We speak to Jessica Milleville, Player Experience Director at Wolcen Studio, about their latest DLC, Bloodtrail, and why they chose CRYENGINE.

We need your votes to decide the CRYENGINE Indie Game of the Year 2020 winner! The nominees are ColdSide, Racing Glider, and Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, and by heading to the forum, casting your vote, and leaving a comment about your choice, you’ll also be in with a chance of winning a voucher to spend on merch at the Crytek store. Voting is open until Sunday, February 7, so don’t delay.

The million-plus selling Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is a stunning, dynamic hack'n'slash RPG with all-action combat where you’ll carve a trail of destruction through beautiful environments. If you haven’t played it already, keep an eye out on our social channels for your chance of winning a key, and join us on Twitch this Friday as we host a playthrough with special guests from your CRYENGINE Team.

Today, we speak to Jessica Milleville, Player Expérience Director, about Bloodtrail, their latest major update to the game. Find out what it brings to the game, how supporting the community is vital, and more in our interview.

Hey Jessica! Wolcen was already awesome. The Bloodtrail update makes it even better. Can you tell us about what it brings to the game?

Bloodtrail is the first Chronicle for Wolcen. It brings a lot of improvements to the original game, such as new talent nodes, new skill modifiers, and pets! It adds a new game mode associated with narrative events, and players will learn a bit more about Wolcen’s universe and discover a new boss.

The narrative events of the Bloodtrail Chronicle are part of a larger story that we want to develop during several updates. It expands the game's main story, and we hope that players will enjoy discovering new sides of Wolcen's universe. We know that players are really excited to find out more about what happened after the events of Act 3, and this is something that we plan to address in future updates as well. Stay tuned!

There are a lot of general game improvements in the update, like expanding customization and balancing. How did your community help you with developing the update?

Our community feedback helped a lot and still helps today. We plan to progressively improve areas they expect to see improved throughout future Chronicles.

We are most proud of the Bloodtrail system. We think the game system works very well, it is fun to play, and we were able to add many new types of events and objectives in the endgame.

Another part that we are really happy with is the build diversity available now. Thanks to the many new skill variants both for active and passive skills, the character building possibilities are now very diverse and enjoyable, with many viable options in the endgame.

How has the reaction to Bloodtrail been?

Bloodtrail has been a very interesting release, both for the company and the community.

Our fans were delighted that we continued the development of Wolcen with Chronicle I, and more Chronicles are scheduled to enhance the game experience further. While all of the players' feedback couldn't be implemented for Bloodtrail, we keep account of them and prioritize the requests. As with any launch, the community encountered issues, but our teams work very hard to investigate and fix them as fast as possible.

Fixing the game and improving it from stable to user-friendly is now a huge priority for us, and it’s all our team is focused on it at the moment.

On the company side, Bloodtrail has allowed us to grow and improve our processes and pipelines, which will lead us to better releases in the future.

Why did the team choose CRYENGINE to develop the game?

At the time, Daniel Dolui, Wolcen Studio’s CEO, knew that the game he wanted to create would take a long time to be made. CRYENGINE was the best-looking game engine on the market at the time, and it was obvious to him that the engine would still be able to deliver amazing visuals years later.

Engine-wise, the beautiful visuals that a talented team can offer with the engine was really what made the difference to our eyes.

Are you guys already at work on Chronicle II? What lies ahead for Wolcen?

It is too early for us to talk in detail about Chronicle II. For now, we focus on improving the game following the Bloodtrail release.

Thanks, Jessica! 

Join us tomorrow, Friday, February 5th, 2021 at 6 pm GMT+1, right here on our Twitch channel, where our new CRYENGINE Evangelist Roman Perezogin will play the game with some help from some of our other Wolcen fans at Crytek. If you still aren't sure what game to vote for this stream may help you decide. Those tuning in may also get a chance to win some goodies and even the game itself.

Head to the forum to cast your vote for your favorite game from our shortlist, and stay tuned for updates and giveaways on Facebook and Twitter.

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