Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem First Impressions

Daniel looked at Wolcen.

- Daniel Lenois

The action-RPG genre has always been something of a niche genre, dominated largely by a select number of titles, each with their own dedicated fanbase, such as Diablo, Path of Exile, and Torchlight. Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, developed and published by the aptlynamed WOLCEN Studio, stands out as a bold new attempt to break through the stagnant market and offer players something different.

When Wolcen first kicks off, you’re given the option to either play online or offline. Now, this could have been fixed by the time of posting, but as of now, the developers have stated that, bizarrely, progress between the online and offline components will not be shared. If you played part of the campaign solo in offline mode, but then jump over to the online co-op mode, any progress, including levelling up, with that character in the online mode will not transfer to the offline mode featuring that character.

Now, in 2020, I have absolutely no idea why any action-RPG game that features both online and offline play wouldn’t allow players to transfer character progression between online and offline play. Blizzard has been supporting this functionality in Diablo for at least a decade by now, and even other relatively small action-RPGs have enabled this feature. If you’re going to allow online coop in your action-RPG game, why would any developer not develop the framework upon which nearly every other action-RPG is designed around?