Wolcen - Thoughts

A genre I didn't expect having so much resistance to is the Action RPG. I was an active participant in its heyday, having grown up on the unforgettable one-two punch of Diablo and Diablo II. But I suppose in retrospect I didn't play them a lot—or rather, I didn't play them as much as my peers tended to. After finishing both games, my relationship with ARPGs was mostly casual: I played Diablo 3 a decent amount, bounced off of Titan Quest and Path of Exile, and liked Grim Dawn but sadly never finished it. I've always kept my eye out for projects on the horizon that looked interesting despite my own personal struggles with the genre, because I was waiting for an experience to finally click with me.

Yet there's also an irrepressible, morbid side to my desires. I'm enthralled by broken dreams, overambition, and an out-of-depth arrogance. I love writing about games that fail the player, because even though I may detest the title while playing it, it's fascinating to pick apart a game's design and ponder what went wrong. That's why Wolcen has always had a giant red bullseye on its back, begging me to play it. The game released to aggressively mixed reviews on Steam and had its fanbase quickly burn out, despite receiving numerous post-launch updates in an attempt to resuscitate the community. And if the fans of the genre abandoned Wolcen, a game that by all impressions looks pretty good, then what hope did it have for me, a jaded apostate that has abandoned the genre?

Well guess what? Wolcen is fine. Well... "fine" is a bit of an oversimplification—Wolcen is a mediocre action romp that looks and sounds great but fundamentally misses the mark. It's not a game that will leave you itching to try out a different build or strategize around unique gear you discover; Wolcen is firmly a "play, theorycraft, and wipe your hands once done" type of experience. I think that kind of thing can be a huge disappointment for ARPG addicts looking for the next juicy hit to keep coming back to, but for someone like me that bounces quickly from game to game, it was an unexpectedly fun ride. Personally the best part of an ARPG is near its start anyway, when you first get to submerge your hands into the gooey, squishy clay that is character building—and Wolcen's clay reservoir is practically overflowing.

Besides its above-average presentation, the best thing Wolcen has going for it is a massive passive skill tree that puts Diablo IV to shame. It's not as mind-bogglingly large as Path of Exile but it's still deeper and wider than many of its contemporaries, giving you a ton of pathways and connections to mull over. You start by picking one of three core "builds" to focus on, and as you spread out you'll run into two secondary builds further in and four tertiary builds on the outer rim. You can also cross into adjacent builds pretty quickly and rotate bits of the web to make it easier to beeline for a tertiary build from the start. Additionally, there are larger nodes that grant build-defining skills sprinkled throughout, although most of the ones on the outer rim tend to come with a downside that make them risky to take (at least for my build). Still, no matter if you're big on experimenting with wacky triple-class shenanigans or laser-focused on damage of a single type, it's hard not to find something to love within Wolcen's giant web of possibilities.

The downside to all of this is that Wolcen's active skills fail to support the range of options here. Similar to the passive tree, there are three core active skill types: melee, range, and magic. You can pick up as many as you want (provided you have the money) but your access to them is limited by the weapon you have equipped (ie if you wield an arcane staff you can't use melee or range skills). While that may sound like an acceptable restriction, what kills the game's variety is that skills are woefully scant: there are 18 skills for magic, 13 for range, and only 12 for melee. With 6 skills able to be loaded into your hotbar, and most of them being simple do-damage doodads, it's going to feel like there's not much room for build variety. Wolcen tries to remedy this with a rune system similar to Diablo III (but with 16 skill runes instead of 5), but I never felt this made up for the lack of active skills on offer. If anything it made the game slightly more confusing to sift through, as a skill's true value was often hidden somewhere amidst its runes.

For my playthrough, I kept my build in Wolcen deliciously simple: I was a big strong lad that liked to smash things with his right-click hammer. I knew to follow ARPG 101: get a good damage ability, get a quick escape ability, and then everything else is supplemental (AoE, utility, buffs, debuffs, etc). Due to Wolcen's limited skills, the three non-damage supplemental abilities I picked up were the only three the melee class offered: a shout, an AoE buff, and a summon of all things. Everything else would compete for resources against my big bonk attack, and pretty early on I found the bonk to be unparalleled at pulping foes. I zipped across the passive skill web to pick up as many +physical damage nodes as possible, and when I ran out of those I doubled down on becoming a tank, pumping my resistances up to 55% across the board. It was a fun experience that kept me engaged for the most part—but I couldn't help but feel everything was so... arbitrary.

For instance, I spent a long time trying to figure out if I should be going for high HP or high resistance. I received plenty of gear for both builds and could easily pick up nodes to support whichever choice I made, seeing as they were both major pillars for melee builds. But what truly muddled my options was that raw and multiplicative numbers are hidden—you're only given the total of your statistics, not the raw value nor what it's being multiplied by. This forces you to flick back and forth between your stats tab and the passive skill tree with each change, as you're never really sure just how much "10% more resistance" adds to your overall resistance (for me it was closer to 2% total). The same is true for all damage types, attack speed, crit chance, force shield—basically every upgrade on the passive skill tree gets put into an equation you never get to see.

That's why it was so hard for me to figure out my defense strategy. Is 10% more resistance better than 8% more max HP when I can't see the cumulative total for either until after I level up? And considering the lightning-fast speed at which new gear dropped ("rare" quality? More like I "rare"ly get anything else), I was changing out my equipment so fast that old comparisons I made were immediately outdated. I wound up waffling between the two defense stats, ultimately looking for gear that provided both but willing to lean into resistance if the stat was high enough. I encountered a similar hurdle when I found a unique weapon near the end of the game, one that gave a huge amount of arcane bonuses if I switched to that damage type. But since Wolcen doesn't offer a way to save different loadouts or view your total stats while respeccing, I spent 10 minutes remaking my character to an arcane-melee man, saw my damage would be a tiny bit less, and then spent 10 minutes trying to rebuild my original bonklord. Thankfully respeccing is fairly cheap, but the process was so tedious and unproductive that I never again considered altering my build.

As far as the campaign goes, Wolcen does an admirable job, although the first three acts aren't anything to write home about. The story here is unabashedly about Warhammer 40k marines in a fantasy universe (so Warhammer?), bombarding you with an incredible amount of side chatter in an attempt to endear you to its lore. For some folks this will provide a great incentive to care about Wolcen's grim universe and quippy cast of characters, but for those used to every other ARPG, the dialogue will only get in the way of whatever media is playing on your second monitor. That, and the prose itself isn't particularly gripping; it reminds me most of 90s comic book writing, the kind you'd find under a Liefeld-esque cover where a gallon of blood drips off the main character's spiked gauntlets. As you play it you'll realize that Wolcen suffers from a self-consciousness problem: it's trying to be what it thinks is cool, and you can't help but notice the "trying" part while playing.

Wolcen's final act however, is definitely one of the most interesting things about it. In it, a big bad demon is coming to attack your hub city, and each time you embark on a mission he gets a little bit closer to arriving. In order to give yourself a fighting chance you have to pick and choose missions that will weaken him and his forces, along with bolstering your city's defenses and productivity. The final boss starts at roughly 15 levels above you, so your first attempt at tackling him will likely end in crushing demise. Afterwards, you'll be whisked back to the start of the demon invasion with only your gear, levels, and a few town upgrades intact. It's a cool idea with a tiny roguelite spin on it that I vastly prefer to the boring, dungeon-delving act structure that most ARPGs religiously follow.

But just like the rest of the game, Wolcen's final act is poorly thought out. Upgrading your town is cool in theory, but in reality you only have about two dozen upgrades to choose from, with a good chunk of those being "increase productivity for your city". Early on I thought the idea of a garrison was great since it could gather gold and items for you between missions, but the gold they accrued was pitifully low (2000?! When it costs 15k to build anything?!!) and the gear was worse than the whites I'd stumble across laying by the side of the road. Mission variety—while decent—was severely imbalanced too, with some missions taking over 10 minutes to complete while others (specifically headhunter) could be wrapped up in under 10 seconds. And the weirdest of all is that a bunch of postgame stuff (building structures, bounty maps, hunt trophies) would show up during this act but you can't interface with any of it until the final boss is slain. Like, why give me a bounty map or show me the trophy vendor when I can't access either? Why prevent the player from building the transmutation forge or enneract lab or salt baths until after the hardest battle has concluded? Ultimately the final act felt underbaked and aimless, reaching for greatness but falling short the way a middle schooler would playing college basketball.

Make no mistake: I liked my time with Wolcen. I don't feel comfortable calling it a good game, but it definitely didn't feel like a bad one—it's mostly just janky and imbalanced. Imagine a shiny new office desk with plenty of papers atop it, ready for you to scribble down your zany character builds. But on closer inspection you'll see that the desk's nails were never fully hammered in, the screws only slightly turned, and the panels assembled from disparate types of wood. The desk is sturdy enough that you can write on it for some 20 hours or more, but to spend longer than that—to feverishly draw harder than you have been—is to send the whole thing toppling down. Wolcen is a fine experience, but at the end of the day the classics of old will outlast it—and it won't be a surprise why.