick to them.
And when I say find, I do mean find. Skills are acquired the same as everything else in the game— as loot drops. Meaning you could essentially play through the entire game without finding all the skills available to your character. I don’t think I did. Now, I don’t know if there are certain elements going on behind the scenes, certain dice-rolls or RNG’s that determine if a skill drops or not, or if they’re limited to certain chapters, but there was a time or two when I was having a somewhat difficult time with the game, only to get a new skill drop that just opened everything up. Could I have acquired this skill sooner? I don’t know. I will never know. Because the game doesn’t tell you.
In all, the whole “classless” character was rendered a moot point since you can’t really swap between weapons and abilities on-the-fly. I played as a dual-wielding melee character through most of the game, despite having a sweet legendary pistol in my inventory for the entire third chapter. It just wasn’t worth it swapping everything out.
The skills level up as you use them, which was cool at first, but once you realize there are skills you might not get until late in the game, it becomes kind of a handicap. There are two ways to get them leveled up; one of them by killing stuff while having it equipped, and the other by paying to level them up. But the cost of leveling them up is high, and you’ll likely only be able to afford to do it a few times before relying on battle to do the rest.
Luckily, they do seem to level up fairly quickly, which is good because there isn’t much grinding to do in the game. It’s pretty linear, with a map laid out a lot like Path of Exile, where there are “nodes” on a map that represent different zones. The difference here is that they all play out fairly linearly, as well. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing; there were only two times where I felt underpowered, if you did want to grind a few levels, you’re stuck selecting the most recent zone and playing it through once or twice until the enemies no longer give enough experience to really make it worth it.
Once the new-found skills get up to character level, they can be quite useful. I found one that summoned a squad of soldiers that provided a ranged attack. It was a persistent buff that never ended, so it was nice to have some minions to take some of the aggro off and take out some of those pesky ranged attackers that I would get hammered by while fighting off a horde.
The combat is the high point of the game. Because the rest of it is probably one of the sloppiest experiences I’ve played in a long, long time. The UI is a mess. I actually don’t even know how they looked at this game as a final product and thought it was okay. Menus constantly overlap other menus, and weird shit happens that just shouldn’t happen.
For example, if you’re in your inventory screen, and a character begins a conversation, the text boxes will appear on the right side of the screen, and cover what you’re trying to do in your inventory. And you can’t fast-forward the conversation, you can’t push it to the back, you just have to sit and wait until the conversation is done, however long it takes.
Some menus pop up when you mouse-over some things. For example, in the skills page, if you mouse over a skill at the bottom, where you would assign which slot on your skill bar it will occupy, the description box for that skill will pop up and block the entire skill bar, so you can’t see THE SKILL BAR. This happens in various menus around the game and it makes zero sense how it made it past beta.
And this is just talking about the mouse and keyboard controls. If you decide to play with a controller, then God help you. The game switches to a menu wheel that, at the best of times, will make you want to rage. It makes sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. Or even passable. It’s downright fucking awful. I don’t even like playing these games with a mouse and keyboard. I don’t like using a mouse to click and point everywhere. I did for this game, simply because the controller menus were such a migraine-inducing jumble of shit.
I will give credit where credit is due; I did really like the weapon and armor design. Sure, it was all very pointy and reeked of Korean MMO design, but it still looked cool. And the cosmetic feature was very welcomed. As long as you picked up a weapon or piece of armor, it unlocked as a cosmetic option. You didn’t have to keep it or salvage it at a blacksmith or anything. Just pick it up and then drop it, and it’s there. I really appreciated that.
Likewise, the story was good for the most part. It had some cliche moments, as these games tend to do, but for the most part there were characters that I actually liked, and there was a bond between the two that ebbed and flowed naturally. One of the characters, Valerie, is kinda caught in the middle of this struggle between beings much stronger than she, and she struggles with some moral and personal dilemmas believably (or as believably as can be expected in a setting like this). Sometimes her flip-flopping can be a bit abrupt— she’ll switch back and forth a bit too quickly, almost as if the story wasn’t long enough for her to reach her conclusions organically and they just needed to get her there already. But I will be honest, the story was more intriguing to me than the one in Diablo IV— a game for which the story was hyped.
The main problem is that it all falls apart at the end. One double-cross too many, an ending that wasn’t an ending, and an endgame that just kinda shrugs it all off as “eh, ya know.”
I explained it to a friend that it was kinda like how Anna Faris saw her friend Brenda in Scary Movie 4, after the character died in Scary Movie 3. She says, “Brenda! I thought you were dead!” and Brenda just kinda shrugs it off and says, “Yeah, me too.” And then they just go on with the conversation like nothing ever happened. The thing is, that movie is a spoof, and this is a game trying to take itself seriously.
Much like the menus, it just seemed like they didn’t explain it because it would require some form of effort.
I even went to the Steam forums and to the game’s website itself, just to see if I missed something, because the game ended with everything on the verge of disaster. The evil being was about to enter the world, the characters were dead or dying, and everything was, essentially, doomed. Then the next thing you know, it’s “six months later” and your character is sauntering into town like nothing ever happened. Time has passed and some characters are back and some are missing, and when someone asks her about her friends, the character just shrugs and says something to the tune of, “Eh, they’re fine.”
Really? They’re fine? One of them was missing an arm the last time I saw her. She had essentially bled out, floating over a portal to another realm. And she’s “fine?”
But no, I didn’t miss anything. That’s literally how the game transitioned. It seems as if, between the end of the game and the release of the Endgame update, the developers just didn’t feel like figuring it out.
Speaking of the endgame, it switches gears into a kind of city management sim, where you’ll invest time and resources into rebuilding the city, all while doing quick combat missions in the meantime. I think they meant well, but these kinds of game modes appeal to me approximately not at all. I don’t care for those base-building mini-games. Assassin’s Creed games had a lot of these mini-game types. The fleets of ships, the homestead, the villa. I never did any of it. It also didn’t help that the first mission I decided to try out was an escort mission. Yeah, you read that right. A fucking escort mission. In 2023. That was enough to get me to stop right there.
Any hope for some cool extra content was pretty much doused when I checked the Steam Forums to see if there was anything else. Apparently the developers didn’t feel like supporting the game any further after the Endgame update. Whether the game under-performed financially, or if they just got bored with it, I don’t know. Nothing was explained, of course. It’s just as if they moved on and didn’t tell anyone. I’m sensing a theme here.
Well everybody, that’s Wolcen. Or Woolkin. Or whatever. I honestly don’t care. Until next time!
