When the indie action role-playing game Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem left early access in February, it was plagued by server issues at launch. However, the game has continued to thrive, and today its developers announced they will be shifting focus from developing new content to fixing up what they have and creating a more solid foundation to build upon.
The plan for Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem to spend the next four months on "bug fixing, game stabilization, quality of life, and recruitment" is being called Operation: Second Dawn according to the game's community post on Steam. Server problems throughout Wolcen's launch have been a result of the huge influx of new players, who also found numerous in-game issues like item duplication to fix and forced a substantial change in the code to "allow a lighter charge on the servers and the database requests."
Operation: Second Dawn will begin with patch 1.0.10 being deployed early next week rather than this week as planned, because some changes were found to need "extensive testing" according to the post. Further changes coming to Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem through this period include quality of life improvements like rebinding left-click, balancing that focuses on giving lesser-used skills more play, and hiring more staff for communicating on social media.
The developers also say they want to bring "some more love to Chapter 3" of Wolcen's three-act campaign by improving its pacing, adding enemies, and making the visuals more diverse. After Operation: Second Dawn is over, there are plans "to support Wolcen for several years" with regular free-content updates and new story chapters.
Wolcen had over 120,000 concurrent players in its first official week of release on Steam, and the ARPG spoke to a community that has kept it going strong through regular gameplay and mods that enhance character customization and create new weapons. It may not have the history of its predecessors in the genre like Blizzard Entertainment's Diablo franchise, but the game has a long runway to really make a name for itself.
Taking the time to iron out server issues and quality of life improvements is a great idea while Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is in its early stages, and the Operation: Second Dawn post suggests the devs are listening to their community. Other large-scale indie titles like the MMO Temtem also encountered server issues on launch, so it isn't alone with these growing pains.
Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is currently available on PC.
Source: Steam Community News