Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem in the technology test

– With Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, the PC gets a new Hack'n'Slay that looks really good thanks to CryEngine. The technology test shows that the Diablo clone primarily requires a fast graphics card, the CPU is less relevant. There is a question mark at the start of the number of serious bugs.

With Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, the comparatively small French development team Wolcen Studio has created a Diablo clone exclusively for the PC, which wants to woo Hack'n'Slay fans before the release of Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2. The title, financed by crowdfunding, relies on many virtues of the great role models, but also wants to differentiate themselves from them. Graphics should be a means.

A Diablo clone with Cryengine

And indeed: While no Diablo seemed to fit the state of the art when it appeared, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem certainly does. With chic lighting, a fireworks display in battles, detailed characters, neat textures and chic staged cutscenes, the game may not look spectacular, but it looks consistently good. So it doesn't matter that there is only a very rigid camera perspective, which somehow belongs to the genre.

One reason for the chic graphics from Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem is the Cryengine, which is now rather rare. It is unclear which of their expansion stages will be used. In any case, only DirectX 11 is available, although the engine now also supports low-level APIs. That should also be due to the small team. As the technology test will show, the PC version also works properly with DirectX 11, although not without problems.

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem's graphics options are kept relatively simple. There are graphics presets, a few individual options and an anti-aliasing setting. On the positive side there is an FPS limiter that can be freely configured between 30 and 240 FPS. There is also an integrated function for resharpening. By default, this is set to "0.2" (from up to 1.0 are possible), which has proven sufficient in the test even in Full HD.

Four graphics presets with little tuning potential

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem offers four different graphic presets with "Low", "Medium", "High" and "Very High", whereby "Very high" also shows the maximum graphic details. Unfortunately, it is not possible to switch back and forth between the presets for a comparison without restarting – only a few changes are then adopted, a reboot is required for all.

There are only minimal visual differences between the "Very High" and "High" presets, which are not noticeable when playing. However, it hardly brings any more power, because the frame rate only increases by ten percent on a GeForce RTX 2070 Super and a Radeon RX 5700 XT.

With the medium preset, on the other hand, there are large cuts, because some objects then no longer cast shadows. In some scenes this is practically not noticeable, in others, however, clearly. It also shows that the developers created many surface irregularities using tessellation. And this is obviously reduced somewhat with medium, because the floor becomes flatter with the setting. This brings a performance boost of nine percent on the Radeon RX 5700 XT, and six percent on the GeForce RTX 2070 Super. In the lowest preset, the textures lose detail and the lighting is easier. Regardless of the graphics card, this results in another 12 percent increase in FPS.

Apart from the differences in shadows, the effects of the presets on the quality are pretty small, especially when the texture details are manually turned up again. The maximum increase in performance is only 31 (Nvidia) and 34 percent (AMD). If Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem runs badly, apart from the resolution, there are only a few adjustments to raise the FPS significantly.

SMAA 1TX is the anti-aliasing of choice

Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem offers the post-processing methods SMAA 1X and SMAA 1TX as anti-aliasing. The latter is the anti-aliasing of choice because it captures all image elements with the temporal component. The differences to SMAA 1X are minimal, but the smoothing is slightly better in motion. The performance losses are minimal.

Fortunately, the blurring caused by the anti-aliasing is tiny even in Full HD in combination with the sharpness filter activated as standard in the game. More sharpness, be it through the in-game function or the options provided by AMD and Nvidia externally, is not necessary.

Average textures and memory requirements

The textures in Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem look neat, but don't set any standards. But they don't have to, because the type of game means the camera is never too close to the action anyway. The quality of the textures is good enough to leave a high-quality impression at all times. Even in Ultra HD, a graphics card with 6 GB is sufficient for maximum texture quality. For low resolutions like Full HD, models with 4 GB are sufficient.

On the next page: GPU benchmarks, frame times and the conclusion