Recent reviews by atom0s

I want this game to succeed, but so far that is just not happening. (Please understand before assuming I'm just crapping on the game, I have a lot of time invested into it on several accounts to assist with testing things pretty heavily.)

For those that just want a short answer; I cannot recommend this game currently.

I helped Kickstart this game back when it was still named Umbra. The vision of the game back then was such a different scope than what we have gotten to now, and not in a good way. The developers honestly became extremely lazy mid-development and just decided to start copying every other ARPG on the market rather than stick to their own style and promises. There are so many aspects to why this game is failing currently even though they have now rushed a beta together to try and save-face.


1. The developers pretty much completely ignore the community.

From the start, they had a website/forums where the initial place to report bugs and give feedback was. This started out ok for the first few months of development but slowly you could watch the forum become abandoned by the developers and team of the game. Massive bugs, exploits, glaring issues etc. all started going completely ignored. When I confronted the lead developer about this, he told me "we don't really bother with the forums anymore, we use the Steam community instead". Yes, he literally said that. No announcement or anything on the official site, or even just closing it down, they just let people shout into the void with their bug reports and feedback all of which was completely ignored still to this day. (There are massive bugs in this game that to this day still exist that are reported on the original forums.)

Soon after, they started doing the same with the Steam forums, becoming less and less active and less engaged in the community. And again, it turned into a new place to be, Discord. Where they hardly ever talk, and never listen to the feedback.

2. They abandoned their own game in favor of copying other ARPGs.

During the alpha, the game was focused on being a unique experience for an ARPG while still having the traditional aspects you come to expect in one. This was going pretty solid for a while, we got fairly regular updates with some various new features to check out. However, this suddenly changed when massive changes happened in the team where people were fired/laid off to a point where there was only like 2 people left on the team. We got very little information about what was going on and we got a new update that basically broke the entire game for a while.

They shifted focus on their original ideas at this point to basically just stay afloat. The original alpha act 1 was scrapped and was replaced with a very lacking piece of content. Then some new hires were added and more promises began rolling in.

Fast forward to a few months ago, they completely ditched the entire game. They gave up on their own concepts and ideas, and instead completely copied Diablo 3, in almost every possible aspect. They redid everything, but used all of Diablo's ideas instead of being original and having their own game. You logged into this new alpha and were presented with a new title screen copied exactly from Diablo. The entire game mode available at this point was Diablo inspired. Skills, graphics, animations, loot, etc. were all redone to be more like existing ARPGs. The entire skill tree system was disabled in favor of a 'revamp' which turned into a clone of PoE with very minimal unique parts. New mobs were added that were literal copies of Diablo mobs (models look exactly like D3 things (ie the Butcher), the mob skills were clones of things from Diablo, etc.)

3. Massive game breaking bugs still exist, to this day.

There are a lot of massive bugs in this game that have been there since day one. These bugs have been reported multiple times across all mediums (official forums, official bug reporting setup, official Steam community and the official Discord) all of which just got ignored or simply deemed 'unfixable'.

There is a huge bug due to how the world loads because the developers do not understand how to properly handle thread synchronization. This game loads various aspects of the world during a loading screen in different threads. All fine and great for optimization, however they have no locking or syncing mechanisms in place to deal with the order things complete or when the game assumes it's ready. This means there is chance every single time you hit a loading screen that you will fall through the floor.

Here is a quote from one of the developers from a pm I had with on Discord. This was me reiterating the issue of falling through the floors in the game. (This convo was back at the beginning of the year when they released the Diablo 3 clone version of the alpha.)

"There might be, CryEngine have a worker thread system to run some things away from the main thread. But tbh, we'r a small team and we'r making such an ambitious game (ARPG are hard..... so many game mechanics & systems... it's great and horrible at the same time as a programmer ^^) that I don't think we'll have time to take a look into this before release"

I'm not trying to out a developer or have any ill-will towards them, but this is a huge problem that wasn't new. It's been in the game from the start and is still there now. You can also cause this bug to happen in other ways by running against walls and other jagged surfaces that are blocking like walls. Eventually you will start to slowly fall into the floor, causing the camera to go absolutely insane while moving. Soon enough you'll fall through the floor or your position will never correct itself until you restart the game.

There are other massive bugs like this in the game too. Such as loot drops falling through the floor or landing up in unreachable places. Potions not reacting properly on the current 'tick' of the game, causing you to die because it'll trigger the cooldown but not heal you until the next tick and so on. This are massive glaring problems in an ARPG that are not going to fly when a lot more people start playing and finding the same problems.

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I really want this game to succeed. We need more ARPGs to exist and help continue to push the genre forward, but right now Wolcen is not that special thing it once was when they first announced it.

Right now, it feels more like a beta test of an unannounced Diablo 3 clone made by fans.

I do not recommend this game for the time being. I highly recommend people save their money until the Wolcen team really gets back into their own grove and starts making their own game.

To the developer I talked with, I'm sure you'll see my name and recognize me based on our in depth chat. I mean no ill-will towards you or the team. I want this game to be amazing. But for me, your current direction is not one I feel is going to make this game popular or successful outside of a small niche of people. Please take a step back and realize copying Diablo is not how to make a successful ARPG.

What Diablo 3 should have been.

I am an old time player of this game back before all the random mergers and handoffs on who runs the game. I have thousands of hours logged on this game between a few accounts/characters and was recently interested in coming back to check out the new Steam launch. However, this was a huge disappointment.

During all the hand offs and merging of servers, they decided it was too hard to keep all the original character data and only kept people who logged in during a certain period a while back. This means if you played and took a break and missed any info on this happening, your characters are gone. Any money you spent in the cash shop, for mounts, costumes, etc. are all gone.

This is literally criminal to just delete peoples things because they were too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lazy to transfer it. Proof of their wording of it being too much:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150221032239/http://board.us.runesofmagic.gameforge.com/board272-runes-of-magic-us-au/board265-news-announcements/board267-news-announcements/84171-future-server-merge-plans/

This game is HEAVILY pay to win as well. Do not plan to participate in end game at all if you do not plan to spend a load of money all the time. And given that this is an MMORPG, expect all the money you spend to be a waste each time a major update hits yielding all your previous purchases a waste / invalid. To even upgrade gear it costs a ton of money to do anything good. The game is really fun but the cash shop and now the incompentice to move character data has really sealed the deal for me to never touch this game again, or anything GameForge touches in the future.

Target Audience: Anyone/Everyone

This game is aimed at anyone that enjoys puzzles. Nothing in this game would cause it to be rated anything other than Everyone.

Graphics: Good/Decent

The game looks nice being a remake of the original. But there isn't much for it to actually do to make it hard to look visually appealing. Some lighting could have been done better, and the ability to see the light sources the way they are setup makes this seem a bit odd. Almost like your on a set being filmed.

Sound/Music: Great

The music fits the atmosphere well and the various sounds work great with the environment. The hint sound for when you are 'warm' to a clue is a bit annoying though since it sounds more like a horror movie sound than a clue type thing.

Price: Fair

I'd recommend waiting for the game to be on sale to grab it. While the asking price isn't bad, the game is quiet short.

Content / Story: Fair / Decent

While the story is told through clues and small postcards you find, the overall length of the game is fairly short. If you ignore reading anything, and focus straight on the puzzles you can clear this game in 1-2 hours start to finish. Reading and looking for story information adds about another hour. In total it takes around 3 hours to play through the game casually. It leaves a bit to be desired since you reach the end and think "Aww that was it?".

The puzzles are fun and decent but more are pretty easy. The reuse of the same puzzle to expose additional sub-puzzles is nice. The story ties well into the puzzles as well, including the first piece you collect which you use throughout the game.

Overall it's a fun game, but a bit too short.

Probably one of the most hyped games to exist and yet fall entirely short of what was shown to players before hand. Nearly all the fun and interesting aspects of the game shown at the demos were stripped from the actual released game.

Fast-forward to now, the game is nothing but hackers. The main aspect of the game is the Dark Zone, a forced-pvp area that the entire game centers around. While you can completely play without ever going in to the DZ, the intent is to get people to play it. If you do, enjoy living for less than a few minutes before some 12 year old screaming on their mic comes flying through the walls 1 hitting you regardless of your stats / gear.

The game is heavily client sided where it shouldn't be. Things such as damage, rate of fire, etc. are all client sided allowing players to easily hack and ruin any bit of pvp. While it being a FPS with multiplayer hacking is expected to exist, it is just entirely rampent on this game. There is no form of client sided anti-cheat. Ubisoft and Massive dropped the ball here hard. Their method of detecting cheats/hackers is via server side stat monitoring. And this was not added until more recent.

Ubi has a lot of work to do to save this game, or it is just going to continue to die since launch like it has.

Where to begin... I backed this game waaaay back in the day when it was originally still being crowd-funded. During that time, if you backed the game you were promised a Steam copy of the game AND a DRM free copy of the game. Fast forward to now, that promise was broken, the website was changed to remove this and attempt to hide that promise and then the disaster of handling that promise happened on the forums. Grim Dawns team took back what they had promised to their backers and stated that instead, you now had to choose between the Steam copy or the DRM free copy, you didn't get both.

Prior to this drama, I was banned from their forums for modding their game, something they now encourage. However, my ban was never removed and was only done out of spite because the lead developer of the game hates me. I released some mods for the game that showed more or less weaknesses in his ideas of security. Mind you, none of this was released on the official forums. But since he can't take any form of critisim or feedback, I was banned.

Some reasons why I would not recommend this game:
- If you do something the developers disagree with, even off of their own site, you'll get banned.
- If you do something the developers disagree with, they'll threaten to VAC ban you. (Yes, this happened.)
- The gameplay is fairly boring, the idea to bring back an older Diablo feel works but overall it just lacks purpose.
- The story is fairly empty. You are dropped into a world with little background, some minor NPC interaction and chat, and that's basically it. Otherwise it's just get gear and level up with no real depth.
- The multiplayer is absolutely horrible and full of bugs and crashes.

The game is running on the old Titan Quest engine, so don't expect anything amazing in terms of graphics, however some would prefer it to look older and more grungy like the original Diablo's.

Ultimately I refunded my copy of the game after being lied to after backing the project. I would not recommend this game studio to anyone if they attempt to do similar crowd-funding things in the future. They are very unorganized when it comes to actually following through with their word to their backers.

(Proof of refund in comments since apparently people think I'm lying.)

If you are someone that is looking to obtain the outfits, DO NOT BUY THIS!

You will not get any of the outfits displayed in the 2nd image of the season pass. This is a total scam and false advertisement. This only includes the expansions and the shotgun. I received nothing else with buying this. Don't get scammed for something you wont get!

-- Below is info on my ticket / posts / etc. regarding this issue on various locations. --

- March 24, 2016 - Made a topic in the games discussions regarding this matter.
- March 24, 2016 - Made a ticket on Steam regarding this issue.
- March 24, 2016 - Made a ticket on Ubi.com regarding this issue.
- March 24, 2016 - Made a post on Ubi.com's forums regarding this issue.

- March 26, 2016 - Steam responded to my ticket, says it's up to Ubi to fix.
- March 30, 2016 - Steam responded to my ticket with another invalid response.
- April 1, 2016 - Steam responded to my ticket with a new technician. Repeated the first response in the ticket about activating the key which is not the problem.
- April 2, 2016 - Ubi responded to the ticket stating they 'fixed' the problem and to check the vendor. Vendor had no items regarding the season pass advertisement. Problem still exists.

- Post on their Steam discussions has gone unanswered.
- Post on their forums has gone unanswered.

As of today, April 5, 2016 I still do not have any of the items. I seriously DO NOT recommend this to anyone looking for the items advertised, you will not get them!

April 7, 2016 -- Items were finally received two weeks later. My review of Ubi / this product will remain negative as their support is horrible.

While this game does bring back a great game play time, story, and memories.. this game shows how poorly a port can be done from a console to PC. CAPCOM seems to have released this game with little testing done as there are some pretty stupid issues between the FPS problems to the control mapping limitations. The game looks great but runs fairly horrible regardless if your system meets the requirements. (Some extra work done can help bring performance up, but the "slow-mo" problem this game has is very wide-spread.)

I would not recommend buying this until CAPCOM releases a patch to make the game run better.