I get sad every time I see someone mention City of Heroes.
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H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
edited March 2017
Sorry, ura.
So, I started playing again. Made myself a stalker/explorer Aurin. I... kinda liked the public beta's tutorial sections on the spaceships a lot better than the new 'virtual' one. I mean, besides not having all the "here, ride this hoverboard, wasn't that fun? Too bad you won't get one for a long time, UNLESS YOU BUY IT WITH REAL MONEY BY CLICKING THE IN-GAME STORE BUTTON!" shit. Or the "you could be earning extra everything if you were a paying player, you cheap-skate" reminder on the UI to the right of the action buttons (which is almost as passive-aggressive and gauche as that giant fucking round store button they added to the default UI in CoH (sorry ura) when it went free to play). The old tutorial explained the paths and gave you a taste of playing them, which this doesn't. It introduced you to a bunch of NPC characters that you just kind of see in passing now (I'm assuming they'll be more important later?). It also gave you a bunch of world-building text to read through (which you could pretty much skip by just clicking the doodads and then immediately closing any window that popped up and clicking the next one if you didn't want to read it). And at a basic level I found the action part a little more fun? Oh well, it's really short so no big deal, just kind of surprised they didn't keep it.
I like that the chat interface is very, very similar to City of Heroes' (sorry urahonky :P ) in terms of how you can organize channels and tabs (dunno if that's common for other MMO's, never really had reason to mess with it in WoW and didn't play others enough to bother).
I had a moment of stupidity and spent 10 bucks to unlock enough character slots to remake the beta characters I had (1 for each class). Well, almost; I've got that lv.50 Engineer I made while they were handing out freebies last weekend. I think I'm gonna try to grind out enough omnibits (or whatever they're called, man this game has a lot of currencies) to unlock one for my old robo-engineer for free.
The OP and post after it were both me. They're nearly three years out of date.
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Golden YakBurnished BovineThe sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered Userregular
Alright, I've gotten the gist of this Primal Pattern thing.
Like WoW's artifact power and Secret World's ability wheel, it is a terrifying mouse-trap that threatens to suck me back into the game, doing quests and dungeons and world-bosses and such.
Stopped playing when game went free to play and just tried doing some quests today.
So how am i supposed to earn essences for the primal thingy?
edit-
right, run dungeons for essences.
just how bad are the lfg queues generally?
Because i am getting hour+ queues.
Actually, you can earn essences doing just about anything. Every daily quest zone - Crimson Isles, Northern Wastes, Star-Comm Basin, and even the Malgrave R-12 event, all give essence. Expeditions (formerly shiphand missions) and Prime Dungeons (formerly veteran dungeons) also give essence. A lot of these are also daily contracts, so you can do both at once. Raids also give essence, if you can swing getting into one of those. People do PUG raids fairly frequently on the weekends.
Easiest way to get a lot of essence is to hit the 'N' key and check the Bonus Rewards section - periodically, different activities will grant bonus essence, in x2, x3, x4, x5, and x10 amounts. For example, every day a different daily quest zone will grant x10 red, green, or blue Essence. There will be World Bosses that grant bonus essences too - one will grant 500 purple essence (the rarest kind), while another will grant x10 R/G/B essence. People *always* hit these, usually multiple groups a day - however, you can only earn the bonus once per kill, you can't keep farming the same boss for x10 multiple times.
Bonuses reset at different times - Expeditions are usually 1 hour, dungeons and battlegrounds a few hours, and some things are daily or weekly. I forget, but I think the 500 purple essence world boss is a weekly one.
Running random normal dungeons gets you purple essence, and a lot of people blast through those. If you want dungeons specifically, you're better off just starting a group in regular chat (world chat is /nexus) than sitting in queues, which yeah take 1+ hour or so. People are very frequently doing world bosses and events though, just keep an eye on /Nexus chat.
I started playing this game last week on a whim and it seems fun
Am I a fool
Does anyone play this
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H3KnucklesBut we decide which is rightand which is an illusion.Registered Userregular
It is fun. I started playing a little when I finally got my gaming pc working again a few months back. Right now I'm catching up on some Steam backlog and trying to avoid missing weekly boxes for Overwatch, but I intend to dig back in and play more soon.
The high end status of the game has basically reached the point of critical failure. My guild has been around for over 3 years now, and we'll be suspending raiding at the end of the month due to the inability to recruit ahead of attrition. Wildstar is still a great game to level up in because I personally feel that the gameplay is unmatched, but I think it's finally time to hang up my hat.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
edited July 2017
That's a damn shame to hear. The art direction and class design really are something special, and the player housing and the fact that it was cosmetic but also could be functional was something really unlike anything else in the MMO space. This game was really something special. It sucks that the devs couldn't pull their HARDCORE heads out of their HARDCORE asses before it HARDCORE tanked the playerbase and killed off the game (I mean technically it's still around but once an MMO goes F2P with a small playerbase it's pretty much on borrowed time).
It takes a special kind of fool to watch another company publically change up their game and climb to previously undreamed playerbase plateaus....and instead just discard all that and stick with the broken parts the other company corrected and improved on.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
It takes a special kind of fool to watch another company publically change up their game and climb to previously undreamed playerbase plateaus....and instead just discard all that and stick with the broken parts the other company corrected and improved on.
Well, it was a combination of stubbornness on the part of the devs who really thought the old-school MMO grind had a mass market, and that there was a very vocal minority of the type of people who play on the old school EQ servers who did want that and made a toooooooooon of noise during development. I can't entirely fault them for thinking there were enough people who wanted that to sustain the game, but when beta came and they talked about how hardcore/grind-y it was and the general mass reaction was "oh god no" they should probably have done a quick about-face.
I played a little even after it went f2p and I didn't find it very good still. the combat wasn't anything special and everything = tells isn't actually very good at all, I checked out after the protostar games
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
It takes a special kind of fool to watch another company publically change up their game and climb to previously undreamed playerbase plateaus....and instead just discard all that and stick with the broken parts the other company corrected and improved on.
Well, it was a combination of stubbornness on the part of the devs who really thought the old-school MMO grind had a mass market, and that there was a very vocal minority of the type of people who play on the old school EQ servers who did want that and made a toooooooooon of noise during development. I can't entirely fault them for thinking there were enough people who wanted that to sustain the game, but when beta came and they talked about how hardcore/grind-y it was and the general mass reaction was "oh god no" they should probably have done a quick about-face.
They were in the middle of two other about faces regarding the game design, and those alone resulted in one of the buggiest released MMOs in a long time. There was no backing out of that decision by that point.
Not surprising. If anything, it's amazing the game limped along on life support for four years when it barely had any real updates of substance for over half of that.
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SaldonasSee you space cowboy...Registered Userregular
Just had to pop in here and say I'm sorry to hear the news. I remember how excited we all were when this game first launched (and all the survey stuff to figure out what side to play on and such, even guild name and logo!).
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Nexus Zoning Commission remains the best guild name, ever, in any game I've ever played. That was sheer inspired brilliance.
I've always been sad about what happened with Wildstar. I know they did it to themselves by trying to be a HARDCORE GAME for HARDCORE GAMERS, but the game had so many cool ideas (and some really really bad ones, like healing being template based and not just "click on someone and heal them"). It was a shame it never really got a chance to spread its wings.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time hyping over this game and getting prepped for launch. It's probably the last time I will get that invested in an MMORPG ever again...albeit mostly because the genre is on life support but you get the idea. Like practically ALL of the first two posts of the thread are written by me, which is an embarrassing amount of time shilling for such a turd.
Wildstar failed because management sucked. There's a bunch of postmortems here and there that talk about how an art director had way too much sway over development and how features like Warplots were announced to the public before the devs. The hardcore thing absolutely did not help in the slightest, but I think the game had enough casual features that the rough edges of dungeon and raid balance would have been smoothed over in time. Housing was easily the best feature and remains the one thing I really wish other MMOs would take from the game. It's a feature that you could spend the majority of your time on and never hit level cap, a fairly unique thing in modern MMOs that we need more of.
It's very telling that Carbine people were bailing like a month after launch. They knew what we didn't: that this game was doomed from the start.
It's still the best MMO I ever played, despite Carbine's best efforts to tank it. Raiding was like nothing anywhere else. I'll have to make sure I sign in before the server is shuttered and take some final screenshots. I'll miss my mounts.
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Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I hate seeing mmos completely disappear instead of some form of them being an option to toy with, even if offline
This was also the last game I poured my heart into before it came out. I defended it so much and half blindly. I felt foolish afterwards. Seems like the most competent people in the studio were the marketing.
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GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
The sad truth is that outside of a few gravitation wells like WoW and FF14, MMO's have become transient experiences. Much like 'RPG' the 'MMO' is being sucked in to all kinds of genres. See: "Live Games" like Destiny, Warframe or The Division (and soon Anthem) which scratch some of the same itch for people. Still MMO's when done correctly nail things on a scale that no "live game" does.
I had high hopes for Wildstar as well but it entered an already strangled market with a lot of beyond-their-time ideas. I don't think the visual style helped either which was far too easily hand waved away as "More WoW" by a lot of people. Some cool ideas, but ultimately some bad design decisions too heavily baked in to the game and mistargeting of where the market was. Another game relegated to the history books where it can't be experienced by anyone again (unless someone builds a private server I guess).
I really enjoyed the beta and played the game up until around the time of the first dungeon/small group instanced content. It was around then that I discovered that my latency (~100-150 ms) made the game unplayable. I didn't have the same problem in World of Warcraft or FFXIV, but in Wildstar for whatever reason I could not dodge any of the ground effects after a certain point in the game. It was a real shame, since the gameplay loop and character mechanics were a lot of fun early on in the leveling process.
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
The best part of the game for me was in beta and early launch when you could pvp during leveling where there was stat balancing and no way to really overgear it yet. Also before it became nearly fully populated with bots. The PVP in the game could be remarkably fun when massive gear discrepencies were not a part of it.
I tried arenas at endgame but I fell behind on gear, and everyone likely remembers the rating tanking bs that just flat out ruined it. But those could also be fun when you managed to avoid those issues early on.
I also loved the dungeons but I like playing content in games that beats me down and I need to overcome. But man I don't know if I could have grinded them long term, I only enjoy finishing them all the first time.
I wish I took more screenshots of my fortified spaceport housing plot. I hope there is some timeline where Marshal Yatish became the cultural icon he could not be in ours.
Black lives matter.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
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BeezelThere was no agreement little morsel..Registered Userregular
I still carry a soft spot for this game and I'm saddened to see it go out the way it did. The art and sound team were the real heroes there despite managements best efforts to just throw money in a pit and set it on fire. It's just kinda funny to see a lot of the old management come out of the woodwork to express condolences when it was a lot of their decisions early on that set them down that path in the first place
I could never wrap my head around how they watched Blizzard's TBC era raiding and attunements fail publicly; was replaced for WOTLK driving their sub numbers to their peak and yet... still copied that failed idea. I played it a little, but even when it was free it didn't work for me. A few friends really loved it, or the housing part of it at least.
Farewell Wildstar, you were too good for this world.
Even with the troubled development that people have mentioned, the end result of Wildstar was a polished game with amazing innovative systems that was to me the pinnacle of the mmorpg genre. There will never be another game like Wildstar because no one will ever be brave enough to do a massive subscription based mmo again and even Wildstar came out after the market had moved on from big mmorpgs. It was the best mmo that never got the success that it deserved. Personally, I played only for a year or so after launch as I could never convince my guild to switch over from WoW and I chose to keep playing with them rather than abandon my friends for a new game. I will miss the housing, the telegraph system, the amazing art and animation, the dungeons, the music, hoverboard races.
I do not regret the time I spent in Wildstar, my only regret is that more people did not experience it.
Can't add much except that I did enjoy the modest time I tried the game for a few weeks in an old laptop.
I recently had an itch to play a MMO and downloaded Aion.
"Wait, I do have an account for Aion. Why am I filling this form? I played WildStar last year."
XBL - ArchSilversmith
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
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Golden YakBurnished BovineThe sunny beaches of CanadaRegistered Userregular
Wildstar had beautiful art, a great setting, a neat story, and quite possibly the most fun combat in any MMO I've ever played. It's a real shame it didn't succeed.
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KasynI'm not saying I don't like our chances.She called me the master.Registered Userregular
edited September 2018
I badly wanted this game to succeed. I feel like the game was overly-punished by its players for flaws upon release. It was flawed, to be sure, but not to the degree where it deserved to be stillborn like it was. Very disappointed in how it turned out.
I was on a PvP server and decided from day one that I wanted to be the most prolific world PvPer / ganker on the realm. I wanted to get an add-on developed that showed me my K/D on people, and I wanted to never come across somebody I hadn't killed before at some point.
Just for kicks and stats, I kept track of the class and race breakdown, too. I ended up killing over 750 unique players in less than two months from release.
Fun times. Chua will always be one of my favorite races in a game, ever.
Kasyn on
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Wildtstar, Wildstar, Wildstar. You were supposed to be the Chosen One.
So much about the game was cool and new yet at the same time the rest was dumb and old.
I’m not sure I can think of any other game that seemed so torn between the past and the future.
I never hated Wildstar, but I didn’t like it. I felt a bit sad for not liking it because I really wanted to.
That said-
Hey Carbine I’d totally watch a Wildstar cartoon series on Netflix.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
This game was great at first, but ended up being a waste. I remember starting out and having fun exploring stuff and leveling with ease, then the grind kicked in.
PVP was great for some classes, others not so much. I remember choosing to play the 2 worst PVP character classes in the game and and playing battlegrounds. Big mistake.
You shouldn't be punished to play a low mobile or rogue-like class. Wildstar was renowned for its high TTK time and favoritism towards high mobile/tanky classes.
Hey Carbine I’d totally watch a Wildstar cartoon series on Netflix.
Carbine doesn't exist anymore. That's the thing I'm saddest about - NCSoft just killed another partner, and 50 people lost their jobs.
And this is NCSoft we're talking about so not only is the game gone, but we're probably not seeing anything else from the franchise ever again.
Fingers crossed that the pirates do NCSofts job for them and set up a private server so there's some relic that shows the world that this game existed once.
I wanted to love this game so much when it came out. I dug the active healing, but it was just too hard for my tastes once you got past a certain point, and I think it turned a lot of people off. Really a damn shame. I don't think we'll see anything like it again until the next cycle of this sort of game (if that even comes),
Remember when there was a horrific bug in the nightmarish attunement questline that broke the progression and the devs response was to tell people to fix it by rerolling a new character
There was an interesting comment on Kotaku about this, make of it what you will
Okay. I made this burner account because I need to correct the record here.
The stories passed around since the end of COH have been summed up as “Paragon Studios was so great and perfect until evil NCSoft closed them down.” And obviously telling this story would not be fun for my NDAs of the past...
And no, I’m not doing this out of love for NCSoft or any shit like that. We parted ways many many moons ago and we’re both happier for it. I just hate untruths being passed around because they let certain people keep skating around the industry causing the same shit over and over and being able to pin it on a nebulous entity to remove blame for their own actions.
Paragon Studios was shut down because they tried to pull a fast one on NCSoft. NCSoft was actually pretty happy with how COH was doing - they were never a huge hit, but they’d long since paid their dev costs and were a nice little money farm. They were happy enough with the brand that they even decided to move forward on an unannounced COH 2 project, and allocated funds to Paragon Studios for the development of a new COH property.
Yea, THAT is how committed NCSoft was to the brand.
So what happened?
Paragon Studios basically took the money, pretended to work on COH 2, but in actuality started building a completely unrelated new IP.
That’s right. NCSoft handed them a giant pile of money to make COH 2 and Paragon Studios, a studio literally created JUST to keep the COH IP going, said “Wait, no, let’s not do that. Let’s make some other shit nobody wants and not tell the publisher and presumably they will be completely understanding of it because we’ll show them a completely different prototype than what they asked for!”
NCSoft was not understanding.
See, this is what I learned when I worked for them - South Korean publishers are actually pretty hands off for the most part, as long as you give them reason to trust you. You hit your deadlines, you give them the product you promised, they’re actually pretty willing to put up with a lot.
Until you waste their money.
THEN the boot comes down.
The gap between the COH 2 debacle and the shutdown was less than a year from what I gathered talking to people in the know.
And now WildStar. NCSoft was pretty cool with us for a long time. They gave the company piles and piles of money and many years of extensions to get the game out. The totality of WildStar’s existence, from conception to release, was about a *decade*. A decade that NCSoft never saw a single return of investment on. So obviously... they had a lot of patience.
Carbine... was never a well managed studio. Ever. WildStar as you saw it was a completely different beast from what started development. It wasn’t even the same IP - Tim Cain, literally one of the creators of the original Fallout, used to be the creative lead and eventually he got pushed out of the studio. Which was a dumb idea because Carbine didn’t actually lock down their only IP when they did it and Tim owned all of it. So there was a huge freeze on production while they essentially had to do the game over from scratch because they didn’t own their own game!
And NCSoft actually let them when any sane publisher would have spotted the flaming shitshow brewing and cancelled the project entirely.
But okay. WildStar had its IP rebooted... then missed release date after release date after release date. The scope of the game was never realistic - we were supposed to ship with tons of extra zones, all of which got cut when they were well into production, because nobody actually knew what a pipeline was (oh but the higher ups would literally start screaming at the line designers for so much as laughing during work because obviously if we had time to laugh, we were wasting time that could have been used meeting these impossible deadlines.)
After yet another missed launch, NCSoft finally put the boot down and demanded more control over the project to actually make some money on this turd of an investment. Which meant there was finally an unmissable deadline that HAD to be hit. And then all hell broke loose.
Teams and personnel were constantly shuffled around at random without any real concern for if this was creating useable content. The economy team, which is, you know, the core of an MMO and literally the most important component to player retention and monetization, was a skeleton crew where staff were just flung at it when a producer didn’t like them but wouldn’t actually fire them. By the time someone went ‘Hey wait, isn’t the economy important?’ and reorganized the team, it was far too late to catch up on those systems... which included our end game content.
Hey, remember that memetic chart that went around showing all the obnoxious and pointlessly time consuming quests needed to actually unlock endgame raids? Guess what? That content was literally injected in at the very last minute because A) our raids weren’t actually completely done at launch and the creative director literally said we should add raid keys to artificially lengthen the game enough to force people to have to pay for a subscription past the free trial period in order to actually raid.
Oh there was shit from NCSoft, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not exactly the villains destroying the lives of saintly devs. Though they did try to push really hard on the art team to dress up all the female characters in the equivalent of lingerie. Given that they were already insanely over sexualized, this ended up being a tipping point and the artists tried to rebel. Believe it or not, the only reason the actual artists of the game got their way was because of Tumblr users kicking up a shitstorm over the obsessive pointless T&A. Those tumblr threads gave the artists enough momentum to at least keep the sexy ladies dressed in normal (but still revealing) clothing.
So with all this in mind... how did WildStar do?
They were already culling people before the end of the second month of release. Behind the scenes, they knew it was going to lose so much money that they were actually greatful so many people quit right after launch because it saved them money on personnel. But then people stopped quitting, so they started looking into how many people they could fire before someone at the state labor board got suspicious of them trying to duck out on the WARN Act. Given that they’d already gotten into legal trouble for illegally exempting employees from overtime pay, it’s kind of amazing they rolled the dice again anyway. But they did manage to hide the true state of the game until October 2014 when they finally had their first major layoff.
Coincidentally, most of that first wave were people that had at any point raised criticism of the company’s management.
I can’t speak to much to WildStar’s existence past their first huge layoff, because I was in that. I remember being shocked and surprised it stayed online as long as it did because it never, ever turned a profit - though almost all of the original leadership either quit or were fired, which is probably how it stabilized. But it still had a terrible launch that was actively on fire. We literally promised our players *monthly* content updates... then we couldn’t even hit the goal of *quartely* updates. Because, once again, nobody actually had a reasonable scope of what it took to actually make shippable content and how long that would actually take to be more meaningful than an occasional holiday event.
So really, you shouldn’t be angry at NCSoft for finally pulling the plug. My experience with them was that they were a tough but surprisingly forgiving master that overlooked an exceedingly troubled development and still put a lot of faith and money into a title they never saw an ROI on. WildStar had it’s four-year anniversary this June. Given that I assumed it wouldn’t even make it to a first year anniversary, that’s pretty darn impressive.
Also I learned that a few idiots running a game studio can basically screw over hundreds of talented game devs by performing utterly boneheaded decisions, but really, anyone who’s shipped more than one title can tell you that.
So now, you know... the whole story. From the mouth of an exChua on a burner account.
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So, I started playing again. Made myself a stalker/explorer Aurin. I... kinda liked the public beta's tutorial sections on the spaceships a lot better than the new 'virtual' one. I mean, besides not having all the "here, ride this hoverboard, wasn't that fun? Too bad you won't get one for a long time, UNLESS YOU BUY IT WITH REAL MONEY BY CLICKING THE IN-GAME STORE BUTTON!" shit. Or the "you could be earning extra everything if you were a paying player, you cheap-skate" reminder on the UI to the right of the action buttons (which is almost as passive-aggressive and gauche as that giant fucking round store button they added to the default UI in CoH (sorry ura) when it went free to play). The old tutorial explained the paths and gave you a taste of playing them, which this doesn't. It introduced you to a bunch of NPC characters that you just kind of see in passing now (I'm assuming they'll be more important later?). It also gave you a bunch of world-building text to read through (which you could pretty much skip by just clicking the doodads and then immediately closing any window that popped up and clicking the next one if you didn't want to read it). And at a basic level I found the action part a little more fun? Oh well, it's really short so no big deal, just kind of surprised they didn't keep it.
I like that the chat interface is very, very similar to City of Heroes' (sorry urahonky :P ) in terms of how you can organize channels and tabs (dunno if that's common for other MMO's, never really had reason to mess with it in WoW and didn't play others enough to bother).
I had a moment of stupidity and spent 10 bucks to unlock enough character slots to remake the beta characters I had (1 for each class). Well, almost; I've got that lv.50 Engineer I made while they were handing out freebies last weekend. I think I'm gonna try to grind out enough omnibits (or whatever they're called, man this game has a lot of currencies) to unlock one for my old robo-engineer for free.
Like WoW's artifact power and Secret World's ability wheel, it is a terrifying mouse-trap that threatens to suck me back into the game, doing quests and dungeons and world-bosses and such.
God damn your black hearts, MMO developers.
So how am i supposed to earn essences for the primal thingy?
edit-
right, run dungeons for essences.
just how bad are the lfg queues generally?
Because i am getting hour+ queues.
Actually, you can earn essences doing just about anything. Every daily quest zone - Crimson Isles, Northern Wastes, Star-Comm Basin, and even the Malgrave R-12 event, all give essence. Expeditions (formerly shiphand missions) and Prime Dungeons (formerly veteran dungeons) also give essence. A lot of these are also daily contracts, so you can do both at once. Raids also give essence, if you can swing getting into one of those. People do PUG raids fairly frequently on the weekends.
Easiest way to get a lot of essence is to hit the 'N' key and check the Bonus Rewards section - periodically, different activities will grant bonus essence, in x2, x3, x4, x5, and x10 amounts. For example, every day a different daily quest zone will grant x10 red, green, or blue Essence. There will be World Bosses that grant bonus essences too - one will grant 500 purple essence (the rarest kind), while another will grant x10 R/G/B essence. People *always* hit these, usually multiple groups a day - however, you can only earn the bonus once per kill, you can't keep farming the same boss for x10 multiple times.
Bonuses reset at different times - Expeditions are usually 1 hour, dungeons and battlegrounds a few hours, and some things are daily or weekly. I forget, but I think the 500 purple essence world boss is a weekly one.
Running random normal dungeons gets you purple essence, and a lot of people blast through those. If you want dungeons specifically, you're better off just starting a group in regular chat (world chat is /nexus) than sitting in queues, which yeah take 1+ hour or so. People are very frequently doing world bosses and events though, just keep an eye on /Nexus chat.
I started playing this game last week on a whim and it seems fun
Am I a fool
Does anyone play this
Well, it was a combination of stubbornness on the part of the devs who really thought the old-school MMO grind had a mass market, and that there was a very vocal minority of the type of people who play on the old school EQ servers who did want that and made a toooooooooon of noise during development. I can't entirely fault them for thinking there were enough people who wanted that to sustain the game, but when beta came and they talked about how hardcore/grind-y it was and the general mass reaction was "oh god no" they should probably have done a quick about-face.
They were in the middle of two other about faces regarding the game design, and those alone resulted in one of the buggiest released MMOs in a long time. There was no backing out of that decision by that point.
Not surprising. If anything, it's amazing the game limped along on life support for four years when it barely had any real updates of substance for over half of that.
Switch: SW-1493-0062-4053
I've always been sad about what happened with Wildstar. I know they did it to themselves by trying to be a HARDCORE GAME for HARDCORE GAMERS, but the game had so many cool ideas (and some really really bad ones, like healing being template based and not just "click on someone and heal them"). It was a shame it never really got a chance to spread its wings.
Wildstar failed because management sucked. There's a bunch of postmortems here and there that talk about how an art director had way too much sway over development and how features like Warplots were announced to the public before the devs. The hardcore thing absolutely did not help in the slightest, but I think the game had enough casual features that the rough edges of dungeon and raid balance would have been smoothed over in time. Housing was easily the best feature and remains the one thing I really wish other MMOs would take from the game. It's a feature that you could spend the majority of your time on and never hit level cap, a fairly unique thing in modern MMOs that we need more of.
It's very telling that Carbine people were bailing like a month after launch. They knew what we didn't: that this game was doomed from the start.
This was also the last game I poured my heart into before it came out. I defended it so much and half blindly. I felt foolish afterwards. Seems like the most competent people in the studio were the marketing.
I had high hopes for Wildstar as well but it entered an already strangled market with a lot of beyond-their-time ideas. I don't think the visual style helped either which was far too easily hand waved away as "More WoW" by a lot of people. Some cool ideas, but ultimately some bad design decisions too heavily baked in to the game and mistargeting of where the market was. Another game relegated to the history books where it can't be experienced by anyone again (unless someone builds a private server I guess).
The housing system is still the best around, though FFXIV scratches some of that itch.
I tried arenas at endgame but I fell behind on gear, and everyone likely remembers the rating tanking bs that just flat out ruined it. But those could also be fun when you managed to avoid those issues early on.
I also loved the dungeons but I like playing content in games that beats me down and I need to overcome. But man I don't know if I could have grinded them long term, I only enjoy finishing them all the first time.
Law and Order ≠ Justice
ACNH Island Isla Cero: DA-3082-2045-4142
Captain of the SES Comptroller of the State
"...only mights and maybes."
Even with the troubled development that people have mentioned, the end result of Wildstar was a polished game with amazing innovative systems that was to me the pinnacle of the mmorpg genre. There will never be another game like Wildstar because no one will ever be brave enough to do a massive subscription based mmo again and even Wildstar came out after the market had moved on from big mmorpgs. It was the best mmo that never got the success that it deserved. Personally, I played only for a year or so after launch as I could never convince my guild to switch over from WoW and I chose to keep playing with them rather than abandon my friends for a new game. I will miss the housing, the telegraph system, the amazing art and animation, the dungeons, the music, hoverboard races.
I do not regret the time I spent in Wildstar, my only regret is that more people did not experience it.
I recently had an itch to play a MMO and downloaded Aion.
"Wait, I do have an account for Aion. Why am I filling this form? I played WildStar last year."
"We have years of struggle ahead, mostly within ourselves." - Made in USA
In memoriam, here is the fun little side-project I took on when I started this game up.
I was on a PvP server and decided from day one that I wanted to be the most prolific world PvPer / ganker on the realm. I wanted to get an add-on developed that showed me my K/D on people, and I wanted to never come across somebody I hadn't killed before at some point.
Just for kicks and stats, I kept track of the class and race breakdown, too. I ended up killing over 750 unique players in less than two months from release.
Fun times. Chua will always be one of my favorite races in a game, ever.
So much about the game was cool and new yet at the same time the rest was dumb and old.
I’m not sure I can think of any other game that seemed so torn between the past and the future.
I never hated Wildstar, but I didn’t like it. I felt a bit sad for not liking it because I really wanted to.
That said-
Hey Carbine I’d totally watch a Wildstar cartoon series on Netflix.
PVP was great for some classes, others not so much. I remember choosing to play the 2 worst PVP character classes in the game and and playing battlegrounds. Big mistake.
You shouldn't be punished to play a low mobile or rogue-like class. Wildstar was renowned for its high TTK time and favoritism towards high mobile/tanky classes.
Carbine doesn't exist anymore. That's the thing I'm saddest about - NCSoft just killed another partner, and 50 people lost their jobs.
And this is NCSoft we're talking about so not only is the game gone, but we're probably not seeing anything else from the franchise ever again.
Fingers crossed that the pirates do NCSofts job for them and set up a private server so there's some relic that shows the world that this game existed once.
There was an interesting comment on Kotaku about this, make of it what you will