The Official Website
It's being developed by Carbine Studios and lead by Jeremy Gaffney, co-creator of Turbine, and published by NCsoft.
Rock Paper Shotgun Preview
Some interesting quotes from that article:
The Paths
Why we should play attention to Wildstar is its concept of playstyles, aka Paths – an additional layer of specialism on top of race, class, haircut and all that, and one that’s designed to shape the game as a whole depending on what kind of MMO gamer you are.
Combat, Collecting, Building and Exploring: pick one when you create your character, and that’s going to play a big part in how you gain experience, find loot and level up. Rather than simply doing the quest or killing fields treadmill, in theory you’re making your own path.
Combat Path
If you’re a Combat guy, certain points and objects enable you to incite, essentially, a public quest: a wave of angry monsters to chop/shoot/magic to pieces, building in numbers and ferocity and eventually to big-arse boss fights. (You can apparently tackle at least some of these solo, by the way). Concentrate on this and scrolling impatiently quest text will essentially be a thing of the past for you, because instead you’re setting up your own fights and resultant rewards.
The game will also offer you the option of on-the-spot challenges – kill a monster particularly speedily and a message asks if you fancy taking out, say, five more of them within five minutes for a bonus package of XP and loot.
Combat generally, by the way (as shared by all playstyles, regardless of how much they want to engage with monster-bothering), is along familiar MMO lines, but a touch more dynamic and reactive. Rather than snoresome auto-attack, players are in there blow-by-blow, and able to dodge looming special attacks with a bit of timely double-tapping of the backwards key. Time your evade right and your enemy will be tired out by its futile assault, rendering it temporarily more vulnerable.
Exploring Path
A Locator device, available only to characters with that playstyle, gives hints of nearby secret areas and objects, and making your way to them will result in xp, cash and/or gear.
Again, it’s a chance to go off-piste, to do your own thing rather than stick slavishly to the quest run. Nosing at it, following leads, I stumbled into bonus quests such as a chasing a floating spatial anomaly, which granted me mega-jump powers that enabled me to reach the top of towering spire. For doing this, the game gifted me some gloves and experience. I hadn’t had to kill 10 rats to do this. I’d instead wandered away from the mobs, to the edges of the map, and I’d found things to do. Another asked me to plant a locator beacon on the top of a high pile of boulders – inaccessible, of course. But Explorers can see/activate paths that other playstyles can’t – tracking my way to a subtly-marked point on my minimap, I found the requisite hotspot, right-clicked and a series of platforms appeared on the side of rocky tower. Up ‘em I went, and my beacon was safely planted. Ding! Gifts for me.
Collecting Path
Collecting is going deep into the game’s lore and/or achievement whoring via finding reams of hidden data stashes, reading every last piece of quest and ancillary text and the like.
Building Path
Building has you both contributing to the growth of settlements (don’t know yet if this is in a permanent, major, UO or Galaxies-like way or something more transitory – I’m meeting Carbine tomorrow and will inquire) and fostering good relations with other players and assorted NPCs – it’s the social element of MMOs, in other words, with a for-now still fairly cryptic construction element there too.
Pictures
Videos
Cinematic TrailerGameplay walkthrough
Posts
Why am I being limited to only one?
I'm gonna hope that the whole path concept is either a gross interpretation, or that they nix it a few months in. If they really want players to not feel forced into grinding via combat, then don't design a game that emphasizes it. That quote just makes it sound like they're letting us choose our grind.
I really want them to partner with Dreamworks or something.. make a movie out of that cinematic they made. I was genuinely entertained by it, but the gameplay? Eh....
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Why not?
I mean, clearly the issue of shame is going out the window for anyone playing that particular race. There's no reason not to go for the fully monty.
EDIT: Yep, two factions.
Double-yep, those three races are just the races shown in the demo.
Steam
Your argument is valid and there is appeal to this game's art style, but I still have to reiterate their appropriate question: Why are that bunny/cat girl's hands/tits/whatevers so fucking huge?
At any rate: for as far as I can tell the different "paths" give you options to get rewarded for stuff you'd be doing anyway. I guess there will be a lot of alts when people want to see what's down every one of those paths.
And the soldier was easily the most boring class they had on display there, as the spellsinger I ran through the demo with never really stopped moving. Lots of emphasis on moving in and out of range, and interrupts available pretty much from the start to exploit opportunities.
PSN: LucidStar_BC
Her horrifying monster hands are a mystery unless hand fetishes are a thing now.
I like them.
Another example is the Heavy from TF2. Large hands, but they're consistent with his body. Bunny girl has horrifying spider hands.
EDIT: I mean, her hands are longer than the dude's, despite being physically smaller than him!
I want to know more PA people on Twitter.
That'd be pretty groundbreaking for an MMO
Also, kudos on MMOs finally cluing in on manually dodging and avoiding attacks in combat.
Eh, I really disagree with you but I don't want to make anything more of it.
a lot
Nothing in particular is said.