They are progressing slowly. Several months to releases only a single level. They are supposed to do 10 more with two more hubs. I suspect the release date will have to be moved.
I like it heaps too, Brian! I haven’t played the latest update, but there’s one power-up that really surprised me by how completely it changes how you play. Lots of fun surprises to be had.
The 1.0 release date has been moved from February to summer. They’ve been working on the rest of the levels, artifacts, enemies and weapons concurrently with the ones you find in the first hub. The original vision keeper and project founder for Wrath, Killpixel, left the development team in October last year, judging from his message due to burn out, but appears to be on good terms with the people still working on it. They recently hired a project manager from id to help wrap up the game.
Yeah the PR guy told me summer as well. I could see why these maps take a while. I played on ONE for over an hour and didn’t see all of it, even close to all of it.
This was listed as a release day today on Xbox, but when I went to the store this morning on Series X, it wasn’t there. So maybe it got delayed again? I see some references online about it coming out Feb 25, and some saying it will be out in “Summer 2021”.
Yea, it was delayed till summer because some devs got COVID.
Wrath for only 6€ on EGS, if you get their coupon by subscribing to their email thingie
This comes out tomorrow.
Worth quoting the first few paragraphs of the Eurogamer review.
Fun as all this is, it’s nothing that hasn’t been done in a thousand other shooters. Where Wrath stands out from the crowd is in its level design. Each of its fifteen maps is a masterpiece of 3D worldbuilding, a soaring, twisting, tunnelling, looping, writhing work of art. As each hub provides some flexibility in the order you tackle its challenges, I can’t say which you’ll encounter first. It will probably be The Undercrofts, a sprawling necropolis that weaves through snowy graveyards and subterranean sepulchres that took me 48 minutes to complete. But it might equally be The Mire, which drops you into the world’s most elaborate sewer level and forces you to climb out to a castle on the cliffside. It could even be the Gardens, an ingenious spiralling design that keeps feeding you back into its central greenhouse hub, like the world’s deadliest hedge maze.
I cannot emphasise enough how much I appreciate and admire the craft in these spaces. The talent, imagination, and generosity on show is astonishing. They’re fun to explore too, riven with secrets and unlockable chests that provide bonus items you can deploy in combat, like a heart that drains health from slaughtered foes and an energy shield that deflects projectiles. But here’s where I drop the other shoe. There’s a difference between good level design and good shooter design, and for all its geometric showmanship, Wrath fails to consistently convert the former into the latter.
It’s a difficult problem to explain, but it ultimately comes down to flow. In a shooter like this I want to be in the middle of a snarl of enemies, weaving and ducking and leaping to avoid their projectiles. Wrath’s combat can be like this, but it’s generally more staggered and incremental. You’re either moving forward in staccato beats to shoot two or three enemies at a time, or peeping around corners to snipe foes positioned at vast distances.
This is a common problem I’ve seen repeated over and over again in megamods in GZDoom. A designer puts out a massively-detailed architectural masterpiece, yet it’s just no fun to actually play.
And as the review above - it repeatedly mentions Killpixel as the designer, when that hasn’t been the case for years. It was picked up and finished by 3DR’s other retro-engine team, whose name I am totally spacing out on right now.
edit later Slipgate Interactive, I believe
You know what’s really cool? Giant sprawling levels and save anywhere is limited.
Ugh. I may not stick this one out.
From the Eurogamer review, after a paragraph about why the limited saves are such a terrible idea:
Then, about three levels from the game’s end, I discovered an option that enables infinite saves. I’ve never checked a box so hard in my life, and it unquestionably improved the experience. Now I could throw myself into combat freely, enjoy the challenge of the fight itself rather than fretting over resource management.
You need to find that infinite saves option, STAT!
Wrath took so long to come out, first being teased way back in 2018, that any enthusiasm I once had for it has long since evaporated. A glut of boomer shooters have released in the interim and elevated fan expectations making it hard for a more traditional throwback FPS to stand out.
Here’s a flashback to PAX 2019 when the game and its console ports were on track to leave early access in Q1 2020.
Oh thank god!
Yeah, this one’s not moving the needle for me much. Other than the “let’s break the Quake engine” architecture and level design, gameplay is bog-standard. Wrath would have been a cool boomshoot in 2020; not so much now.
That’s my take-away as well, @scharmers. I like the idea of getting lost in big open levels! But after getting through the Undercroft, Wrath’s gunplay and enemies aren’t doing anything for me. I’m going back to my Prodeus playthrough.
Skill issue.
(no seriously, I can’t take seriously someone who doesn’t understand that resource management is integral part of the combat)
Savegame slots as resource management? Nah. No thanks. Not with the size of these levels.
Oh, I wasn’t considering the sentence was about that, I didn’t read it correctly.
About the game itself, I’m going to start it just now, so you will have some impressions in a few days, i guess.
Ok, first level done.
The first impression is pretty good, actually! I have never tried the game in EA before, despite buying it years ago. In fact, fun story, I bought it on EGS on a sale, and because the game has been so many years on EA, it happened by chance that years later I got a key in Steam (from a bundle? free from a friend? I can’t remember!) so I spent money on it for nothing. I had been waiting patiently until the 1.0 was out. Also, I have to say that part of the reasoning of buying this (and Supplice too) was in part to wanting to give something back to the Doom/Quake community, which have given me hundreds of hours of enjoyment for free.
In any case, I like it. The weapons are very solid (and for once, the super shotgun isn’t particularly OP), and the enemies in particular are very fun to kill, I say they are the best enemies of Quake 1 / Quake 1 clones that I have tried. The zombies have several states of destruction when you attack them and lots of enemies have a satisfying explosion where they are killed (from the flying small enemy to the vine zombie to the weird thing that fires blue shots with its single eye and emits it towards the sky and then blows up when you kill it, as if it was overloaded) and the enemy encounter design is good.
The combat is an interesting mix of Quake and Doom, more than being a straightforward clone of Quake, actually. While the base is of course, Quake, enemies are a bit more fragile hjp wise, enemy numbers are a bit higher, there are less melee based enemies and less hitscan enemies, so there is more of hectic combat dance and it all feels more punchy.
Now, this has been the first level so I expect things to change, but for now it has been easy. There was an adequate number of ammo for the four weapons I could find (not counting the melee blade), same as armor, but there was too much extra health going around, I was almost always at 100 hp, and in several rooms I left behind red vials, and I didn’t have to use any of the powerups I found (and I found more than a dozen!).
The level, by the way, was at first a bit samey with the whole grey crypt theme, but later it had a pair of different areas and the progression was interesting and well done, in how areas opened later, a central location was revisited serving a unofficial hub, shortcuts were opened, etc.
I have been always a proponent of quicksaving with total freedom from the player, vs game using checkpoints. I usually am able to regulate myself and use it sparingly at first, and only use it more and more if the difficulty increases. The first time I heard about it, I thought the system used here was intriguing, while limited saves seems going against my preferences, giving the player still the freedom of choosing when and where to save could potentially be enough for me. It all depended of how many save points uses you are given.
Again, it’s just the first level, but I found 3 fixed checkpoints + 13 usable quicksaves, which seemed a very good amount. Plenty enough to play without an issue, just not infinite, avoiding players cheesing fights. We will see how it evolves in that regard.
In any case it seems there is a way to enable infinite saves in the options if the game goes too hardore later.
7 hours in, I’m still finishing up the first episode, although I’m not rushing it, but the opposite, I’m trying to fully explore the levels. Not that the results of said exploring is something super throughout, I’m usually getting half the secrets of the levels.
So the game is long, and yeah it’s nice the game is longer than say, Quake 1, but it doesn’t seem to have the different content to cover that length without getting too samey. After seven hours I’m starting to be bored of the same 8 enemies and I still have the same 5 weapons, at this point I should have new weapons and new enemies to play against.
Other issues I found with the game, these are more of the ‘objective’ type, is that a few enemies have collision box issues and they get stuck on some corners instead of chasing you properly, and another one: Steam cloud saves aren’t working as it should, from playing from one computer to another I can say files with saves are copied correctly, but there is a file about the user profiles that isn’t copied over, so your profile doesn’t appear, I had to fix it by hand.
The limited save thing is funny, I thought it would made me save somewhat less, but I’m actually saving a lot less… Because it’s somehow fun to make the item number you have on screen to go up, it makes me strangely proud of seeing it. I think I am at 29 unused saves now.
… and by doing that, I had two occasions where I lost 15 minutes of playing, making me swear loudly.
But really, I don’t think my way of playing have changed by using this system, I think I could disable it and I still would play the same way.
I really like the pistol, it’s super accurate so is your unofficial sniper rifle, and it usually stun lock any low level enemy a bit, so it’s very safe as long as you can kill one by one.
I also like these long, epic levels. I was exploring a swamp, and fell to a sewer that had below a crypt… and you know, I know the whole thing could have been split in two different levels, and functionally it would have been the same, but imo having it being a single big level creates this feeling of adventure, of finding new areas on your own and deciding to explore them organically.
I’m starting to change my ‘I like long, epic levels!!11’ stance. I’m in some kind of Egyptian-like catacombs and it’s already 80 minutes played and holy shit some of these levels won’t ever end. Pace, what it is.
The game is also starting to lose a few points for me, as in addition to the pace issues, the enemy behaviour is definitely another issue. It has a few too many enemies that just stay on place (or move sloowly) and fires endlessly. In between the Imp-like, the Caco-like and the Fire Construct, they cover low level, mid level and high level encounters, making the combat feel overall very static.
Something no one commented is about the movement. It felt somewhat off at first, and the reason is simple: it’s a bit faster than Quake movement, while the level design is still very Quake like in sizes.
I’m still in the middle of Episode 2, but in the level I am, I’m using more the quicksaves because I’m finding less health now, and well, the combat difficulty is still steadily increasing. In lots of places I had to play with 20 hp or less.