i mean... i've played some pretty terrible games and i wouldn't put this in that category. i'd say it's right smack dab in the "mediocre" list. it's hard to define exactly what went wrong with it, as there's kind of a lot of factors. the state that the game released in... they should have kept working on it. but it's also basically an indie game and they couldn't continue funding it without releasing it. it had a TON of reiterations. the game that was originally released in early access is almost completely unrecognizable to what we got. it changed considerably multiple times.
i'm one of those guys that hates publishers, because they get all handsy with a product that isn't theirs. you end up getting a design by committee and the end product is bland and unpalatable. that being said, wolcen, i think, is the perfect example of why publishers exist. they've been working on this game for like... 7+ years and have changed the design of it at least that many times. on one hand, clearly the people involved wanted to make a game they were passionate about, but like a lot of artists, passion is fickle. how long did it take and how much money was lost before someone, somewhere just said "we have to stick to what we have, make it work, and release it."
i think if you just make the statement (as i did earlier) that it needed more time, things would have gotten worse. obviously corona would have had a huge effect on even being able to continue working on it, but no one knew that was coming (except for the dirty commie chinese). but even if that didn't come along, i think their history shows they would have redesigned some stuff (which obviously the game needed), but it also would have kept the cycle going.
there were some pretty interesting ideas that they had several years ago but they got tossed to the wayside because those ideas were cool in theory, but a pain in the butt to make actually work. one of my favorite things was that staff attack animations were unique to the element of the staff itself. so, an electric staff would have a 3 hit combo, the first was just a straight lightning bolt from the staff to the target, the second attack was a chain lightning that would hit everything in like a 5 yard radius, the third was a big giant bolt that game from the sky and hit everything in like a 10 yard radius. a fire staff would shoot out firebolts in different patterns, a frost staff would function almost like a shotgun hitting a lot of enemies in close range, ending with a frost nova hitting everything around you.
but for several reasons, they dropped it. basically the default attacks were so good you'd never use any spells. and secondly the other weapons were just... boring swings. they couldn't figure out how to equalize the animations for melee or bows so they just dropped the staff stuff.