Wildstar To Launch On June 3

An anonymous reader writes "Carbine Studios, a game company founded by former Blizzard developers, has been working on a new sci-fi MMORPG called Wildstar. The game has now gotten a release date: June 3rd. Rock, Paper, Shotgun's preview described the game thus: 'it's trying to out-MMO every other MMO. Not with big talk of moving narratives or ever-changing worlds, but by ramping up the unreal theme pack nature of its peers and predecessors. This is a game where you're constantly presented with a legion of things to do, numbers to increase, boxes to tick, things to collect, factions to impress, points to earn, monsters air-dropped in to battle without warning and/or preferably all of the above simultaneously. It might even be too much, too overwhelming in its parade of sideshows.'"

Comments

To summarize

[Stickerboy]

This is a game where you're constantly presented with a legion of things to do, numbers to increase, boxes to tick, things to collect, factions to impress, points to earn, monsters air-dropped in to battle without warning and/or preferably all of the above simultaneously.

So this is the most job-like game on the internet?? Awesome! Sign me up.

Less facetiously, I didn't think the answer to the common complaint of, "We're sick of killing 10 generic monsters to collect 5 generic trophies to advance a quest" was, "Here's more stuff to grind!"

Re:To summarize

[PopeRatzo]

Its a subscription-based MMO. $15 a month. In today's market, that is a recipe for fail.

On the other hand, I only play games that I pay for. I don't want anything for free, and most definitely not a game. Every single F2P game gives me a creepy feeling.

And I figure, since I'm not exceptional in any way, there are probably other people like me, who are happy to pay for a game that provides value. In fact, if the game was good enough, and provided enough value, I'd pay even more than the current price-tag for an AAA game.

I'm not much on MMO's or really, multiplayer anything, but by charging for their work, at least Blizzard has placed Wildstar in the category of games that I will consider playing.

Re:To summarize

[Luckyo]

GW2 is not a pay once game. It's "microtransaction hell free to play model if you want to play the game with any comfort, but we'll charge you AAA price up front because we have good brand name" game. That's one of the reasons why so many people dropped it - after all the empty promises, they ended up making even legendaries puchasable from auction house with in game money, and in game money purchasable with real money strait from the developer. After spending months telling everyone they won't sell in game money for real money.

On the other hand as FF14 showed, people are fully willing to pay if you have a good game worth paying for. Problem was and still is that most people only pay for one sub at a time, so you need to produce enough quality to make people want to switch from WoW, or FF14, or whatever sub game they're playing. And quality level there is much higher than F2P.

That's the main reason why so many MMORPGs nowadays went F2P. Not that the model is great, but because bad and average games simply could not compete with WoW. F2P let's you release anything from average to shovelware and finance it at least for some time, as long as it's not completely awful.

But great F2P MMORPGs are essentially all P2P nowadays, and will likely remain this way for a while, simply because to compete in that market you need to provide people with consistent influx of high quality content. F2P budgets are simply not sufficient for that sort of thing, as SWTOR showed. When they went F2P, they had to drop the constant new content updates.

So . . .

[Traciatim]

In other words: Welcome to the grind fest, where if it doesn't consume your entire life then you lose.

Re:So . . .

[ackthpt]

In other words: Welcome to the grind fest, where if it doesn't consume your entire life then you lose.

Or, by losing you win, but feel you didn't win, so keep trying and keep losing, until you are good enough to win and thus lose.

No Linux client

[future assassin]

no money. Thanks for playing...

Re:How to Falsify Evolution

[TheRecklessWanderer]

I can't argue against magic and fairy dust. You win.

My experience

[argStyopa]

Granted this was beta, but here's what I found:

- a slavish determination to mimic World of Warcraft's aesthetic. Unsurprising, since the dev team AFAIK largely came from Blizzard. IMO this is a little too slavish, coming off like "WoW sci fi with guns". To me it's jarring that you have nicely-detailed characters with hi-rez textures, but you're running around a world with a klunky geometry that screams "this is all computers can handle in 2004". TF2 showed that you could adhere to a non-representational, 'cartoony' theme without necessarily deliberately going so far as to mimic the design compromises of a decade ago.

- Obviously this is entirely subjective, but there's a very fine line between quirky/kitschy and cheesy. The "bad guys" n00b island story line in Wildstar is cheesy; the good guys story is cheesy AND sappy. WoW had a certain sort of self-referential humor to a lot of what it did (at its best), and that has seemed to dominate latter releases *cough* *cough* Pandas *cough*. Wildstar continues this unfortunate narrative/editorial choice, with everything from animations to storyline being so "over the top" that it has to be self-mocking (with the 'good guy' side adding a further drippy saccharine layer of narrative - the tutorial quest has you saving a guy's pregnant wife...)

- They've already very much adopted the modern-mmo paradigm of "go to quest hub, get a bunch of quests, complete those quests, move to next hub". There's almost never (at least in the first 12-15 levels) a point where you go backward, for any reason. Everything is very conveniently placed; when you hit a place where you level up, there's a new-skill trainer already waiting for you.

- Some clever design ideas in UI, communicating what enemies are doing and what you're doing (and the area effects) clearly and intuitively.

It's WoW40k, nothing more, nothing less. Personally, I don't find the modern design choices in MMOs for 'everything to be easy' to be interesting or engaging, but that's not Wildstar's fault at all. They're very solidly in the current mainstream.