UPDATE: I reviewed Wolcen during the pre-release review build window. When the game launched, a number of game breaking bugs were revealed that will greatly impact your experience. I've changed the thumbnail of this video to better highlight that and I also encourage you to check the Wolcen subreddit/forums/etc to the current state of the game's technical performance. Finally, this was NOT a sponsored video. I have ALWAYS and will ALWAYS disclose when a video is sponsored. This was not.
I finally got the game to work after 4 days. Just beat it..... as a 40 dollar experience I say it's worth it. Is it a game I would put a long term investment....probably not. The endgame needs a couple more patches and updates. Just kind of a more shallow version of Greater rifts. I will play this game from time to time when I get deep into a POE leagues and get bored.
I usually like your reviews very much. You've become my "gold standard" for good indepth reviews on youtube, but on this one I have the opposite opinion to you. The story is the part where Wolcen shines atm. Not because it's brilliant, but it's well voice acted and the builds actually seem to work during these levels. The endgame though is completely f***** up. 1/3 of the passive tree is literally not working. All stats are additive +% stats, making spells in the endgame scale extremly bad. Sometimes they seem to accidentally add multiplicative % stats to items or passives wich lead to absolutely op builds. You can be immortal or deal infinite amounts of damage or both. The % are all over the place. When you grab an item with 30% Spell damage it means like 1% more damage. It does not matter at all. The main stats I go for are movement speed, flat Force shield or flat Health, CDR. Everything else seems useless. I dont know how they could develop such a great fighting expierience but fail so hard in the itemisation part. Im not even good at min maxing or creating builds and I feel like im cheating using some skills (Looking at you Bleeding Edge + Ailment build)
mate, I never... like NEVER buy games day one. I´m a focken seasoned player who had ENOUGH of this industry bs, so, I only buy a game after watching reviews and waiting for, at least, a week or two... or even more, when the game has some launch issues. However, I ignored my golden rule and bought the game day one exactly because this review and your opinion, that I respect a focken lot since you are one of the few people here who knows what you are talking about. Anyway, now that the game is out there amassing negative reviews, watching this video again - and because you are (like me) a sucker for ARPGs (I still remember the excitement when I first started Diablo on my shinning new Pentium 133 back in 1996) -, we can see that you lost your objectivity and let a lot of bias come into it, exactly because you - as many of us here - CRAVED for a game like Wolcen. Ergo, I dont know if I can say I´m disappointed with this "review", maybe I´m just angry with me since I ignored my rule, bought the game, and now I´m struggling to have some fun with it while the shitshow is still on, with the bugs, glitches, server problems, etc, and I don´t believe you give a single shit about my opinion, but next time (as "influencer") be more - a lot more - specific about what you know about the game, the exact build you played, etc., it´ll help us a lot in making a more educated decision. Cheers.
Yeah, he also said that game stutters sometimes and it's a nice optimization. Seriously? Also graphics is the last thing ARPG should care about, PoE can attest to that.
You have an option to show the full name of the items instead of the item type, look in the options mate. They wrote it in the patch notes under User Experience.
@@TheScienceguy77 really? Ive been through every option and tried everything i can think of. Still seems to just say "chestpiece, helmet" etc. Doesnt appear to be there at launch Edit: it was being weird and buggy. Had to equip an item and drop it to see the name. Doesnt show details etc just changes it from "chestpiece" to the name of the item.
During Exilecon (Path of Exile) the developers told in an interview, that they considered a 3D skill tree for Path of Exile 2 ... but that it was too much.
@@mtbarnes1 It's possible there are specific settings that need to be maxed to cause whatever issues he's having periodically, since he says his settings are maxed. He could also just have some configuration on his PC itself, or something running in the background, that is causing issues at times and causing the game to hiccup.
Just came home and was about to start the game for the first time, saw this video in my recommended feed and thought "Well, I can wait another half hour before i play." Excellent review as usual.
A big thanks to AMD for continuing to support my channel with awesome hardware. Their line-up of Ryzen CPUs is particularly excellent atm, and I really recommend checking them out if you're in the market: www.amd.com/en
I've heard of another aRPG that could use some attention as well if you haven't already covered it. Last Epoch. I'm looking for a new game to play and am stuck between that and Wolcen. I'd be curious as to your perspective on it!
"I don't know if you guys were around for Diablo 3's launch," Oh yeah, took a day off work to just to not play and be pissed all day long due to server issues.
Haha Blizzard really never changes. Today our guild wanted to do the new raid in WoW classic and we couldn't because the servers were overloaded and nobody could zone into the area.
they also said at some point before launch that they wanted to move away from skill and stat points because those are concepts that the players don't really understand. This was one of the main reasons I did not buy Diablo 3, and I have absolutely not regretted that choice. Patronizing me is a very good way of losing me as a player.
@@DarkSatan95 I know, but that's still not true. It's especially not a valid justification to basically completely neuter build diversity and put everything on rails.
It looks like the complaint about the items on the ground may have been addressed based on the launch patch notes: "You now have an option to show only the item type of items on the ground instead of their full name. This is enabled by default."
I bought this game based on this review and the reviews from others that I trust and regret it massively. It's insanely buggy, I have run into multiple game breaking progression bugs. I have had my character randomly wiped and reset. I have lost my stash twice. Performance in some areas is absolutely atrocious in many areas on my GTX 1080 - another bug considering my friend with similar setup has no issue. Pretty disappointed to be honest. Wish I could get my money back but by the time shit really hit the fan for me my refund window was long gone.
Valve is giving refunds regardless of breaking the 2 hour refund period. You should be fine if you talk about being misled about the state of the game.
@@IamaQuadChannel not really misled as much as unlucky. A reviewer saying there are not any game breaking bugs they've encountered can only apply to their experience. Even if they cite other people, those people might have had better luck as well. Not to mention new bugs that need to be repaired, there are plenty of games that have bugs that haven't showed up until "x meets z multiplied by y happen to correspond to one other thing". Even the mixed reviews on steam have some people with 0 issues and others with many.
Well shit, buggy game that takes many hundreds of hours to finish with building and complex mechanics that reward time investment. Warframe has prepared me for this. >:D
played it for a while now, Only bug i encountered was my female characters got the biggest beard by default in the character creator, which was quite amusing
Ralph, I really think you need to do a follow up to this video. If you haven't been following the shitstorm of a release... the servers were down for almost 30 hours, people can still barely connect, taking hours sometimes to even start a game, people's stashes are straight disappearing, CO-OP is causing people to skip massive sections of their own single-player progress, half the skill tree and items are bugged and not working as intended, making progression and gearing up a nightmare. I honestly think this video is misleading in it's current state due to how absolutely unready this game is currently for live. Please, consider doing a small update.
I have played 45 hours of Wolcen and quite frankly I don’t care about online mode as offline I’m having a great time. I haven’t had any bugs at all. It’s on a m.2 ssd drive. I think all these thumbs down on the store page is childish and stupid. While a frustrating launch is a let down, it’s only because of the massive amount of us spergs buying and trying to play this path of exile, and diablo baby. They definitely underestimated the game’s demand, but nearly all launches I’ve played have been like that, even in games like wow.
@@IamaQuadChannel i play online and havnt ran into any game breaking bugs, only minor bugs. I maybe lucky but i have had a completely different experience.
@@ashleygoggs5679 I would say you are lucky then. The further you get into the game, the more broken it is. There are multiple gamebreaking bugs. Goodluck using foundry or market in act 3, it will brick your game. Even Skillup has now made an update to acknowledge how broken the game is
I changed force move to "W" on my keyboard. And the belt item 2 that was already set to W, i changed to E. So belt item 1 is Q, force move W, and belt item 2 is E. Works great
This definitly has to be paid for along with most of the other reviews for this game The game is a buggy mess and is definitly unfished and half of the endgame content can straight up brick your game. Yet reviewers like this act like theres zero issue
But why wd he accept money? This is the one dude who doesn't give two fucks about blacklists. The guy who turned on his TEAM, BUNGIE, for their hideous decision making. So why now? Argument makes no sense. Review is pointless due to the bugs, 100%. But I don't think he got PAID to wax about it.
"The developers have shown at launch what few other developers have been able to show..." Queue to day one launch: servers down for 2+ days guys, have fun
This guy's fucking takes are so inconsistent. He only likes this game cause he got a free review copy and didnt have to deal with any day 1 launch server issues.
@Jason U if he experienced any of that he would have said so don't you think? Or are you saying ralph is deliberately lying, I mean it's one or the other no?
@G Q And im here still rocking TL2 :D and vanilla too ! Thank god there are other options so many new ARPG's and MMORPG's become just a chore of stuff to do and work, instead of enjoying and playing. Grim Dawn is also amazing !
@G Q Interesting i have had a bit of a different experience. I can't seem to stick much with Grim Dawn , its a pretty amazing game wont lie, but i don't find it as fun and the campaign/story itself feels like a drag. I really enjoy the TL2 chill and casual vibes, as i don't play very often. And i also bought the game little after release so i have a lot of years spent, even back when multiplayer was more lively and we played with many people and had lots of fun so it stuck with me more i suppose.
Siyeon Trash just got d3 eternal edition for the switch last month. I was trying to avoid everything blizzard at all costs, but I desperately needed a looter/arpg for my new handheld. This being my first run through of the game, it feels right at home on the switch and I’ve been having a blast with it
23:24 Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for bringing up the tons of bugs! I played the finished version pre-release and thought I was going insane when I noticed nobody else mentioning them.
@@Ouzzel Always online = spying on users. Read TOS what they can do to you and they bare no responsibly whatever they do to you. If game fucks up your PC they are not responsible for damaging it. They can sell your data around. They can use your data to manipulate you in buying more cut content.
Then again, early reviewers should not be held accountable if afterwards the developpers mess it up. If a car reviewer tries a near-release car and it handles fine, then the maker makes a whole batch of defectives products for various reasons, it's not the reviewer's fault for being unable to anticipate that. It ESPECIALLY true if the review build was known to be a lot more stable than the realease one; there is absolutely no chance the reviewers knew that and it makes the devs even more manipulative.
@@francoiscoupal7057 "Early reviewers" should be held accountable for their review's quality just like devs are (generally) held accountable for their game's quality.
Its a buggy mess, dont buy this yet wait until they patched all the crap out. Heres a copy/paste of a reviewer and the problems he ran into Issues I've currently run into: Characters in offline mode are randomly deleted, especially in Act 2. This is not fixed by the fix in their discord that claims it's a path problem with specific characters, as many people (myself included) on English Windows builds have experienced it. When this happens your character's .json file is filed with binary data (normally it's plaintext), which makes me suspect there's a serialization bug here. You can trivially exploit endgame expeditions. Every time you go down a set of stairs, you get +100% magic find. If you just go up and down the same stairs, you can get as much magic find as you want, to the point where opening a chest spews out loots for minutes. If you expect online to have any form of trade economy, or ladder, don't. Expeditions do not properly set item levels. If you enter a level 40 zone, then a 60, your items will be locked at 40. You need to reset your game to fix this. Your progression through the game in online can be randomly reset at ANY time, including when playing the endgame (even after the "hotfix") he game does not allow you to perform actions while performing another one. This is not necessarily a bad design decision, but because there's zero input buffer when you're animation locked, it makes the game feel massively clunky. Many passive tree nodes are completely broken. I accidentally literally one-shot the A1 final boss because a node was giving me +1000% damage. There's a few that do this. There's also a few keystones that do nothing. They say they do something, but they don't actually have any effect. There's ~.5 seconds of input lag on all actions, even offline. You can especially see this when trying to rapidly sell items to a vendor. Many skill "runes" simply do not function. Acts 2 and 3 essentially have no real content outside of the main story quests. Act 3 is full of placeholder text in the main story too. It's clear Act 1 was finished while these others were not. Aspects of the Apocalypse do not scale with pretty much anything and are useless past Act 2. If you play with someone online, only the host progresses. For example, if you run through Act 1 with a friend, and your friend is the host, once you leave the game you will be back at the prologue. Flying monsters often simply cannot be targeted If you mash potion while attacking, you triple your attack speed for each potion attempt, allowing you to delete the game with no skills equipped. Honestly, this feels like an alpha. I won't speculate as to what happened internally with this team, but I'd strongly question this release and the motivations behind it. I'm also very concerned with the fact that a few "influencers" were singing the praises of this game and outright lying about it. It definitely smells like they were paid without disclosing that they were advertising/sponsored, which is illegal in the US. Very difficult to prove, but this should serve as a continued reminder not to trust video "playthroughs" prior to releases. The underlying game is good, and if this was released as an alpha, or maybe even early beta, I'd be impressed. The core of this game is to D3 what PoE was to D2. However, releasing this and calling it 1.0 is deception bordering on a scam. Fortunately it seems Valve has opened up the ability to refund regardless of hours played, so people can get their money back now.
Agree 100% man. Enjoying it so far, but the bugs are adding up quickly. Add odd difficulty spikes re act bosses ( I one shot almost all mobs), the fact that there are no servers near me (South Africa) and the input lag problems.....Meh
See heres my problem with this. While it is buggy and can be fixed its still fundamentally a great game ! and finally a developer that knows what they are doing. I would actually advise buying it if this is your kind of game becuase i was suprised how great it is. I think if everyone is put off by the bugs and support is dropped completely the game would be dropped, especially given its kick started roots. They arnt backed by a big publisher so they need all the support they can get. Usually i would agree with what you said had this been EA, activision or ubisoft but this is an indy/kickstarter developer. Things like this could easily kill this game. so my opinion, if you dont like aRPG then sure pass or wait, but if you love them Give it ago and support these guys! its the best fun ive had in quite some time.
Backed this long ago glad to see the improvements it made with each release, I did ask them during the development to look at Lost Ark (korean mmo action rpg still no western release) I think they may have done
@@MixMeister5000 Don't care anymore. The game would have flopped anyway, because it's one dimension. I've gotten opinions from other gamers, and they felt the same way.
In regard to the "broken promises" thing, keeping in mind this is the first I'm hearing of this game at all...SkillUp is right that people have a right to be upset that things they were looking forward to don't appear to be in the game at launch, but what Digital Extremes went through trying to get Warframe to look like what they originally wanted to make with their original Dark Sector demos almost 20 years ago feels strangely familiar. When they pitched the original Dark Sector, it was meant to be what Empyrean and Railjack have looked like in the last 2 Tennocon demos, a fast-paced mix of spaceship flight, infiltrating capital ships, fending off boarding parties, collecting loot, shooting down fighters, etc. They couldn't do all that 7 years ago, so they opted to go super small scale, and present Warframe as a stylistic corridor shooter with loot, gear upgrading, etc. We're only getting spaceships and bigger scale space battles now, after all the time and growth they've gone through. Granted, as much as I love Empyrean, the launch of it last year was horrific and it's still a long way from fulfilling the fantasies inspired by the Tennocon demos, but my point is simple... Just because many of the ideas the devs wanted for the previous iteration of this, Umbra, were streamlined for a slightly different style, supporting the game as it is could mean many of those ideas see a revival, perhaps a story-based lore-inspired reason for them exist outside of "look, guys, cool mechanics!" Even if people are commenting "rip umbra" on Wolcen videos on TH-cam and their forums, because they're lamenting those features doesn't mean those features are dead and gone forever. It's possible Wolcen was developed in this direction because it was more feasible for how they wanted to release, but those ideas are on the back burner to include later, when they're more ready to develop them further. In any case, Wolcen looks really cool, would love to see more!
@@nutbunny10 Given the quality of the action, that'd be awesome. ARPGs don't really have many vastly open worlds, so that'd really set it apart. I don't know jack squat about development or software, but if there's some degree of lag, maybe it's a memory issue that they can't make the open world happen? Even so, keeping up with the game would ensure it lasted long enough to maybe make it happen, we'll see, that'd be amazing!
Yeah, I've left my bow/pistol user character on the backburner until they fix it. With a magic or melee build it's easy to just generate rage and pop off an AOE to take care of untargetable enemies, but with ranged characters that rely on landing hits to build rage, it's easy to land in a situation where you literally can't do anything about the flying enemies.
@@toprap88 It is, for lack of better terms: stable, enjoyable and does not require 20h+ to appreciate your character. I'll give Wolcen a try when the game is release-worthy. Not the case as of now it seems.
i mean just be thankful to be able to play and explore a new ARPG . i had much fun, and still have. its not as BIG or complex as poe. but i think you will have fun. and for me that counts. to enjoy my evening and to have fun. i feel thats better as to grind for the 100000000 time over the atlas. or sell stuff in poe. u get my point. dont be negative guys.
That was my first thought too. Even if many people didn't like the system coming from gw1 as it was such a depature from the original game it could have been great. Maybe wolcen can do it.
This feels like one of those games one should wait to buy. I think this game is going to be much better in a few months time, and even better in one year. I'll wait.
Things going on all over the screen - youtube does NOT like streaming this game 😅 SkillUp: Doesn't that look awesome? Me: Looks like a bunch of streaming artifacts to me ☹
Looks fine for me. Try manually setting the video quality higher, and just let it buffer if it needs to. By default, the quality is set to auto so it minimizes buffering time.
@ProseColored Glasses 😂 you are absolutely trying to be a dick my dude. Who mocks someone for their internet speeds? I buy the only internet that's available in my area. Also, you know perfectly well that "it all depends on your internet speeds" means "it all depends on each individual's internet speeds." You just felt like bein a little shitty - you were in that kind of mood I guess!
When I first heard about this game I was intrigued and decided to look up more. Imagine my frustration when googling "Wilson" for hours provided no relevant results...
Some weapon combos change how weapons behave. For instance, if you equip a pistol with a shield, the pistol fires a short-range AOE attack instead of its usual long-ranged single-target attack.
This! This makes me glad to see. I long got bored of D3, and preordering that Warhammer Chaosbane monstrosity was crushing. Glad to see this ones looking up!
@ProseColored Glasses PoE isnt really F2P when it comes down to it, its neigh unplayable in the endgame without stashes, otherwise.. PoE has been solved alrdy sadly.. there is no real experimentation anymore since all builds have been mapped out, the last seaosn i played where they changed the Atlas was buggy as hell in its new mechanic so... as good as PoE is and id say in terms of enjoyment it gets a 8/10 while D3 get s a 7/10 it is by no means the non plus ultra for the genre.
@ProseColored Glasses i have 500+ hours, i can look it up in steam to be precise.. the game is essentially solved the little changes they make is just so they choose which builds are on top in a season, the new skills are slotted in within a week and builds stamp out of the floor, because as i said the game is entirely solved, if you find it difficult to build sth new with changes and new skills and dont exactly know what you need to do to make it work, maybe you need to play more if it takes you so long for such things. and the bugs were: the new bossfight was buggy as hell, but that was okay they fixed it pretty quickly. the atlas however was another story, sometimes no matter how much you did in a quadrant it wont light up with a colour even though all requisites for it were clear, you had to switch hideouts, reconnect etc to fix that, people had no idea what really fixed it, and i play PoE at the start and pretty heavily after 1-2 days id alrdy killed the new boss a couple of times and was doing tier 14-16 maps so that shit ( the mechanic of triggering quadrants and guardians)not being fixed even after a week is a gamebreaker for me in that situation, GGG isnt rly a small company anymore where i can tolerate that. A new machanic was released and it was buggy as fuck, so after i did pretty much all the new content i dropped it since im not grinding through a buggy mess.
@ProseColored Glasses Oh and, no its not playable in endgame without stashes, at least not if you want to craft properly since you need thousands of materials for it to do it properly.
The gameplay actually reminds me of Torchlight 2, based on your description of it and how it looks, which sold me on the game. (build diversity is obviously greater in Wolcen here, I'm just referring to how the speed and feel of combat look)
I hate Grim Dawn. First time i played for three hours straight.Closed it and when i came back all my progress was gone. Fuck you developers.Fuck you in your ass.
Gonna buy this in like a month or 2 when the biggest bugs have been fixed! But apart from this i have to mention the quality of your production, which is absolutely sublime! Perfect pause timing perfect cuts nice display of what youre referring to .. i could go on but lemme just say keep up the good work!
First off, the game is visually stunning and the systems are fairly decent, sorta hybrid between PoE and D3 which is fine, but personally I caved in and got a refund after a doubledigit numbers of gameresets during launchday. If the game saved progress during a map I'd might be inclined to give it a break, but being reset back to last waypoint on multilevel maps is just a no-go in my book, regardless of it being an Indie company and it was launchday. Thats whats alpha and betatesting is for. I will probably revisit this title on the next arpg draught once the initial bugs hopefully are gone and serverinstability isnt an issue anymore.
I absolutely love the city building aspect. It's genius. Now all we need is NPC guards and regular attacks on your city. I wanna have Diablo but in a world where the NPCs aren't always all dead.
Yo Skill Up, I almost always like and respect your reviews but this time you should have waited for the full release before doing the review. The game is a mess at the moment, with many bugs that you did not mention. Many "class" breaking bugs, map bugs where you get stuck and have to quit to main menu, online play is a mess, many people reporting crashes an stuff (not me), stat clarity is BAD, many talent tree nodes not working, some skill modifications not working and so on. Just saying this to discourage people to buy this game AT THE MOMENT. Hope people will look at other reviews before buying this.
Just started playing this on xbox release, love the game play but have hit a progression blocker at the end of act two in the boss fight . Hemloch become invincible in the last phase (3) of the fight at the portal, trying to stop Fury's arrival, he just stands there, you cant kill him, waves keep spawning in but Hemloch is just locked in place. Same thing happened about 9 times at the same point. Unplayable in campaign mode for me atm.
just the small things like individual gloves and shoulders gives a huge amount of customization, this is the best game i played in a long while. Really enjoying Wolcen.
Followed this losely back from when it was umbra, then I got this game some time in early alpha for 15 or 20 bucks i think, played the alpha a bit, saw promise but nothing breathtaking and over the sadly bad communication on dev part and long dev time and multiple big reconstructions i kinda lost interest and even forgot it was coming out until i read skill ups tweet the other day. Nice surprise to suddenly have a apparently good ARPG on my hands for "free" , just in time when the PoE league was getting stale for me. i am hyped. Lets hope they get better at communication with their players and this whole thing can only get even better with time.
Great review but I still await the day when you Skill Up the warrior of light release your review of FFXIV Shadow Bringers until then I’ll wait patiently, keep up the great work looking forward to it.
I really interested of this game. I read the most of the reviews on steam and TH-cam game reviewers also pointed out similar issues. I planning to wait for the devs to fix several of the major issues then I’ll start playing.
Your tweets about this game convinced me to buy this, and the beta was kinda fun. I played for like 2h and then waited for a full release. Boy oh boy what a buggy mess this is, but not only that. The whole design is deeply flawed, I don't understand how you could've recommended that... and you are usually right about games in general. Many nodes in the talent tree dont work at all, spell damage is additive making it useless at level 30+, anything except health/all res combo is useless and you get killed in one shot otherwise. The telegraphs are barerly visible, there are missing animations, very often you dont even know what killed you, and many more... After all your recommendations i was sure it is a Diablo killer, or at least a simplier version of PoE (i didnt really dig the skill-gem mechanic) but i also dont believe you were bought by the devs. The game should not have come out in this state, especially that many things were cut and/or reworked, hence undeveloped, at the last moment. It will be months, if not years before it becomes playable, but by that time PoE2 comes out and it will already be over :(
@@bawalbaba4820 I got burnt by the elderslayer rng. Just got annoyed by it after a bunch of Sirius kills. Though gotta say that 3.9 showed how insanely power scaled the game has gotten. I need something slow and non-rippy like wolcen for therapy.
@@bawalbaba4820 there is no rng anymore after the patch in early january^^. You can always reach him. Also metamorphs are rippy and that's good. They gave builds a reason to be pushed to levels they never needed to be pushed to before (well at least for the last 2-3 years not). The game just got too easy in 3.8 and even in 3.9 I still believe a lot of things need to be down scaled (notably summoner investment and probably impale ... bringing up RT and EO would be nice as well or heavily nerfing crit).
I was on the fence about this game but after watching your review you sold me. I was going to wait for a port to PS4 or 5, but it looks amazing and i really like the idea of no classes and its more based on how you want to build the character takes some pretty awesome elements from the genre and put them all together then turns up the speed ...hahaha
To be fair, PoE is also really hard to get into seriously unless you want to unravel a literal spider’s web of abilities, infinite content, somewhat frustrating RNG systems at endgame, etc. etc. Wolcen is a lot more digestible.
@Zalmast I'm well aware of the current state of PoE - I still play it. :) That said, it's still one game, and its core systems are still the same, just been added on top of over time. It doesn't satisfy every conceivable ARPG playstyle one might desire. For instance, PoE strongly encourages hyperspecialisation in builds, while a game like Wolcen caters more to those who like hybrid builds with a big variety of skills used in combat. There's still room for more in the genre. Any genre that is only accomodated by one game is a very poor genre indeed imo (the RTS genre has been like that for many years sadly, albeit things are finally looking up there now).
PoE is not a big as it's community wants it to be. Maybe for hardcore APRG fans, but casual ARPG fans (have some of the around) quite often don't know about it or don't care about it. It looks like shit, gameplay is clunky and the talent tree is both intimidating (for the casuals) and is the posterchild for illusion of compexity...
I have had this game on my wishlist since 2018 and finally got it after 4 years of waiting for an update and a good discount. 70% off down to 11 USD. Enjoy it so far.
Not at all like GW2. In GW2 , a weapon type has pre-determined skills. In Wolcen , skills are limited into categories based on what TYPE of weapon you use. Also, there are several ways to break those limits on skill usage.
Thank you for bringing these low key titles to our attention, this is truly great, having a blast with Wolcen ! Also, not experiencing a terrible amount of bugs, the 1st day patch must have done the trick. Playing on GTX 1070 laptop and have over 90fps most of the time on High settings
I just want to say Wolcen is a broken and messy game. There is a ton of bugs and glitches, and not many actual viable builds. I could be doing something wrong but I've tried multiple times to make a force shield build and it just doesn't seem possible because of how the force shield works. There are nodes in the skill tree where you get a HUGE dps increase but it's only tied to rage so if you are going wisdom, good luck. You only have one weapon that returns wisdom while all the rest return rage. This game needs a lot of adjustments but I still plan on playing
"The scrolling backdrops provide a sense of scale that we rarely see in arpgs" I want to echo this sentiment a million times. I love PoE, but its level design is flat as all hell.
I tried poe 3times over the yrs, cause so many says it good when i tried again only to find it is just trash again...nothing is good with that game, don`t see why even ppl like it lol
I’ve been hearing the console port is a disaster but I saw some good reviews so I decided to try it out on my series x. I’m level 20 so far and having a friggin blast. Im almost even enjoying it more than the Diablo 4 beta. I did run into one bug where I couldn’t move my character only dodge but a quick reset fixed it. It’s running great with 0 crashes and there is basically no load times. Highly recommend trying it out if you’re in series x!
Do you know what would be awesome? (I don't know if it is possible or not) But anyway, it would be awesome if you could have several builds and be able to switch between them with the press of a button, so you can go from a melee build to a magical build in the blink of an eye with weapons equipped and everything. I'm at 22:12 in your video, so you might answer this later, but is modding available and are there any mods?
UPDATE: I reviewed Wolcen during the pre-release review build window. When the game launched, a number of game breaking bugs were revealed that will greatly impact your experience. I've changed the thumbnail of this video to better highlight that and I also encourage you to check the Wolcen subreddit/forums/etc to the current state of the game's technical performance.
Finally, this was NOT a sponsored video. I have ALWAYS and will ALWAYS disclose when a video is sponsored. This was not.
I kinda assume this update was triggered by some comments from the thread about the Rhykker video? You are doing great work, don't worry.
Current State: Dumsterfire
I finally got the game to work after 4 days. Just beat it..... as a 40 dollar experience I say it's worth it. Is it a game I would put a long term investment....probably not. The endgame needs a couple more patches and updates. Just kind of a more shallow version of Greater rifts. I will play this game from time to time when I get deep into a POE leagues and get bored.
I usually like your reviews very much. You've become my "gold standard" for good indepth reviews on youtube, but on this one I have the opposite opinion to you. The story is the part where Wolcen shines atm. Not because it's brilliant, but it's well voice acted and the builds actually seem to work during these levels. The endgame though is completely f***** up. 1/3 of the passive tree is literally not working. All stats are additive +% stats, making spells in the endgame scale extremly bad. Sometimes they seem to accidentally add multiplicative % stats to items or passives wich lead to absolutely op builds. You can be immortal or deal infinite amounts of damage or both. The % are all over the place. When you grab an item with 30% Spell damage it means like 1% more damage. It does not matter at all. The main stats I go for are movement speed, flat Force shield or flat Health, CDR. Everything else seems useless. I dont know how they could develop such a great fighting expierience but fail so hard in the itemisation part. Im not even good at min maxing or creating builds and I feel like im cheating using some skills (Looking at you Bleeding Edge + Ailment build)
mate, I never... like NEVER buy games day one. I´m a focken seasoned player who had ENOUGH of this industry bs, so, I only buy a game after watching reviews and waiting for, at least, a week or two... or even more, when the game has some launch issues. However, I ignored my golden rule and bought the game day one exactly because this review and your opinion, that I respect a focken lot since you are one of the few people here who knows what you are talking about. Anyway, now that the game is out there amassing negative reviews, watching this video again - and because you are (like me) a sucker for ARPGs (I still remember the excitement when I first started Diablo on my shinning new Pentium 133 back in 1996) -, we can see that you lost your objectivity and let a lot of bias come into it, exactly because you - as many of us here - CRAVED for a game like Wolcen. Ergo, I dont know if I can say I´m disappointed with this "review", maybe I´m just angry with me since I ignored my rule, bought the game, and now I´m struggling to have some fun with it while the shitshow is still on, with the bugs, glitches, server problems, etc, and I don´t believe you give a single shit about my opinion, but next time (as "influencer") be more - a lot more - specific about what you know about the game, the exact build you played, etc., it´ll help us a lot in making a more educated decision.
Cheers.
“I’m running an rtx2080 and have had solid performance” doesn’t tell me a ton lol
Yeah, he also said that game stutters sometimes and it's a nice optimization. Seriously? Also graphics is the last thing ARPG should care about, PoE can attest to that.
1070ti and 7700k runs 140 fps at high + msa high.
@Citizen Khan poe really doesn't look great at all though lol, it's very obviously visibly dated
*rtx2080ti also, poe has a lot of performance problems. Even on high end hardware with a good connection some builds can lead to huge fps drops.
Running a 1060 and a ryzen 5 3600. Runs great at 1440p for me
You have an option to show the full name of the items instead of the item type, look in the options mate. They wrote it in the patch notes under User Experience.
Thanks for this
Really ? thx for letting me know
@@TheScienceguy77 really? Ive been through every option and tried everything i can think of. Still seems to just say "chestpiece, helmet" etc. Doesnt appear to be there at launch
Edit: it was being weird and buggy. Had to equip an item and drop it to see the name. Doesnt show details etc just changes it from "chestpiece" to the name of the item.
Yeah, first thing I checked. The choice for the default option was a poor one.
Ty mate
Yeah, that skill tree looks like a smaller version of PoE's.
"You can rotate the rings"
YO HOLD UP
During Exilecon (Path of Exile) the developers told in an interview, that they considered a 3D skill tree for Path of Exile 2 ... but that it was too much.
And free respec, thanks goodness
Gyl Sky it costs a resource to respec passive tree
@@zangorajura yea the resource you get from selling extra skills that drop
Yo I saw that and went oh shit LOL
If you're getting solid performance with a 2080 Ti ONLY 98% of the time, that may be a concern....
Same here and it looks like he is playing on 1440p. I have a 1080 ti so I hope it should still be ok.
I play it on a 1660ti and I havent had any of the issues he described (yet) personally. But I must admit I've only played around 15 hours
@@mtbarnes1 It's possible there are specific settings that need to be maxed to cause whatever issues he's having periodically, since he says his settings are maxed. He could also just have some configuration on his PC itself, or something running in the background, that is causing issues at times and causing the game to hiccup.
*stared at my 2060*
*sighs*
@@VelcroSnake93 Well he is recording, that should affect a bit.
Just came home and was about to start the game for the first time, saw this video in my recommended feed and thought "Well, I can wait another half hour before i play." Excellent review as usual.
since it's loading a 19GB patch right now I saw no reason not to watch this instead lol
A big thanks to AMD for continuing to support my channel with awesome hardware. Their line-up of Ryzen CPUs is particularly excellent atm, and I really recommend checking them out if you're in the market: www.amd.com/en
Hey, you missed to mention Van Helsing arpg
I've heard of another aRPG that could use some attention as well if you haven't already covered it. Last Epoch. I'm looking for a new game to play and am stuck between that and Wolcen. I'd be curious as to your perspective on it!
Would really like to see a Guild Wars 2 review (or maybe a format like this). Aside from that, great content as usual. Best reviewer in whole TH-cam.
Play Divinity Original Sin 2, its an RPG masterpiece.
Is this coming to console? or have controller support on PC?
"I don't know if you guys were around for Diablo 3's launch," Oh yeah, took a day off work to just to not play and be pissed all day long due to server issues.
Haha Blizzard really never changes. Today our guild wanted to do the new raid in WoW classic and we couldn't because the servers were overloaded and nobody could zone into the area.
Yup, I bought it with anticipation after a decade of waiting... then never played it again.
You have my condolences.
Well it's the same thing with Wolcen x)
error 37
"Dodge doesn't suit PC" is one of the most frustrating things I've ever heard from the Diablo developers.
But what does make sense is making one game play differently across different machines.
Violet Bliss as a PC Master Race I can confirm, just not enough keys for a dodge where as a controller has... oh wait
they also said at some point before launch that they wanted to move away from skill and stat points because those are concepts that the players don't really understand.
This was one of the main reasons I did not buy Diablo 3, and I have absolutely not regretted that choice. Patronizing me is a very good way of losing me as a player.
@@rogthepirate4593 they probably mean a broad part of their playerbase doesn't understand it. not absolutely everyone :')
@@DarkSatan95 I know, but that's still not true.
It's especially not a valid justification to basically completely neuter build diversity and put everything on rails.
It looks like the complaint about the items on the ground may have been addressed based on the launch patch notes: "You now have an option to show only the item type of items on the ground instead of their full name. This is enabled by default."
Kickstarted this 45 years ago, never really expected to see it get this far.
If i ever kickstart anything that only launches 45 years later, i'd hope my grandchildren would reap the benefits
lmao! had a good laugh sseeing this comment.
I bought this game based on this review and the reviews from others that I trust and regret it massively. It's insanely buggy, I have run into multiple game breaking progression bugs. I have had my character randomly wiped and reset. I have lost my stash twice. Performance in some areas is absolutely atrocious in many areas on my GTX 1080 - another bug considering my friend with similar setup has no issue. Pretty disappointed to be honest. Wish I could get my money back but by the time shit really hit the fan for me my refund window was long gone.
Valve is giving refunds regardless of breaking the 2 hour refund period. You should be fine if you talk about being misled about the state of the game.
@@IamaQuadChannel not really misled as much as unlucky. A reviewer saying there are not any game breaking bugs they've encountered can only apply to their experience. Even if they cite other people, those people might have had better luck as well. Not to mention new bugs that need to be repaired, there are plenty of games that have bugs that haven't showed up until "x meets z multiplied by y happen to correspond to one other thing". Even the mixed reviews on steam have some people with 0 issues and others with many.
@@IamaQuadChannel Valve denied our refund attempts, seems you need a dash of luck as well as it probably depends on the person reviewing your request
@@linearskillzz well I guess it depends how long you played for. If you've played for 5 hours versus 20 hours.. they might not have as much sympathy
@@Koranthus this video has to be sponsored. He sounds likes hea downplaying all the bugs
Well shit, buggy game that takes many hundreds of hours to finish with building and complex mechanics that reward time investment.
Warframe has prepared me for this. >:D
As a Warframe player I think you just convinced me to pull the trigger on this lmao.
Eyedol33 Nice!
played it for a while now, Only bug i encountered was my female characters got the biggest beard by default in the character creator, which was quite amusing
Only that Warframe isn't that bugy, not complex and doesn't take alot of time 😂
░▒▓█▇▆▅▄▃▂Gous▂▃▄▅▆▇█▓▒░ Nice troll.
Ralph, I really think you need to do a follow up to this video. If you haven't been following the shitstorm of a release... the servers were down for almost 30 hours, people can still barely connect, taking hours sometimes to even start a game, people's stashes are straight disappearing, CO-OP is causing people to skip massive sections of their own single-player progress, half the skill tree and items are bugged and not working as intended, making progression and gearing up a nightmare. I honestly think this video is misleading in it's current state due to how absolutely unready this game is currently for live. Please, consider doing a small update.
I have played 45 hours of Wolcen and quite frankly I don’t care about online mode as offline I’m having a great time. I haven’t had any bugs at all. It’s on a m.2 ssd drive. I think all these thumbs down on the store page is childish and stupid. While a frustrating launch is a let down, it’s only because of the massive amount of us spergs buying and trying to play this path of exile, and diablo baby. They definitely underestimated the game’s demand, but nearly all launches I’ve played have been like that, even in games like wow.
@@Naturalessence18 great for you. A lot of people only play games like this for online, so these are issues that stop the game being playable?
@@IamaQuadChannel i play online and havnt ran into any game breaking bugs, only minor bugs. I maybe lucky but i have had a completely different experience.
@@ashleygoggs5679 I would say you are lucky then. The further you get into the game, the more broken it is. There are multiple gamebreaking bugs. Goodluck using foundry or market in act 3, it will brick your game. Even Skillup has now made an update to acknowledge how broken the game is
Skill Up seriously hates my wallet.
@Jay Marlin also true but i wouldn't have heard of this one without him
he's a bernie bro, he hates everyone's wallets, including his own
@@alexs_toy_barn Spoken like a true fool. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong ideas.
r/cratchwatch thank me later
@@VTRDC27 wrong crowd
You've convinced me, professional advertiser.
the gaming journalism we always wanted. i hope Skillup keeps up his quality because currently his recommendations are frequently autobuys for me.
The game dev srsly need to support Shill Up cuz he deserve it
Have fun playing online lmao
@@zeromailss shill up lol
This is the best Wolcen comm- I mean review
“ standard journalist blue hair” 😂
"Wolcen combat is not just standing there and using your abilities"
laughs in PoE Necromancer build
Really all poe builds tbh
@@ianfitchett2768 i wouldn't say all, i mean some of them requires lots of clicking like mines
I changed force move to "W" on my keyboard. And the belt item 2 that was already set to W, i changed to E. So belt item 1 is Q, force move W, and belt item 2 is E. Works great
Why do I get the feeling that this and the temtem review were both sponsored? The bugs you describe sound like huge issues and you downplay them.
Funny, I got the exact same impression...
This definitly has to be paid for along with most of the other reviews for this game
The game is a buggy mess and is definitly unfished and half of the endgame content can straight up brick your game. Yet reviewers like this act like theres zero issue
They paid a lot of influencers. Rhyker came clean for example.
But why wd he accept money? This is the one dude who doesn't give two fucks about blacklists. The guy who turned on his TEAM, BUNGIE, for their hideous decision making. So why now? Argument makes no sense.
Review is pointless due to the bugs, 100%. But I don't think he got PAID to wax about it.
"The developers have shown at launch what few other developers have been able to show..."
Queue to day one launch: servers down for 2+ days guys, have fun
This guy's fucking takes are so inconsistent. He only likes this game cause he got a free review copy and didnt have to deal with any day 1 launch server issues.
The devs didnt even finish half the game and are now banning people from online. How on earth can anyone defend these devs
@Jason U yeah this for sure felt like a review of a game that the devs want Wolcen to be lol
@Jason U well if he played it without any of those issues prior to launch I can see why his experience would differ so much
@Jason U if he experienced any of that he would have said so don't you think? Or are you saying ralph is deliberately lying, I mean it's one or the other no?
This is one of the most professionally paced and delivered reviews I've seen. Bravo, sir.
It needs "trafic light" - hud.. skills should light up when you have enough resource..it makes it flow a lot better
or learn to play
@@bobbykotick1163 Yikes kiddo, no need to be aggressive... he was just suggesting a QoL improvement
@@bobbykotick1163 Such edge. Much Pity. Wow.
@@bobbykotick1163 fuck off, douche..
Given that blizzard can’t make games anymore. It’s good that this has come out, so we don’t need to think about Diablo 4.
And TL3 is coming, but this game looks like a d3 clone so I guess that what you want
@G Q And im here still rocking TL2 :D and vanilla too ! Thank god there are other options
so many new ARPG's and MMORPG's become just a chore of stuff to do and work, instead of enjoying and playing. Grim Dawn is also amazing !
@G Q Interesting i have had a bit of a different experience. I can't seem to stick much with Grim Dawn , its a pretty amazing game wont lie, but i don't find it as fun and the campaign/story itself feels like a drag.
I really enjoy the TL2 chill and casual vibes, as i don't play very often. And i also bought the game little after release so i have a lot of years spent, even back when multiplayer was more lively and we played with many people and had lots of fun so it stuck with me more i suppose.
they turned D3 around hard
Still buying diablo 4
Siyeon Trash just got d3 eternal edition for the switch last month. I was trying to avoid everything blizzard at all costs, but I desperately needed a looter/arpg for my new handheld. This being my first run through of the game, it feels right at home on the switch and I’ve been having a blast with it
23:24 Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for bringing up the tons of bugs! I played the finished version pre-release and thought I was going insane when I noticed nobody else mentioning them.
Wolcen is a scam in plain sight with spy service as a bonus. That's why it was removed from GOG.
LivingIn PatheticEra care to elaborate
@@Ouzzel Always online = spying on users. Read TOS what they can do to you and they bare no responsibly whatever they do to you. If game fucks up your PC they are not responsible for damaging it. They can sell your data around. They can use your data to manipulate you in buying more cut content.
You are aware that the game is both single player and online co.op right?
@Super Jeff I don't have one. Still hunting for it so it finally drops from the lootboxes. Praise Rigged Number Generator.
Surprised but satisfied to see you review this. Glad to hear your take on this game
The glowing nature of this review as compared with the release state of the game highlights the folly in releasing reviews before games are out.
Then again, early reviewers should not be held accountable if afterwards the developpers mess it up.
If a car reviewer tries a near-release car and it handles fine, then the maker makes a whole batch of defectives products for various reasons, it's not the reviewer's fault for being unable to anticipate that.
It ESPECIALLY true if the review build was known to be a lot more stable than the realease one; there is absolutely no chance the reviewers knew that and it makes the devs even more manipulative.
@@francoiscoupal7057 "Early reviewers" should be held accountable for their review's quality just like devs are (generally) held accountable for their game's quality.
Skill Up thank you for uploading this video in 1440p. Keep it up.
Its a buggy mess, dont buy this yet wait until they patched all the crap out. Heres a copy/paste of a reviewer and the problems he ran into
Issues I've currently run into:
Characters in offline mode are randomly deleted, especially in Act 2. This is not fixed by the fix in their discord that claims it's a path problem with specific characters, as many people (myself included) on English Windows builds have experienced it. When this happens your character's .json file is filed with binary data (normally it's plaintext), which makes me suspect there's a serialization bug here.
You can trivially exploit endgame expeditions. Every time you go down a set of stairs, you get +100% magic find. If you just go up and down the same stairs, you can get as much magic find as you want, to the point where opening a chest spews out loots for minutes. If you expect online to have any form of trade economy, or ladder, don't.
Expeditions do not properly set item levels. If you enter a level 40 zone, then a 60, your items will be locked at 40. You need to reset your game to fix this.
Your progression through the game in online can be randomly reset at ANY time, including when playing the endgame (even after the "hotfix")
he game does not allow you to perform actions while performing another one. This is not necessarily a bad design decision, but because there's zero input buffer when you're animation locked, it makes the game feel massively clunky.
Many passive tree nodes are completely broken. I accidentally literally one-shot the A1 final boss because a node was giving me +1000% damage. There's a few that do this. There's also a few keystones that do nothing. They say they do something, but they don't actually have any effect.
There's ~.5 seconds of input lag on all actions, even offline. You can especially see this when trying to rapidly sell items to a vendor.
Many skill "runes" simply do not function.
Acts 2 and 3 essentially have no real content outside of the main story quests. Act 3 is full of placeholder text in the main story too. It's clear Act 1 was finished while these others were not.
Aspects of the Apocalypse do not scale with pretty much anything and are useless past Act 2.
If you play with someone online, only the host progresses. For example, if you run through Act 1 with a friend, and your friend is the host, once you leave the game you will be back at the prologue.
Flying monsters often simply cannot be targeted
If you mash potion while attacking, you triple your attack speed for each potion attempt, allowing you to delete the game with no skills equipped.
Honestly, this feels like an alpha. I won't speculate as to what happened internally with this team, but I'd strongly question this release and the motivations behind it. I'm also very concerned with the fact that a few "influencers" were singing the praises of this game and outright lying about it. It definitely smells like they were paid without disclosing that they were advertising/sponsored, which is illegal in the US. Very difficult to prove, but this should serve as a continued reminder not to trust video "playthroughs" prior to releases.
The underlying game is good, and if this was released as an alpha, or maybe even early beta, I'd be impressed. The core of this game is to D3 what PoE was to D2. However, releasing this and calling it 1.0 is deception bordering on a scam. Fortunately it seems Valve has opened up the ability to refund regardless of hours played, so people can get their money back now.
thanks
I was contemplating on getting it, I enjoyed grim dawn and all of its DLCs
I guess I'll wait for the bug fixes, if they ever come
Agree 100% man. Enjoying it so far, but the bugs are adding up quickly. Add odd difficulty spikes re act bosses ( I one shot almost all mobs), the fact that there are no servers near me (South Africa) and the input lag problems.....Meh
See heres my problem with this. While it is buggy and can be fixed its still fundamentally a great game ! and finally a developer that knows what they are doing. I would actually advise buying it if this is your kind of game becuase i was suprised how great it is. I think if everyone is put off by the bugs and support is dropped completely the game would be dropped, especially given its kick started roots. They arnt backed by a big publisher so they need all the support they can get.
Usually i would agree with what you said had this been EA, activision or ubisoft but this is an indy/kickstarter developer. Things like this could easily kill this game.
so my opinion, if you dont like aRPG then sure pass or wait, but if you love them Give it ago and support these guys! its the best fun ive had in quite some time.
I have tried to refound 4 times now, but they wont aprove... =(
Love long form reviews. Keep them up
Wilson seems like a nice game, I like how they separate online and offline characters
WILSON!
Tom Hanks leaves the chat, looking for his friend.
Even if its a typo, i will forever be calling this game Wilson now
@@chris5240 I cried
jesus its like misheard lyric getting stuck in your head and ruining a song... WILSON THE LORD OF MAYHEM!
@@Corusame I hope with laughter :)
Another superb review. Great work!
Backed this long ago glad to see the improvements it made with each release, I did ask them during the development to look at Lost Ark (korean mmo action rpg still no western release) I think they may have done
They Sure did
Apparently western release is canceled.
@@MixMeister5000 Don't care anymore. The game would have flopped anyway, because it's one dimension. I've gotten opinions from other gamers, and they felt the same way.
Item names on drop is a setting in the gameplay settings tab. You have to deselect "display item type of dropped items".
In regard to the "broken promises" thing, keeping in mind this is the first I'm hearing of this game at all...SkillUp is right that people have a right to be upset that things they were looking forward to don't appear to be in the game at launch, but what Digital Extremes went through trying to get Warframe to look like what they originally wanted to make with their original Dark Sector demos almost 20 years ago feels strangely familiar.
When they pitched the original Dark Sector, it was meant to be what Empyrean and Railjack have looked like in the last 2 Tennocon demos, a fast-paced mix of spaceship flight, infiltrating capital ships, fending off boarding parties, collecting loot, shooting down fighters, etc. They couldn't do all that 7 years ago, so they opted to go super small scale, and present Warframe as a stylistic corridor shooter with loot, gear upgrading, etc. We're only getting spaceships and bigger scale space battles now, after all the time and growth they've gone through. Granted, as much as I love Empyrean, the launch of it last year was horrific and it's still a long way from fulfilling the fantasies inspired by the Tennocon demos, but my point is simple...
Just because many of the ideas the devs wanted for the previous iteration of this, Umbra, were streamlined for a slightly different style, supporting the game as it is could mean many of those ideas see a revival, perhaps a story-based lore-inspired reason for them exist outside of "look, guys, cool mechanics!" Even if people are commenting "rip umbra" on Wolcen videos on TH-cam and their forums, because they're lamenting those features doesn't mean those features are dead and gone forever. It's possible Wolcen was developed in this direction because it was more feasible for how they wanted to release, but those ideas are on the back burner to include later, when they're more ready to develop them further.
In any case, Wolcen looks really cool, would love to see more!
One big thing I hope comes back into play would be a huge open world to explore
@@nutbunny10 Given the quality of the action, that'd be awesome. ARPGs don't really have many vastly open worlds, so that'd really set it apart. I don't know jack squat about development or software, but if there's some degree of lag, maybe it's a memory issue that they can't make the open world happen? Even so, keeping up with the game would ensure it lasted long enough to maybe make it happen, we'll see, that'd be amazing!
Warframe need end game content that has high replay value.
@@silversteel7875 Like what?
@@RedShadowOfSaturn Raids, pvp etc
The weapon system in this game reminds me of Guild Wars 2
I encountered a bugs that flying monsters sometimes are hard to target with normal attack especially when you are using a bow.
Yeah, I've left my bow/pistol user character on the backburner until they fix it. With a magic or melee build it's easy to just generate rage and pop off an AOE to take care of untargetable enemies, but with ranged characters that rely on landing hits to build rage, it's easy to land in a situation where you literally can't do anything about the flying enemies.
Excellent summary and review of the game. Can't wait to play
"Im playing on a RTX 2080 TI, My PeFoRmAnCe Is GoOd" Lmao
true))
I'd be horrified if it wasn't good lol. Nvidia do need new gpu before ps5 xb2 though. I'm still on a 980ti I bought it at the start of PS4.
"I'm a billionaire, my crib is pretty comfy"
I'm using a 2080ti its smooth.
@@zangorajura lmao
dude best review ive seen so far, very objective. kudos
10:48 Okay, I'm sold.
Pretty sure that's whey they caught the attention of all the PoE players
Grim Dawn has pistols as well.
@@MyEconomics101 lol GD can`t compare to wolcen.
You are dumb
@@toprap88 It is, for lack of better terms: stable, enjoyable and does not require 20h+ to appreciate your character.
I'll give Wolcen a try when the game is release-worthy. Not the case as of now it seems.
Another short review, cool but when will we get another 2 hours documentary about giant ship and coke Ralph?
Just what I wanted to see. Thanks for the review.
“The passive tree is where things get crazy” that’s an understatement and not in a good way, over half the stuff is fecked.
Song name at 7:20?? Reminds me of the underdome theme song boss round from borderlands .
I happened to hit my "Subscriptions" tab and this was posted 7 seconds ago lmao. Excited to watch it!
i mean just be thankful to be able to play and explore a new ARPG . i had much fun, and still have. its not as BIG or complex as poe. but i think you will have fun. and for me that counts. to enjoy my evening and to have fun. i feel thats better as to grind for the 100000000 time over the atlas. or sell stuff in poe. u get my point. dont be negative guys.
SO basicly they use an altered version of guild wars 2 weapon/skill system
that's what I was thinking. I like it though.
That was my first thought too. Even if many people didn't like the system coming from gw1 as it was such a depature from the original game it could have been great. Maybe wolcen can do it.
This feels like one of those games one should wait to buy.
I think this game is going to be much better in a few months time, and even better in one year.
I'll wait.
Things going on all over the screen - youtube does NOT like streaming this game 😅
SkillUp: Doesn't that look awesome?
Me: Looks like a bunch of streaming artifacts to me ☹
Looks fine for me. Try manually setting the video quality higher, and just let it buffer if it needs to. By default, the quality is set to auto so it minimizes buffering time.
What things? The video looks normal
it all depends on your net speeds. I can't set higher vid quality without a ton of buffering, so
@@Jesse__H ofc it's gonna look like shit if you set it to 360p
@ProseColored Glasses 😂 you are absolutely trying to be a dick my dude. Who mocks someone for their internet speeds? I buy the only internet that's available in my area.
Also, you know perfectly well that "it all depends on your internet speeds" means "it all depends on each individual's internet speeds." You just felt like bein a little shitty - you were in that kind of mood I guess!
FYI Inquisitor Martyr has improved a lot since it came out. It had a major overhaul and lots of other additions since that too
When I first heard about this game I was intrigued and decided to look up more. Imagine my frustration when googling "Wilson" for hours provided no relevant results...
Thanks man, really enjoy your reviews
Overlay D3 UI and I’d never know, skill system seems interesting tho
The more difficult combat, actual companion customization, and better atmosphere should sell you on it too
Some weapon combos change how weapons behave. For instance, if you equip a pistol with a shield, the pistol fires a short-range AOE attack instead of its usual long-ranged single-target attack.
This! This makes me glad to see. I long got bored of D3, and preordering that Warhammer Chaosbane monstrosity was crushing. Glad to see this ones looking up!
@ProseColored Glasses PoE isnt really F2P when it comes down to it, its neigh unplayable in the endgame without stashes, otherwise.. PoE has been solved alrdy sadly.. there is no real experimentation anymore since all builds have been mapped out, the last seaosn i played where they changed the Atlas was buggy as hell in its new mechanic so... as good as PoE is and id say in terms of enjoyment it gets a 8/10 while D3 get s a 7/10 it is by no means the non plus ultra for the genre.
@ProseColored Glasses its optimization is kinda ass tho.
@ProseColored Glasses i have 500+ hours, i can look it up in steam to be precise.. the game is essentially solved the little changes they make is just so they choose which builds are on top in a season, the new skills are slotted in within a week and builds stamp out of the floor, because as i said the game is entirely solved, if you find it difficult to build sth new with changes and new skills and dont exactly know what you need to do to make it work, maybe you need to play more if it takes you so long for such things. and the bugs were: the new bossfight was buggy as hell, but that was okay they fixed it pretty quickly. the atlas however was another story, sometimes no matter how much you did in a quadrant it wont light up with a colour even though all requisites for it were clear, you had to switch hideouts, reconnect etc to fix that, people had no idea what really fixed it, and i play PoE at the start and pretty heavily after 1-2 days id alrdy killed the new boss a couple of times and was doing tier 14-16 maps so that shit ( the mechanic of triggering quadrants and guardians)not being fixed even after a week is a gamebreaker for me in that situation, GGG isnt rly a small company anymore where i can tolerate that. A new machanic was released and it was buggy as fuck, so after i did pretty much all the new content i dropped it since im not grinding through a buggy mess.
@ProseColored Glasses Oh and, no its not playable in endgame without stashes, at least not if you want to craft properly since you need thousands of materials for it to do it properly.
@ProseColored Glasses I have 1,000,000 hours in PoE, yeah that's right... wanna fight about it?!!
The gameplay actually reminds me of Torchlight 2, based on your description of it and how it looks, which sold me on the game. (build diversity is obviously greater in Wolcen here, I'm just referring to how the speed and feel of combat look)
No one ever talks about Grim Dawn :(....nvm caught it at 2:16
I am on my way to finish Grim Dawn. I am like 70% done. Amazing game.
Grim Dawn is so good I play it with my buds the character skill diversity and customization are so good.
I was thinking the same thing except in relation to The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing series and Transistor.
I think I have five max level characters in Grim Dawn. it is amazing. Wasn't always but surely is now.
I hate Grim Dawn.
First time i played for three hours straight.Closed it and when i came back all my progress was gone.
Fuck you developers.Fuck you in your ass.
It's 3 years later... Is it better? Console edition just launched
You’re a legendary reviewer honestly.
Gonna buy this in like a month or 2 when the biggest bugs have been fixed!
But apart from this i have to mention the quality of your production, which is absolutely sublime! Perfect pause timing perfect cuts nice display of what youre referring to .. i could go on but lemme just say keep up the good work!
First off, the game is visually stunning and the systems are fairly decent, sorta hybrid between PoE and D3 which is fine, but personally I caved in and got a refund after a doubledigit numbers of gameresets during launchday. If the game saved progress during a map I'd might be inclined to give it a break, but being reset back to last waypoint on multilevel maps is just a no-go in my book, regardless of it being an Indie company and it was launchday. Thats whats alpha and betatesting is for. I will probably revisit this title on the next arpg draught once the initial bugs hopefully are gone and serverinstability isnt an issue anymore.
This looks right up my alley, nice review!
I absolutely love the city building aspect. It's genius.
Now all we need is NPC guards and regular attacks on your city. I wanna have Diablo but in a world where the NPCs aren't always all dead.
Finally a solid review! 👍👍👍
Yo Skill Up, I almost always like and respect your reviews but this time you should have waited for the full release before doing the review.
The game is a mess at the moment, with many bugs that you did not mention. Many "class" breaking bugs, map bugs where you get stuck and have to quit to main menu, online play is a mess, many people reporting crashes an stuff (not me), stat clarity is BAD, many talent tree nodes not working, some skill modifications not working and so on.
Just saying this to discourage people to buy this game AT THE MOMENT. Hope people will look at other reviews before buying this.
Very thorough review, thanks for sharing with us all!
"cave-eates"
dar-da
I came to the comments for this
For those confused, it's "cav-e-ats".
This. But he also says ekcetra so there’s that...
Just started playing this on xbox release, love the game play but have hit a progression blocker at the end of act two in the boss fight . Hemloch become invincible in the last phase (3) of the fight at the portal, trying to stop Fury's arrival, he just stands there, you cant kill him, waves keep spawning in but Hemloch is just locked in place. Same thing happened about 9 times at the same point. Unplayable in campaign mode for me atm.
The current version is so full of bugs, I take my head of for you sir for even getting enough material for a review that looks like it has no bugs.
just the small things like individual gloves and shoulders gives a huge amount of customization, this is the best game i played in a long while. Really enjoying Wolcen.
Followed this losely back from when it was umbra, then I got this game some time in early alpha for 15 or 20 bucks i think, played the alpha a bit, saw promise but nothing breathtaking and over the sadly bad communication on dev part and long dev time and multiple big reconstructions i kinda lost interest and even forgot it was coming out until i read skill ups tweet the other day. Nice surprise to suddenly have a apparently good ARPG on my hands for "free" , just in time when the PoE league was getting stale for me. i am hyped. Lets hope they get better at communication with their players and this whole thing can only get even better with time.
As of 25 April 2021, I am 15 hours in and I haven't experienced a single bug.
"I heard this game has optimization issues but it runs fine on my 2080Ti!" Yeah no shit....
Edit: It looks pretty but the old footage looked better :/
i run it on a 1080 ultra and hit my max frames on my screen, never dropped below. I have more issues with the actual bugs then the optimization.
For anyone curious, i have a 1060 6gb and it runs very well.
good to hear it came out well. I've been waiting for a long time
"if that sort of grind doesnt interest you ..."
I play Warframe
Farmerframe..
More like now RNGframe
@@TheRetifox any game with loot has rng to it though lol
I've played this game off and on for a long time now and it has come a long way. Worth a look if you're into the genre.
Great review but I still await the day when you Skill Up the warrior of light release your review of FFXIV Shadow Bringers until then I’ll wait patiently, keep up the great work looking forward to it.
Did he play it? 🤔
@@-pressxtostart- yea he played it and streamed it and didn't skip the story either, so I'm looking forward to it.
The Most Competent Review And Dive-In a Game I've Witnessed!! Thank U
I kind of can't believe they actually released it.
I really interested of this game. I read the most of the reviews on steam and TH-cam game reviewers also pointed out similar issues. I planning to wait for the devs to fix several of the major issues then I’ll start playing.
Chill up can sell ice to an eskimo!
No jump? Seems good though. I love Victor Vran for the same reasons that it's based more off weapons and skill. This takes it further by the looks.
Your tweets about this game convinced me to buy this, and the beta was kinda fun. I played for like 2h and then waited for a full release. Boy oh boy what a buggy mess this is, but not only that.
The whole design is deeply flawed, I don't understand how you could've recommended that... and you are usually right about games in general.
Many nodes in the talent tree dont work at all, spell damage is additive making it useless at level 30+, anything except health/all res combo is useless and you get killed in one shot otherwise. The telegraphs are barerly visible, there are missing animations, very often you dont even know what killed you, and many more...
After all your recommendations i was sure it is a Diablo killer, or at least a simplier version of PoE (i didnt really dig the skill-gem mechanic) but i also dont believe you were bought by the devs.
The game should not have come out in this state, especially that many things were cut and/or reworked, hence undeveloped, at the last moment. It will be months, if not years before it becomes playable, but by that time PoE2 comes out and it will already be over :(
because he got paid to recommend it
Bugs aren't design flaws, they're fixable. And spell damage isn't useless because it's additive, it was plainly bugged and didn't work on release.
Fucking hell, a well thought out review. Excellent work.
Nice... Right around the time I was getting tired of PoE 3.9
I mean, 3.9 kind of tired everyone out with the one-shots, except probably Jousis.
Same!
@@bawalbaba4820 I got burnt by the elderslayer rng. Just got annoyed by it after a bunch of Sirius kills. Though gotta say that 3.9 showed how insanely power scaled the game has gotten. I need something slow and non-rippy like wolcen for therapy.
@@sarthakjoshi1999 Especially from T14-T16 Metamorphs. Sirus is just, IDK, very RNG if you rip once.
@@bawalbaba4820 there is no rng anymore after the patch in early january^^. You can always reach him.
Also metamorphs are rippy and that's good. They gave builds a reason to be pushed to levels they never needed to be pushed to before (well at least for the last 2-3 years not). The game just got too easy in 3.8 and even in 3.9 I still believe a lot of things need to be down scaled (notably summoner investment and probably impale ... bringing up RT and EO would be nice as well or heavily nerfing crit).
awesome review! amazing work, thanks!
Good review; just your intro is like the entirety of most companies' game reviews.
I was on the fence about this game but after watching your review you sold me. I was going to wait for a port to PS4 or 5, but it looks amazing and i really like the idea of no classes and its more based on how you want to build the character takes some pretty awesome elements from the genre and put them all together then turns up the speed ...hahaha
There's been a content draught in the ARPG market
Path of Exile: Am i a joke to you?
To be fair, PoE is also really hard to get into seriously unless you want to unravel a literal spider’s web of abilities, infinite content, somewhat frustrating RNG systems at endgame, etc. etc.
Wolcen is a lot more digestible.
As good as PoE is, it's just one game. And it's been around for over half a decade now.
@Zalmast I'm well aware of the current state of PoE - I still play it. :) That said, it's still one game, and its core systems are still the same, just been added on top of over time. It doesn't satisfy every conceivable ARPG playstyle one might desire. For instance, PoE strongly encourages hyperspecialisation in builds, while a game like Wolcen caters more to those who like hybrid builds with a big variety of skills used in combat. There's still room for more in the genre. Any genre that is only accomodated by one game is a very poor genre indeed imo (the RTS genre has been like that for many years sadly, albeit things are finally looking up there now).
PoE is not a big as it's community wants it to be. Maybe for hardcore APRG fans, but casual ARPG fans (have some of the around) quite often don't know about it or don't care about it. It looks like shit, gameplay is clunky and the talent tree is both intimidating (for the casuals) and is the posterchild for illusion of compexity...
I have had this game on my wishlist since 2018 and finally got it after 4 years of waiting for an update and a good discount. 70% off down to 11 USD. Enjoy it so far.
"The weapons you are using determines which skills you can use"
Sounds like guild wars 2, but with the skill ring? Shut up and take my money
no you have a skill menu to select from but can only use certain skills if you have the correct weapon equipped
twinmonkeycows9267 that makes way more sense, thank you.
Not at all like GW2. In GW2 , a weapon type has pre-determined skills. In Wolcen , skills are limited into categories based on what TYPE of weapon you use. Also, there are several ways to break those limits on skill usage.
Thank you for bringing these low key titles to our attention, this is truly great, having a blast with Wolcen !
Also, not experiencing a terrible amount of bugs, the 1st day patch must have done the trick. Playing on GTX 1070 laptop and have over 90fps most of the time on High settings
I just want to say Wolcen is a broken and messy game. There is a ton of bugs and glitches, and not many actual viable builds. I could be doing something wrong but I've tried multiple times to make a force shield build and it just doesn't seem possible because of how the force shield works. There are nodes in the skill tree where you get a HUGE dps increase but it's only tied to rage so if you are going wisdom, good luck. You only have one weapon that returns wisdom while all the rest return rage. This game needs a lot of adjustments but I still plan on playing
i heard it crashed alot is it still the case? im hesitant on getting the game looks great but idk
Don't, it has "mixed" reviews on steam = garbage game. I think a lot of youtubers were bribed to praise this game.
thx
This game is basically "Reforged"... don't bother.
"The scrolling backdrops provide a sense of scale that we rarely see in arpgs" I want to echo this sentiment a million times. I love PoE, but its level design is flat as all hell.
I tried poe 3times over the yrs, cause so many says it good when i tried again only to find it is just trash again...nothing is good with that game, don`t see why even ppl like it lol
All of PoE design is flat and boring as hell. No, screw that. Just flat and boring. Even hell cannot be THAT flat and boring...
I’ve been hearing the console port is a disaster but I saw some good reviews so I decided to try it out on my series x. I’m level 20 so far and having a friggin blast. Im almost even enjoying it more than the Diablo 4 beta. I did run into one bug where I couldn’t move my character only dodge but a quick reset fixed it. It’s running great with 0 crashes and there is basically no load times. Highly recommend trying it out if you’re in series x!
"Doesnt that look awesome?!"
..meh?
edit: the skill system sounds amazingly versatile and I may not like the gameplay, but I like that
Good review but I agree. Intro was pretty weak. It seems like one of those things that are fun to play but boring to watch.
Agree.. looks like the crappy d3..
Do you know what would be awesome? (I don't know if it is possible or not) But anyway, it would be awesome if you could have several builds and be able to switch between them with the press of a button, so you can go from a melee build to a magical build in the blink of an eye with weapons equipped and everything. I'm at 22:12 in your video, so you might answer this later, but is modding available and are there any mods?
i hoped there was more singleplayer :(