Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem Update #69 – 2018 Roadmap

The team at SolarFall Games looks back at the productive year of 2017, where their Early Access action-RPG Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem received a dozen major patches, was expanded with plenty of new features, and even got a trailer or two, in this Kickstarter update. They also talk about their plans for 2018 and outline the features they intend to add to their game in the near future.

The full update is quite extensive, so here are but a few snippets:

Hello everyone !

The last year has been significantly important for the development and the evolution of Wolcen. From version 0.3.5 to 0.5.0.4a we released a dozen patches and pushes at least as many hotfixes. 2017 was about giving our players substance to start enjoying the content of the game and the core features of Wolcen and we worked hard to update the game twice every month.

2017 also was the one-year-anniversary of the Early Access of Wolcen[.]

And our first trailer !

Finally, 2017 was the year we also learned and grew.

Although we originally planned to release the game much faster, our ambition for Wolcen increased and we’re now moving forward with the idea of making an even Greater game. With a big G. We know that this will cause some delays, but in the end we want you to feel it was definitely worth waiting.

We learned a lot from our previous year thanks to the feedback of our Community and from the experience we gathered.

But for now, let’s go back a little bit on this 2017 year and remind what happened, before we move on to 2018’s plan.

[…]

2018, the year of Rebirth

We’re putting a lot of hopes in 2018 and made the proper arrangement to make these hopes come true. We are still in the process of planning the additions to the game and calculating the time and efforts needed to achieve our goals, but we plan to sweat a great deal this year. And not only because we’re on the French Riviera.

Updates status

With the team growing and the development reaching a critical point for the future of the game, we plan to apply updates every 2-3 months with major and quality content addition. The pace we had didn’t allow us to optimize the game and reduce significantly the amount of crashes as well as making the proper testing. We want to provide more quality to Wolcen, we heard the need for more optimization, content, and less crashes despite the Alpha status of the game and we want to improve on that. This will lead the next patch to be pushed in March.

Linux version status

Wolcen has proven to be a very challenging game to make and maintain, and we’re all highly motivated to lead it to its release and even more. Despite that passion, we’re facing the real problem of time required by all the corrections and additions we must make to make this game great. Knowing that, having a second version of the game for created content as well as maintenance would present a very high difficulty with our current staff, specially without penalizing the PC version itself. As much as we would like to provide the Alpha and Beta version to Linux users, we must face the fact that this will be more time consuming than productive for the game. Therefore we have decided that the Alpha and Beta version will not be implemented on Linux.

Scenario

The last month was very productive and we anchored the core elements of the 5 acts storyline. Regarding the way we’re going to tell the story, we want to innovate on the narrative style, and we hope that you will enjoy what we plan. We will also use the social networks to introduce the main characters, villains, and areas, without spoiling too much of course ! Wolcen Studio now has a hero fully dedicated to that side of the development and we’re confident things will move forward much faster thanks to him.

Gameplay

There will be a lot of improvements in the Gameplay as well. Here is a non-exhaustive list of what we plan for this year:

• Shrines
• Crafting
• Multiplayer
• New act I and more !
• Minions
• New PST sections
• New skills in active skill tree
• New spells
• New monsters, bosses, and AI behaviors
• New NPCs
• New item types including weapons (bows!), armors and trinkets
• More new music and sounds
• Combo improvements
• Apocalyptic form !

We will also internally work on the future content of the game’s scenario but so far we don’t plan to release it for the Alpha or the Beta to provide a testing environment for spoiler sensitive players.

[…]

In conclusion

The 2018 calendar for Wolcen is very fraught with content. We will continue to focus on the gameplay content more than the scenario release. The gameplay elements need much more testing than the story, and we don’t want players to refrain from testing because they’re worried of being spoiled. We will then focus on the endgame content to allow player to have fun while testing the game and its features. Patches applied less often will allow us to add more content in a more stable environment so our Community can enjoy the game while testing it.

Don’t forget your feedbacks will always help us to make the game even better so do not hesitate to provide them to us, it’s really important for us to know how you feel when you play Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem.

Of course, we didn’t cover everything you should know regarding this year, but we will continue to update you on the status of our team, so you will know soon enough 🙂

Once more, thank you all for your support. This means a LOT to all of us.

The Wolcen Team