The new action RPG Wolcen is a phenomenon on Steam: While Steam reviews have plummeted rapidly, the player count has skyrocketed to unprecedented heights since release. The maximum number of simultaneous players has risen to nearly 50 times the previous record.
What is happening with the player count? Wolcen is currently exploding on Steam:
- Wolcen has been playable on Valve’s platform since March 2016 – the highest peak of simultaneous players occurred in March 2019, with 1934 players online at the same time.
- Now, with the game released, Wolcen had 95,720 players at its peak. That’s almost 50 times more. This peak was reached last night on Steam.
When comparing these peak player numbers, Wolcen ranks 7th among the current top games on Steam, ahead of Destiny 2, Warframe, or ARK Survival Evolved.
Wolcen had more players yesterday than could fit in the Dortmund stadium
To highlight the difference: The handball second division team ThSV Eisenach had an average of 2012 spectators this season. About the same as Wolcen until now. (via liquimoly)
The Bundesliga football team Dortmund had 81,153 spectators in the 2019/2020 season – meaning several Wolcen players would have had to watch from outside. (via kicker)
What about the Steam reviews? It’s exactly the opposite:
- Prior to release, Wolcen was playable in Early Access. There, players could only try out the first act. On Thursday the Steam reviews were still at a fabulous 93% in the “last 30 days”
- Today, on Saturday, the current Steam reviews are only at 69%. Wolcen has thus lost 24 percentage points in 2 days. That’s dropped from “Very Positive” to “Mixed”.
What is the reason for this? The Steam reviews list the issues, that led to a 15-point downgrade in the Wolcen review by the gaming magazine GameStar:
- Wolcen has many bugs. For example, some enemies are unreachable and you cannot target them.
- You encounter “invisible” walls that block progress.
- Crashes occur.
- There are problems with the online mode.
- Especially from Act 2 onwards, bugs proliferate.
Many Steam users rating negatively now say that Wolcen doesn’t seem ready for release and that testing should take a few more months.
However, there are also people who have given positive reviews since the Steam launch. They say “Never Play on Release Day!” – you have to give the developers time to fix bugs and issues. They have already had several hours of fun in the game.
This is MeinMMO’s experience: I have spent 4 hours in Wolcen since release:
On the first day, at release, I could only play in offline mode because online was completely down. I noticed the “unreachable enemies,” which I found annoying, but Wolcen was playable.
On day 2, I played exactly the same online as I did the day before, just with a different focus: Wolcen doesn’t have typical classes, but different specializations.
The “unreachable enemies” were already rarer on Friday, but I encountered an invisible wall that I could overcome. I then crashed out of the game around 11 PM due to a hotfix, but until then, I had my fun.
In the short time I spent in Act 1 of Wolcen, I did not encounter any further bugs. However, when I wanted to check the game earlier to take screenshots of my online character, the servers were down again.
It seems to be a rocky release, given such a strong influx of players.
Update 16.2.: There are major server issues during the launch weekend of Wolcen. The servers have been offline for over 30 hours for maintenance.
