Cat playing in tub

Wildstar Starting Experience

Welcome to WildStar is our column that focuses on the basics of WildStar in order to help new fans or just seekers learn more about our favorite MMO. Now that Kaam finally has his gaming laptop, he's finally been able to put some hours into the beta. This article is all about his first impressions of this experience. - Arawulf

At this point I have played every race and class in the Wildstar Beta up to at most level 7. I found that there are features in WildStar that make you stand up and take notice, kind of like these guys:

Here at the "Nexus Welcome Center" we have followed WildStar's development for a long time, since before we could even play the game. We also follow other games and are sometimes on the fence about whether a game's hype will live up to its actual play. Having now played the Beta with a focus on the early leveling game, I feel well qualified to tell you this:

tell you what? Find out after the jump!


. . .The Adventure Starts from the Moment you Click Play!

Immediately after clicking Play you hear a piece of music that sets the ambiance and tone for the entire game. While spending time working the levers on the myriad of options available to create a unique look and feel for your character (including newly announced body styles), the epic music tells you that you are about to begin an equally epic adventure. Selecting not just a race but also a path for your character adds an additional layer of character uniqueness. In fact, there are 136 race/class/path combinations in the game. That's a lot of alts.

After naming your character (no numbers allowed!) you click Create and before you know it the story of your character begins and you get introduced to

Cut Scenes that are Smooth and Smartly Paced

I enjoy a good cut scene . . . that's not too long and doesn't bog down the game. I thrive on quick pacing in my MMO. When diving into a new game I want action as soon as possible. Cut scenes that don't move along at a good clip make me say Uncle because they kill the pace and immersion. In WildStar, the cut scenes sprinkled throughout the game's content are quick, entertaining and visually cool. They heighten immersion, not detract from it. Also, thankfully the Eldan's technology is such that the loading screens when getting into the game and transferring to various areas are few and fast. The pacing of the game moves smartly along, and that keeps the player immersed.

Speaking of movement, I found that 

Character Movement in WildStar is Fun Fun Fun

Double jump FTW!

When I played the Beta  I found myself enthralled with character movement. Each race has its own unique movement animations that neatly fit their personalities. The Granok's movement is a powerful lumber while the Chua is delightfully springy. The Mordesh is the only race whose movement I found a little clunky.

Double-jumping is more fun to do than I thought it would be just watching a video of it. Performing a jump from a perch, watching your character float toward the ground then hitting double jump for an extra boost to hit the next ledge is enjoyment in and of itself.

Dashing, jumping, double-jumping and even sprinting with a reasonable length timer immediately upon setting foot on the Arkship (the initial starting area before heading down to Nexus) is MMO gold that never gets old. I found myself frequently using all of the movement abilities, especially sprint. Movement is also featured in several class abilities. All of these movement features helps make the game feel fluid and alive.

As I began moving through the game's first quests on the Arkship, I discovered that 

The Tutorials are Actually Helpful without Killing Immersion

Similar to long cut scenes, lengthy tutorials that become the focus of the early leveling experience rather than an occasional quick aid destroy immersion and pacing for me. Fortunately WildStar's tutorials, which can be turned off, are brief and helpful. When a tutorial pops up it typically has a visual aid that explains what's happening with a short, constructive blurb explaining the UI or game function. 

The first tutorial explains that you can click the quest title in your UI to see an arrow pointing you in the direction of the quest's goal. Some have written that the arrow makes questing too easy. I disagree. It's there if you want it but you don't have to use it.

Over this way!

If you aren't in the mood to waste time running off in the wrong direction for a quest and just want a nudge in the right direction, the arrow helps keep the questing pace neatly on track. As you head off toward the quest's goal your map is another helpful aid that can be turned on in ghost form so that you can see it while moving. 

After completing a few early quests, you will next find that 

Your Character's Path is Introduced from the Beginning

Your character's path is a big part of the personality of your character, your leveling experience and also for perks that will help not just yourself but your friends as you play the game. A couple of path quests on the Arkship show the basics of how each path plays; that may be enough of a taste for some to decide on a path for their main character, but the variety of path quests expands swiftly after arriving on Nexus so I recommend progressing until at least level 7 to get a sense of the different types of each path's missions. 

In addition to beginning to quest and discovering path missions on the Arkship, I was pleasantly surprised that even in the first hour of the game

Nexus Story Details are Everywhere
            
While still on the Arkship there are quests that involve finding pieces of WildStar, including the discovery of your first Datacube. The quests themselves are sometimes voiced and sometimes quest text, but as with the cut scenes they are short and sweet. You are not forced to read lengthy quest text (in fact they are limited to the size of a twitter post), listen to lengthy voice overs or read the lengthier Nexus story pieces you pick up along the way. If you're like me, you may read some of the story pieces you pick up here and there, but the nice thing is that they will all be inputted into your UI so that you can read them later when you have some downtime in your WildStar home.

While you don't get your home within the first seven levels, you do get questing action and for my money

Questing in WildStar is like a Cold Beer at a Baseball Game

Questing is questing. Yellow exclamation points. Missions to locate people, find stuff, and go places. The questing system in and of itself -- the picking up of quests and turning them in -- is not that different from other MMO's. And that's okay. It's not broke. After all, I enjoy a cold beer at a baseball game the same as the last one I had, especially when Felix Hernandez is on the mound.

WildStar's questing experience overall though is not just about plowing through standard quests. There are features such as optional challenges in each zone that pop up from time to time. Sometimes I did them and sometimes I bypassed them. I would like there to be an option to turn off the challenge timer that starts up whether I want it to or not so that I don't have to hear "Challenge Failed!" at the end when I didn't even try the challenge, but I liked the additional content. Path quests are another feature that rides on top of the main questing experience. 

I found the questing experience itself enjoyable comfort food. What really spiced it up for me in addition to the challenges and path quests was the beautiful scenery on Nexus, the quick pacing of the game, the addition of a new ability just as I was ready for one, and I have to tell you that

WildStar's Combat is Impressive

As you can see from the above, while on the Arkship for just the first few levels you are immediately engrossed in the game and your character's place within it. You receive your first weapon as well along with some quests to start wielding it.

I admit that I was a skeptic when I heard before Beta began that each class will only receive one type of weapon. After playing every class my skepticism has vanished like a Chua after being used as a Granok's football. It is true that the animations of the characters using their abilities are top notch and fun to watch again and again. The sound effects for each type of weapon are markedly different from each other such that without looking at your screen when zoning into a battleground, by listening you will know if there is a stalker, a warrior or an esper in the party. There is a satisfying fluidity to the experience of dashing, evading telegraphs, jumping, getting out of CC and firing off your own abilities.

I could not get enough of WildStar's combat and I only accumulated five or six abilities on any one class. The combat system enhances the early leveling and questing experience in a major way.

Wildstar Character Creation Impressions

As WildStar conducts another beta test this weekend, these are some impressions of the character creation system. WildStar is the highly anticipated upcoming massively multiplayer online (MMO) game from Carbine Studios. While it is Carbine’s first major project as a developer, the studio is made up almost entirely of industry veterans who have worked on other highly successful  projects like World of Warcraft, Everquest, and Dark Age of Camelot. The studio recently announced the release date for the game, which will be June 3rd, 2014 and began selling pre-orders for it. Purchasing the game in advance gives players access to all the upcoming weekend beta events like the one conducted this weekend.

The first thing new players will deal with upon starting up WildStar is the character creation system. The ability to create a unique and distinctive character varies in importance to MMO players. It is the single most important factor to some, and almost a non-issue to others. Those players who find character creation to be the most important feature of an MMO will likely be somewhat disappointed inWildStar. It is a good system, to be certain, but it does not have the in depth customization and wealth of options that some other MMO’s offer. The best way to summarize it would be to say that WildStar is squarely in the middle between highly robust systems like the old City of Heroes and very mundane systems like World of Warcraft. For all its other qualities, character creation in World of Warcraftremains a joke among top tier MMO’s.

Facial sliders in WildStar character creation

WildStar does give a player plenty of options to create their character however. The most in depth portion of character creation is a series of sliders that can be used to adjust every aspect of the character’s head and face. This is whereWildStar offers the most customization to a player. Aside from this there are the standard sorts of options for skin color, hair style, facial hair, etc. There are also some race specific options like horns for the bestial Draken, jewelry for humans, and ear styles for the Aurin. The most disappointing aspect of character creation in WildStar is the total lack of body customization at this time. A player cannot alter the size and shape of their character in any way. Each race and gender is locked to a specific body form and cannot be changed. This omission has already drawn the ire of some players and while Carbine has stood firm on this decision up to now, hope remains that perhaps they will revisit the issue before the game launches in June.

One final comment to be made on the character creation system has little to do with the system itself, but instead the background music for the screen. The theme that plays during character creation is one of the best sounding pieces of music to be heard in an MMO. It does an excellent job of setting the “mood” for what is about to take place. It makes the player feel like they are about to begin an epic journey, which is what the creation of a character in a new MMO should be doing. If the rest of the music in WildStar is of similar quality, players will be aurally impressed throughout their journey on the planet Nexus.

Wildstar Impressions

I found myself playing the latest build of Wildstar last night. This was my first experience with the newest darling of the MMO media’s eye. As with any title, it has it’s ups and downs, but I admit that I may have gone into the game with a bit of a critical eye, considering the amount of hype and praise being heaped on the yet-to-be-released title has probably raised my expectations slightly.

Character creation was fairly straightforward. There were some big races and some little races. I was slightly disappointed in the lack of physical customization options. Several of the faces/heads looked almost identical to me, and it seems like the only way I would be able to differentiate myself was by hairstyle/color. Perhaps if I would have chosen a female character they would have provided me with more sliders. Playing a human in Wildstar doesn’t limit the class you can choose. I decided on playing a stalker, because stealth really appeals to me. I also chose the side of the exiles, because – hey, if you’re going to be playing a Firefly-like space western, you’ve got to be a Browncoat! I probably wouldn’t have spent so much time on the character creation screen in Wildstar except that I kept clicking all over the place trying to make sure I hadn’t missed the “advanced” customizations. But alas, there were none.

Being woken up from cryogenic freezing wasn’t nearly as painful as we’ve been led to believe. In fact, immediately upon re-animation, my toon was up and walking, pressing buttons and pulling levers in order to find the pregnant wife of a rootin’ tootin’ space cowboy. As I’ve stated before, I prefer realism over cartoonish art style, but I will say that I liked the world of Wildstar better than the ooey-gooeyness of Guild Wars 2 or the shiny flash of SWTOR. Perhaps it was because of the exile environments, but there was more of a gritty feel to it. I guess letting sheep wander around in your space station will do that. The music is great. The western flair really plays well with the theme of the game.

Character movement felt pretty strange. Turning with the keyboard was extremely slow, and although they make it a point to let you know that you can hold down the right mouse button to turn, that option actually felt too fast – like a FPS – out of control. There was no middle ground. Also, I’ve never been a huge fan of the sprint mechanic – especially if you can only do it for a certain amount of time. Sprint until your sprint meter goes down to nothing, then wait for it to fill back up, then sprint again. It all seems very tedious. I would prefer to have two speeds to choose between – run and walk. Running while in stealth could cause you to have a higher chance to break stealth. Done. No silly arbitrary sprint timers. I do like being able to double-jump, but I fear that it might lead to some more difficult jumping quests in the future.

The UI is pretty self-explanatory. Pretty much MMO 101. The quest tracker has a nice little feature that if you click on a quest objective, a large arrow will show up pointing you in the direction of the objective. It’s a nice touch, because sometimes you need a little hint about which direction to head. It’s also not as obtrusive as the sparkly trail in Neverwinter, which I found myself following instead of exploring the world. If you think this kind of feature breaks immersion, then you can choose to not click on the quest objective. The choice is up to the player. One thing I didn’t like about the UI was the chat bubbles, which seem to pop up all over the screen at random intervals.In my case, some of this was tutorial hints which should die down as I advance through the game, but even NPC interactions seemed to be very frequent and distracting.

Questing was fun. Again, nothing revolutionary here. Take the transporter to the next hub, pick up 2 collection and 2 slayer quests from an NPC, complete, then move on to the next hub. Basic MMO design. Each NPC had voice acting, which made it fun, because you felt like you got a sense of the NPC personality through their voice. Voice acting was caricature-ized and over the top, but that’s kind of what I expect of this game.  There were a few times when I literally laughed out loud, one in particular that I remember when your quest objective was to lead a group of vegetables to a safe planter. There I was, a hero of Wildstar with a ‘herd’ of hopping vegetables following along behind me making squeaky vegetable sounds. Slayer quests were not overly cumbersome or grindy, at least at the lower levels. I don’t think I was ever made to kill more than 5 of a specific mob for any given quest.

Combat in Wildstar is fair to above average. I like that it is more closely related to ‘old school’ MMO combat (requiring a bar full of skills and not just a quick index finger) and less like the recently touted ‘action’ systems of today. Yes, there is the double-tap dodge mechanic, but it feels slow and unresponsive. I’ve heard stories of ground-targeted colors and shapes for group content (green spots for increased healing from your group-mates, etc.) but since I’ve only soloed up to about level 7, I was not able to evaluate those mechanics. They sound promising, but if they slow down combat (like the dodge seems to) instead of integrating into the natural flow, then Wildstar will have failed in implementing a good idea. As far as the stalker class: Woah, Nellie! Can somebody say Wolverine? Yes, I have mechanical retractable claws, and yes, I mangle the mobs with them. Sometimes before they even realize I’m there.

Progression looks exactly like LOTRO did prior to the recent skill tree revamp. At a specific levels, you are granted access to buy specific class or path skills at a skill vendor. This system gives me pause. LOTRO found themselves in trouble due to “skill bloat” after a certain number of levels were added to the game. They were faced with two choices: Start granting “upgraded” skills (more powerful versions of the skills granted at lower levels), or start handing out skills that overlapped with the abilities of other classes in the game and risk making all classes self-sufficient. They chose the former for levels 50-85, which failed to excite players but kept the class balance in check. At level 85, they were forced to completely re-do the skill system in favor of trees in order to combat the bloat issue. I wonder if Wildstar has a long-term skill strategy in mind. Also, what’s with having to find a computer terminal to “buy” skills? Do you plug in like in The Matrix (I know Kung Fu!)? I’d prefer that they just allow you to buy your skills from a skill panel  instead of having to find/return to a terminal in order to purchase skills.

In all, I was a little underwhelmed by my time in Wildstar, but it’s probably because my expectations were fairly high going in. I can see why the gaming/MMO press loves this title, though. It’s much more of a straight-up MMO than it’s nearest 2014 competitor, The Elder Scrolls Online. It was developed exclusively for the PC, so there are none of the UI limitations present with cross-platform game design. It has the advantage of being a little self-depreciating and exaggerated, so any cheesiness can simply be overlooked as intentional humor. The same can be said for the cartoonish graphics, which will age well but not have to withstand the initial scrutiny of not being “realistic” enough. Plus, it’s fun to play (at least through level seven, which is all I can speak to)! The big question is: are all of these things enough for the general gaming populace to justify factoring a monthly subscription fee into their budget? Is the hardcore, traditional MMO crowd still large enough to support it? Critical success doesn’t always translate into commercial success.

Most Anticipated Games of 2014 – WildStar

If you are a member of the ever-growing Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game community, chances are you know what WildStar is, for everyone else, I’m here to fill you in on what is possibly going to be one of the best MMO’s out there, releasing later this year. With that said, let us join Carbine Studios and NCSoft on the journey to Nexus, the world of WildStar!

WildStar brings a familiar feel to it for those in the MMO community, without bringing with it the sense that you have done this all before. Adding new mechanics to your journey such as the ability to choose not only your class, but the path you take as that class, each of four containing its own content and rewards. WildStar also has a faction system, containing to sides, with four races each, allowing you to pledge alliance to the side of your choice, and of course opening the world to some serious Player vs. Player action.

Another new turn WildStar takes is shown through the advanced movements the character is allowed to make. Double Jumping makes its MMO debut, as far as I can tell, in WildStar allowing for even more range of movement. Add this to Dashing, Sprinting, and the ability to Dodge Roll, and WildStar will prove to be one of the most, if not the most, mobile MMO’s out there.

This leads to the combat system, where WildStar is taking a big leap in making every single move aimed and telegraphed, meaning that every move in the game can be dodged, given the right amount of player skill. This is a risky move, as it can make the game have a high skill cap for those who may be new to such a system, but one that is well worth taking a gamble on.

Finally, player owned housing is making a comeback in the game, as each player is able to purchase a sky plot to build their own humble abode on. This will give the player a home environment that can be customized to the players liking.

Now, I am completely gung-ho in my excitement for WildStar as an avid MMO player. It seems to me that the game will offer a very enjoyable gameplay environment for anyone who picks up the game. The new movement system, and the combat system have played a huge part in bringing me to this game. I feel that this will be a strong competitor in the MMO scene.

At this point if you aren’t thinking about picking up this game, let me just add these few points to help push you over the edge. While WildStar does have a monthly subscription fee, they have set in place an alternative payment model that allows you to pay for your subscription via in-game currency, meaning you simply play to pay, which is one of the best payment systems I can think of. As a final thought, the start of an MMO is always the best time to join, as everyone is new to the game, and the community will be generally a lot friendlier, simply adding to the fun. Who knows, you may even make a few friends, I know I’ve done so through MMO’s.

In closing, WildStar is one of the most promising MMO’s I’ve seen in a long time. It’s definitely worth being part of, if only to say that you were there.