Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem - Next Patch and Beta

A new update for Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem details what the next patch will bring and when to expect the beta. Thanks henriquejr!

Past content, future content, Beta, and a nice surprise!

[German translation]

There is a lot to say today. Before presenting you the huge surprise we made for you at the end of this news, I would like to share some information. Let’s start with…

1. News about the next patch

We want to give you an update on the development of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, and how things will go in the next months.

In January this year, we shared with you the Roadmap for 2018. In that Roadmap, we told you that we will release the true Act I of the game. We would like to clarify what “the true Act I” means:

- Multiplayer/Coop
- An entire new storyline
- Apocalyptic form
- New creatures
- New environments
- New quests and dialogues
- New NPCs
- New player characters
- New animations
- New armors

But also on a more technical point:

- Improved quality of assets and textures
- New shaders and visual effects
- Whole new particle effects with improved quality
- Huge optimization pass on everything
- New gameplay mechanics

Basically, we are improving the quality of everything, so it fits better our ambition, and yours.

Since the entire actual environment, armors, and characters will be modified or improved to allow the final version of the game to be implemented, we’ve decided to focus our attention on the Beta transition and no longer add content to the actual version of Wolcen.

This leads the next patch to be planned for the end of September.

We still plan to check regularly on crashes and game breaking bugs to apply hotfix for the most annoying ones, in order to improve your game comfort on the Alpha. Our Community Manager, Jessica (Calistaen on Discord/Steam), is always here to take care of you. So, please, keep giving us feedback and bug/crash reports so we can monitor these issues.

In September 2018, we will officially move into version 0.9 of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, meaning: Beta! For this update, all characters and stashes will be wiped, and you will have a whole new game to explore.

We’ve already been working on that content for the last months, in parallel of the patch 0.5.0.5 that we applied at the end of March.

Actually, we’ll do better than that and show you the work we’ve done at the end of this news with a nice cool new video (I told you there was a surprise!).

2. What other changes are planned for the Beta?

Before preparing to move into Beta, we had to reconsider some implementations planned during the Kickstarter. There were a lot of discussions in the office around these elements, and a lot of feedback gathered to reach a final decision. However, we’re confident that these choices will improve the production flow, the game flow, and the overall quality of the game.

The Open World

Since we hope that Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is only the first chapter of a long story, it seemed important that the universe is properly introduced. Having an open world ARPG is an interesting challenge and we’re still enthusiastic about having one for Wolcen, but we will most likely keep the idea for a later title.

Therefore, each act of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem will have its own map with different areas in it, and the transition between acts will be handled by teleportation/events. However, each act will be connected to a region and we’re making our best to ensure the game fluidity feels as close as possible to an open world.

Also, the environment will still allow random dungeon, optional random quests, and modifiers. So you’ll always have diversity on the maps.

The rotating camera

We wanted to try the rotating camera to customize player’s experience in the game. After checking our feedback, it seems that the feature is not used by a lot of players, and even considered quite confusing and disorienting.

Developing the game with a rotating camera forces us to make the view perfectly polished on 360° which adds a substantial amount of work for a feature barely used. To us, it means that the time spent taking into consideration the rotating camera could be used as well on more interesting features for the community. All these elements comforted us in the idea to put this feature aside and make the camera viewpoint more popular.

There will still be some cool camera effects though, and the game will be even more beautiful because we will have a full control on what you see when you play your character, but you will no longer have the possibility to rotate your camera in the game.

3. Will the game be completed?

[...]

Yes, the game will be finished and released. The Wolcen Team is growing for you, and most of all, thanks to you and your awesome support since the Kickstarter campaign. Let me assure you that we are all dedicated to making this great game flourish.

Later, I will show you around the studio and introduce all these new faces you don’t know yet.

But for now, as promised, I’ll let you take a sneak peek at what’s been done by the Wolcen team these last few months, and what you can expect when the game moves into Beta in September. Our team is very enthusiastic about this transition, and we hope you will like it despite the waiting it represents.

Thank you all for your support, now and always :)

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