Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem - Plans for the Future
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Roughly a month after Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem left early access, the game’s developers bring us this Steam announcement where they discuss their future plans for the hack ‘n’ slash action-RPG. In short, these plans now include roughly four months of optimization and bug fixing and then a new Path of Exile-style “league.” Here’s more on that:
Hello everyone,
It’s been a month since the game was released and we would like to take this opportunity to talk about the future of the game and the decisions we’ve made lately.
These past few weeks, our team has been working on fixing numerous issues players encountered in-game, and we have many more issues to fix. The problems we encountered with the servers caused by a large number of new players also forced us to substantially change some aspects of the code to allow a lighter charge on the servers and the database requests. And there is still work to do.
Despite the issues encountered, we received a lot of positive feedback about the game and many players enjoy it which makes us very proud of the work we’ve accomplished so far. That success allows us to grow, but most importantly, it allows us to make the right choices to restore more global happiness in our community.
Operation: Second Dawn
We initially planned to put a top priority on new league content and on the new Chapter shortly after the release of the game. We’ve decided to swap the priority between the production of new content and bug fixing, game stabilization, quality of life, and recruitment during the next 4 months.
This decision comes with a name: Operation Second Dawn. Its goal is to focus on fixing several issues and invest in resources and infrastructures to make sure that the game will grow on a healthy base and a happy community.
Testing improvement
This is one of our primary objectives: reinforce the testing. We’re now working with an external QA team to improve our testing process, spot issues sooner, and fix them before a new version goes live.
On that note, we want to inform you that patch 1.0.10 will be deployed early next week instead of this week. We’ve made some changes that require extensive testing and we want to make sure that it works properly.
Story improvements
We want to bring some love to Chapter 3 and improve the diversity and the pace to make its gameplay events and encounters more appealing. In addition to adding more visual diversity, we will also add new enemies and new enemies variants.
Quality of life improvements
Localization quality and clarity, the possibility to rebind left-click(we heard you!), a Gate of Fates search function, ailment stack numbers on monsters, a new quest reward system to avoid having a window in the middle of your screen when you receive your reward(along with the possibility to stack your reward and collect them whenever you want), and more...
Balancing
You can also expect balancing improvements in addition to bug fixing. Our goal is to improve the skills that are currently less played, there should not be a lot of damage reduction or skill nerfs. The Patch 1.0.10.0 will start to bring some improvements in that direction.
We will, however, continue to intervene on extremely unbalanced skills, items, or nodes as we did for Bleeding Edge if any come to our attention.
Servers improvements
We’re investigating options to improve our coverage, server capacities, and their efficiency. We’re aware of the issues you’re encountering in-game and improving server responsiveness is one of our top priorities for solo and multiplayer.
Communication and Support
During all the Alpha and the Beta, communication and support has been handled by only one person. The release of the game made our community substantially grow and community tasks and customer support cannot be handled by a single person anymore. We’re working on reinforcing the team so the background work doesn’t affect our global communication with you. We know that you feel abandoned these days but we can assure you that we’re reading everything and we’re working on improving our communication with you.
Our goal is to keep a close relationship with our community, but we also have to make sure that everyone can have access to our replies. In the ideas considered, there is the possibility to withdraw from Discord to focus on communication on other media such as Reddit and the Official Forums to allow better visibility on the replies we make on various topics.
We also want to improve our forums to ensure that they’re user-friendly and have all the necessary elements (such as a basic search option, the possibility to pin topics, and more...).
This is just part of the changes that are in discussion at Wolcen Studio and we will keep you regularly informed regarding the progress we make and changes we bring in the game and on our communication.
After “Second Dawn”?
We’ve always planned to support Wolcen for several years and that includes regularly adding free content in the game.
The next content patch 1.1.0 will be a league, which means that unique league mechanics will be added in the game along with new content.
The characters created with the 1.0.0 will be separated from the 1.1.0 content during that league, and the league characters will be merged again with the “standard” version when the 1.2.0 is released (and so on). For each league, players will have to start a new character to play the league.
New Chapters are also planned. Keep in mind that it takes more time to make a new Chapter than to make Leagues, so you can expect a new Chapter much later.
We hope that you’re as excited as we are regarding the changes to come. We want to thank you again, all of you, for your support and for your understanding. As usual, don’t hesitate to share your feedback!
