Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, an open world Hack ‘n’ Slash action-RPG by SolarFall Games has reached version 0.5, according to the game’s Kickstarter page. This, rather sizable, new update drastically changes the game’s world map and adds new quests, monsters, and functionality. A bit on that:
Update 0.5 is finally here! It may have taken a few late nights, but the team pulled it off and we are very excited to reveal our new world map and questline!
The new world map is much bigger and denser than the old one, and yet only represent less than a quarter of the final version of map! There’s new environments to explore, new monsters to kill, and other surprises!
3 new randomly generated dungeon architecture have been added, which adds more variety to dungeon layouts. The new questline covers most of Act1 of the game, and will give you a preview of the lore and story of Wolcen. We will periodically add more content to Act 1, including side quests, treasure and optional bosses. You can now listen to the Main Theme of the game while in the main menu. This will give you a glimpse of the new original soundtrack being composed for Wolcen.
A fog-of-war now hides parts of the minimap that haven’t been explored yet. This will further help with orientation in dungeons. All minimap icons have been redone and new icons have been added too.
We are aware that there might be some performance issues, and optimization will be a big focus for the next updates. You can get the game at a discount during the Steam summer sale. Now is the perfect time to jump in!
The game’s official website offers the complete changelog. Here it is:
0.5.0 is finally here ! This new milestone for Wolcen brings a whole new open-world, 15 more enemies, roughly half of the first act of the story and lots of corrections and changes.
Unfortunately, due to the heavy alterations brought by the patch to the save files, we had to delete your existing characters, both locally and on Cloud mode.
GENERAL:
- Brand new world! Forget all you knew about the open-world of Wolcen, because we’ve changed everything. This new open-world is still in its early stage, but we’ll update it each time we’ll add quests and content.
- New quests ! You now have access to roughly half of the first act, a better tutorial, and although true boss-fights are not ready yet, the quests themselves are better and longer than before so we hope you will enjoy them.
- Secondary quests will come later and will lead you to explore each corner of the map.
- Lots of new characters, both friendly and unfriendly ones !
- Cloud mode servers have been moved to France (previously in Australia)
VISUALS:
- Color grading is now functional and help defining each environment
- Main menu rendering tweaks
AUDIO:
- New main theme in the main menu!
- New dodge roll sound.
- New ambient sounds for the new world locations! (lots of content).
- Fixed waypoints increasing audio volume.
- Improved sound mix.
- Fixed a number of ambiance seeking issues, where ambiance would restart from the beginning instead of picking a random starting point.
UI:
- Reworked Quests tracking UI
- New Quests acceptation pop-up
- New Quests reward pop-up
- New World map
- Reworked background for Unique items.
- New item rarity : Quest item, with its own background, loot particle & text color.
- New available stats points and passive skill points notification buttons
- Skill level up is now directly displayed on the skillbar
- Clicking on a skill in the skillbar will now open the active skill tree
- Skillbar shortcuts are now displayed uppercase
- New minimap
- New set of minimap icons
- Added Fog Of War to the minimap
- Reworked and added book icons
- New tutorial icons
- New Spell Books icons
- New quest tracking arrow
- Reworked death screen
- Reworked gameplay error message animation (not enough rage, etc…)
CHARACTERS:
- New enemy : Beware of the unpredictable Grave Digger ! He’ll use his shovel to dig all sorts of things to launch at you, but mostly other Undeads. He is sort of the Grave Keeper’s angrier and older brother.
- New enemy : The first boss of act 1 is in, Halaku, the dreadful Bones Lord. Although we’ll improve the bossfight in the future with more attacks and patterns (and boss phases), this is already a powerful foe and the first true boss of the game.
- New enemies : The Corruption has spread to the East, and bring forth a terrible army. While slaughtering the Corrupted Warriors and Berserkr will be quite straightforward, handling the mighty Juggernaut or the dangerous Slug could be a challenge for those who are not prepared.
- New enemies : In the Hailstone bay to the North, the constant low temperature has affected some of the resident creatures in a bad way. There, you’ll find new variants of enemies you already know, sharing an affinity to the cold : the impressive Ice Crusher, the deadly Storm Keeper and the Iced variants of the Pithus and Pithus Warrior.
- New enemies : The existing Pithus have been reorganized and a few members have been added to the family. We now have the regular Pithus, the Pithus Warrior, the uncatchable Pithus Outrider and the venomous Pithus Spewer and Infector.
- New enemies : the new Skeletal Guards and Warriors serve as the bulk of the Bones Lord army and although they die easy, don’t underestimate them when they’re in large groups.
- New NPC : Seren
ENVIRONMENT:
- Regarding the work that has been put in the new open-world, it would be hard to list the bulk of the environment changes. Anyway, you’ll find that most areas are now more readable and clearly defined, sometimes using biomes or color-grading, and that they contain many new assets.
- Chests : since we want to reward exploration, the new open-world contains many chests, sometimes hidden ones, so that you won’t need to farm Dungeons to find interesting loot. We’re currently working on many different types of containers (furnitures, trash, cadavers, etc.) in order to give chests a better variety in the future and a better readability gameplay-wise (ex: equipment racks that only loot weapons or armors, etc.).
- Indoor locations : We’ve added a few indoors areas to the world, and will design a lot more in the future, so that the total walkable surface of the game will be even bigger and exploration will be more interesting. They can be randomly chosen (ex : house cave) or static (ex : pithus dungeon) and will contain their fair share of rewards and foes.
- New automated Doors system with one-sided Doors that can serve as shortcuts.
- Various signposts have been placed in the world, indicating the location of main areas.
- Fixed the issue that caused some players to encounter invisible walls in dungeons
- New Dungeon : Pithus cave
- New Dungeon : Ancient Civilization
- New Dungeon : House Cave
- We now use a progressive system for time. This can result a more flickering shadows, but we are working on a fix for that.
LOCALIZATION:
- The Quests file has been wiped and replaced by a new one containing all the new dialogs and gameplay strings. This represents almost 200 new lines.
GAMEPLAY:
- Visual spawners : the new world now contain advanced spawners that are represented by objects (tombs, eggs, etc.) that look just like regular props, but will start to shake when you are near and explode after a short time, revealing the enemy they contained. We hope this will bring diversity to the regular enemies that just happen to raise from the ground, and maybe surprise the careless adventurers.
- Spreading Nodes : in certain areas of the world, you’ll find entities that extend their influence on the ground over time and endlessly spawn foes. You’ll need to destroy them quickly if you don’t want to be overwhelmed, but keep in mind that you can’t use them to farm experience or loot because the node only will reward you, not the enemies that it spawned. But know also that those rewards get better the more advanced is the progression of the node when you destroy it, so it may be interesting to let it extend, survive the spawned enemies, then destroy it when it’s the strongest.
- New Support AI : the way following allies (ex: Brother Leon) behave has been totally changed and this is a first step in the direction of interesting pets or mercenaries.
- Traps have been added to the game. You’d better watch your step if you don’t like being stunned, burned or if you don’t want to die prematurely.
- Monster density has been overhauled and spawn locations carefully chosen.
AFFIXES:
- New Umbra On Kill affix for mage equipment.
- Decreased the spell damage bonus on staves.
