Okay, as the title states, I'd love to get some information on why I should get as excited about Wildstar as everybody else seems to be. Almost everybody I know keeps telling me it'll be the game to play, yet when I ask 'why' they often have no actual answers. So far I've heard about 40-man raiding, open-world PvP, and I believe housing? I hate 2 out of 3 of those. :/ So I'm reaching out to the fine boys and girls of XoO to give me a short sales pitch, and maybe explain to me why this game has everybody's panties moist.
Haven't been too interested either. I do think the War Plot stuff sounds interesting though. Build a guild base. Add turrets and NPC defenses.... I guess the ability to add walls is a safe assumption. It sounds like a way to turn battleground style gaming into a tower defense game where you set up defenses that the other team has to work through while fighting you. I've heard guild vs guild talked of in relation to this so... I'm guessing they just throw your base on one side of the map and the enemy's base on the other? Anyone know something I don't here? Everything else about the game seems pretty generic to me so I'm meh about picking it up.
The #1 pro for Wildstar (to me) is the combat system, u can see it on the many vids on youtube and the class vids too, it's really awesome, especially in PVP. There is no tab targeting and it's not an half assed combat system quickly done like in TERA and the like. Basically, every attack, every skill, everything u do creates like an AOE on the ground that people see and that u can dodge, counterattack and everything. Every mob in the game does the same too, from the lvl 1 peon to the big bosses. The game's all about mobility, mobility, mobility. It's not like old school games that when u play a healer, for example, u sit ur ass in a corner reading a book and u just chain cast ur spells on ur party or raid. Here, all ur heals are close range, AOE mostly, so u have to run around, heal peeps, dodge the boss attacks and the like. Class versatility is very good too, most of the classes have 2 of the 3 trinity roles (just not healer / tank as it'd be kinda a "i'm in 100% of groups all the time" class), all are either tank / dps or heal / dps, based on the skillset u equip. PVP has a nice lore behind it as well. The different paths u can take (fighter / explorer / settler and scientist i believe) add different way of playing as well, u can build outposts for people to rest, heal and the like, the explorer can open secret areas for his group, not sure what does the fighter do nor the scientist either. MMORPG.com did a nice article this morning about lore & pvp : http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/632/feature/8057/WildStar-Heading-to-Nexus.html Basically, really the biggest pros, for me are : - Nice polished mmo, developed since 2005 by Carbine studios, which is a company based around core original WoW developers, along with other blizzard devs (Diablo, starcraft...), RPGS (Fallout...) and MMOs (Everquest, cities of heroes). - Superb combat system, feels as revolutionary as grandia was for JRPGS; - Real fun artstyle and very well detailed too; - Full PVP servers; - Nice attitude devs, every interview i've read they were really saying good stuff and knew what they were talking about, especially about players behavior and expectations; - Didn't see crafting mechanics yet but they have described crafting as something that is useful to you right away and that u'd really could use everything u craft compared to drops so that it's not wasted time to lvl crafting as u lvl (opposed to grind it to max lvl when u've got the money in order to make high end stuff), - Lots of CC abilities; Now, nobody has tested lvl 37+ nor end game content yet. For the Warzones i'm not sure how it'll be, it might be close to what star wars galaxies did but it'll require some incentives to have a base. They also have always fun ideas to existing concepts. Like how they did the CTF with the capture the masks things. U basicall pick the masks from some spawn points in the arena and u bring them to your "base" when ur hang them on a rack. The thing is, the other team can go and steal ur hanged masks too, so u have to fight for the masks that are in the middle and u have to defend ur masks, while also trying to steal theirs. It makes it much more interesting than having a stalemate in the middle of the map where peeps pound each other and u just take the flag and run to ur base and score (like in Rift). I also like the fact that the devs ain't money hungry whores and they don't want to do the, so classical, "pre order with beta included" package as they want the game to be fully tested and that they are aiming at players retention instead of having a huge hype at release, make a lot of cash then don't give a fuckle anymore like in GW2 or TOR. They said they'll do preorders when they feel the game's ready and it'll be close to release.
Do you like vanilla WoW? Do you like action combat systems? Wildstar is basically a graphical updated vanilla wow with a action combat system and a skill design someone similar to GW1 (but way simpler yet more advance that the shitpile GW2). Do you like 40 man raiding/GvGs? Do you like housing? Do you like running dungeons? If so you will enjoy the game. If not, go play EvE Online or wait till something else decent comes out.
To elaborate on some of Haibane's post. Here is one example of the ground effects in PvP: On the CC and tank/healer thing, (I can't remember where I read this but I believe) they have roles based around your point placement into the talent trees. You have a DPS tree, a support (tank or healer) tree, and a CC abilities tree. I wonder if this means roles selection will be based around what you want to put points in. I wonder if role switching will require having to respec or if they have spec saving of some sort to allow for switching...
Yeah this vid is fun For the roles, AFAIK, it's like you have a "pool" of skills where u have everything u own (heals, cc, etc...) and u have to select how u skill-equip ur guy by placing them in the hotbar. That's what they show in the class reveals at some point. Now there are probably trees and all and u can maybe switch roles like in RIFT.
Okay, so it turns out all that I've heard about the game, is what people are saying. I wasn't missing some major part of it. There's nothing about those things that make me even remotely excited about the game. Despite loving vanilla WoW, I fear that while they try to bring back some of the aspects of that, they will also borrow some of the newer ideas from WoW. I fear I will be sat at end-game with nothing to do except daily quests and PvP in instanced arena/battleground type scenarios. I fear that 40-man raiding will end up being the huge hassle it was in vanilla WoW. Getting 40 even remotely competent players together at one time is a fucking pain. I do like the idea of housing. I still don't get why WoW haven't taken that step yet, but if that's all there is to get me excited about again, it's just not enough. I like the action combat system. I liked it in TERA, and I would love to have it in future MMOs. But while Haibane lists it as a pro, I think it's a con: The ground markings. I hated when MMOs started introducing ground indicators of abilities. It seems to me like a dumbing down of an otherwise interesting mechanic. That's why I'm a little more than averagely curious about ESO. They claim to make it all about reading the tells of your enemy, rather than "playing the UI". Just like Demon's Souls/Dark Souls, which are my two all-time favourite games. I also completely despise the art-style. I despised WoW for so many years for being so cartoony, and this isn't any better. I've concluded this simply isn't a game for me. ...And yet, I will probably still try it out, like I do with EVERY SINGLE OTHER MMO. I could be pleasantly surprised, right?
Alot of players are QQing about the ground boxs..... but the devs did say they can be turned of I think Not sure where he gets off saying TERA combat is rushed.... since its one of the better action combat system for a MMO out there.
The ground tells drive me nuts too, buddy. I guess the art style is to be expected since the game is being started up by a bunch of guys who left Blizzard about when WoW was coming out. I have to wonder how much early development experience they had on WoW and what might have got them to leave or try this.
What do people want to do endgame? Is all anyone wants is open world pvp? I always here people complaining about endgame but no one ever says what they want. I doubt they will keep the 40man raiding cap for PvE. I assume they are wanting some 40man pvp games though. People never complain about getting 40 competent pvp players heh. WTF is with people and housing. Hey lets play an mmo so I can play sims! I guess it gives you something to do while no one else is playing the game but other than that its pretty pointless. SWG had towns and that made sense because they were essentially your base but this instanced crap where the only point is a time sink. BOOO! Spend time on making endgame content. Meh. That would be nice. But ESO I think will disappoint more people than make them happy. The style is probably one of the things that has kept WoW alive for so long. All these games want to have uber graphics that want to make it look like real life but in the end they just look like shit if you actually want to do anything in a 40man group. I feel ya. I've tried them all and I think the only thing really missing is a good group of players to play with. But you bring up points that I have seen coming up a lot and it feels like a good time to ask.
I feel that TERA's combat system is rushed as some things work nice but half of the abilities are crap and hit connection is not perfect at all, maybe due to lag sometimes i guess. Not to mention the balance between classes... I really like the ground telegraph thing, i don't see how it's "dumbing down" the game. We ain't playing a FPS here. Being able to position urself in a fight (be it boss pve or pvp) and land ur abilities like u want and everything will be quite a challenge still, depending who u face. Having all abilities display on the ground will also avoid broken stuff because in other games some abilities didn't work at all like expected (especially range) and u couldn't really tell right away. For housing, i agree with sokar it's a waste of time, unless it's like in UO and u have shops and all inside. Now i don't know with settlers and the like maybe they'll have some use at some point. About the style, check characters creation videos. I really hated WoW's style, this is the only thing that prevented me from playing it, it was like a food allergy. For Wildstar it's much closer to pixar artstyle which is quite cute n fun i find but i understand that some people hate it. I feared it'd be like wow at the beginning but i'm sort of relieved. Still, WS is a theme park mmo so it won't be ground breaking at all, it's nowhere close to what i dream about a mmorpg (freedom like UO/EVE, lootable enemies like UO/EVE, real well thought player based economy like UO/EVE, etc...) but it's fun to play with a group of buddies, as sokar said What i don't understand is that EVE really managed to bring everything that worked in UO into a very complexe universe that is space and nobody was able to do the same thing with a regular RPG (where u have a character). I really think it's because producers looked at EVE's numbers and at WOW's numbers and said, "ok, you devs go for the one that has millions of players, not for the one players love the most". That's why i always called WoW the MMORPG genre killer, as it destroyed every good idea devs could have had because of the money it made.
I want PvE and PvP both. I enjoy raiding, but I didn't enjoy 40-man raids in WoW. Having to rely on 40 people to do their jobs correctly is simply too much trouble. And I want dungeons. WoW's major issue, in my opinion, is that new dungeons are very few and far between. For a game that's buy+subscription and has been for nearly a decade soon, they sure haven't bothered to put in a whole lot of content on a regular basis, which I'd expect from a subscription game. And PvP in fire-and-forget instances is just not my thing. I want persistent PvP that has an impact on the world. I want to see what I do in PvP matter, and see that when I do well, my faction/side/guild/whatever benefits. (And no, I don't think PvP gear farming is much of a carrot) I never ever said it had to be instanced and unimportant housing. I liked housing in DAoC because it was the only way, aside from running around and yelling in the crafter cities, to properly sell your items. And it wasn't instanced. There were huge zones dedicated to houses, and everybody had their own. It was quite neat. But even that would only be a side-activity, or as you put it "something to do while no one else is playing". What I would love to see is a game that managed to properly mix a side-activity with something that actually had an impact. I can only agree. I'm excited about ESO because of the things they're promising us, but I am equally sceptical because no developer ever delivers everything they promise, and I've been burnt so many times. There is, in my opinion, a huge difference between art-style and graphic level. There's easily a way to keep graphics at a level that doesn't require a beast of a PC, while still looking somewhat realistic in style. But this is really a minor point. If a game plays well, I couldn't care less about its visuals. There's a reason I still play Baldur's Gate and Fallout games. This has been my problem with a lot of games. I've enjoyed them, but my MMO friends are all WoW superfans, so as soon as there's an aspect of it that WoW has done better, they trash the game and never return. What they often fail to realise is that WoW was super buggy, clunky and lacking of a lot of things in Vanilla, and that it took a lot of time for it to get where it is now. I personally give every MMO a chance because that's exactly how I stumbled across DAoC back in the days. I made an impulse store purchase of a game I had never heard of, and it turned out to be my all-time favourite MMO.
I had the same impression, but I still quite liked the combat system. I much prefer it to tab-targetting, and am glad that more and more games are moving into this direction. That's what I liked about the "old system". That you couldn't tell range and cone shape/size and AoE size right away. You had to learn, to memorize, and to estimate. But I think my dislike for the "new system" is simply because games in general are being dumbed down. There are more and more hints and tips and help, and people are becoming increasingly worse at actually playing the games. They often play the UI, and WoW was extremely bad with this, what with the boss mods and aggro meter and what have you. I want to go back to a time where people had to think for themselves, and make decisions based on what was happening around them, not just follow a rotation while keeping an eye on the ground below them, or the boss-mod timer bars. It's exactly the "cute and fun" part that I dislike. If I am going to play an RPG, and run around fighting stuff, I don't want to feel like I'm part of a cartoon. It's surely a subjective issue, and to each their own, but I want gritty, I want fire and brimstone, I want realistic armours and houses, I want realism in geometry (pentagon-shaped wheels in WoW, anyone?). This is why I loved the art-style of Warhammer Online. It was refined, the houses and buildings were shaped like they would be in real life. Armours, clothes and monsters weren't silly looking, but actually cool looking. And that's why I sooooo hope more and more developers will turn to crowdfunding rather than publisher funding. And why I am soooo excited about Camelot Unchained. Not because I hope that it'll be the "Next big thing" (secretly I do, but I'm a realist, and it won't), but because I hope it'll show other developers that if you have an idea, you can get the people, the fans, to invest in your game, and you can make it YOUR game, without having EA, Activision, whoever poking you with a stick, saying "NO! it has to be done like this, because WoW!"
Well housing gives you something else to do then just pveing and pvping it also stop players from getting burnt out on the game just like fishing and what ever else they added as "fluff". Now I do like the housing in ArcheAge and how they are going about with that and most games just do the instance housing bc its easier to do and makes players less mad since they dont have to worry about other guilds destroying there guilds stuff
So stupid question, what is a themepark mmo? I don't mind either style. Tab targetting allows a bit more casual play than having to time and aim everything. Though the action combat systems are much more fun when it comes to getting into the shit. Fuck yea. Those times were good times. EQ2 I think was the last of them. I miss WO... great game at the beginning but they failed to add content and the game kinda died out. I think star citizen is going to be the first big game to prove crowdfunding will work. I'm hoping more mmo's follow.
Theme park is a game where the player's guided and doesn't have much choice or impact on the world. U lvl up with quests, u do dungeons for gear, u go instances for PVP. Like in a theme park, u have stands where u do what is planned for u to do. It's opposed to a "sandbox" game (term which is way too used i think) where u have tools/resources at ur disposal and u do whatever u want. So far the only 2 sandboxes that exist, IMO, are UO and EVE. Most of the time "sandbox" just meant "hey, we are releasing a rushed game with no content at all, just a big world with nothing in it, let's call it a sandbox and be hype". Camelot unchained seems like a good idea but i have few hope about it. It'll be like a mmo version of war of the roses / viking imo. It can still be fun tho but not groundbreaking. Star citizen has a huge financing so i hope they deliver, at least, 70% of their promises, which would make it a really good game. And EQN can still be a good thing, EQ2 was awesome after the initial release mess.
I was excited at first, but no reason to pick up Wildstar anymore, when Star Citizen is due around the same time. Playing both would just be unhealthy.
I'm imagining Wildstar to be maybe midyear or so and Star Citizen sometime in early 2015. Wildstar could launch before Star Citizen Beta.