EU Wildstar: First Impressions

MurlockDance

I had a chance to play for the first time yesterday. I am playing on an EU, French language PvE server on the Dominion side. So far I have played to level 10. I just hit 10 when I logged out. I have not tried crafting yet but have otherwise explored, fought, quested, bumbled around towns, taken dirt naps, and the like. And no, I have not PvPed either yet.

 

First the technical:

- I found it odd that I had bought the EU version but the client put me immediately on the US servers and then logged me out because of course I do not have a US account. Other minor irritation is (once I got onto the EU servers) that despite having a French client the server chosen automatically for my first toon was a German language one. No thanks

- No server queue here but I hope Carbine will add more French language servers since they are all pretty much starting to max out. Server performance was overall as smooth as a baby's bottom, only one lagspike experienced in 6 hours of play. Only hiccup was a full NCSoft login server when I tried to get in the first time.

- The engine runs very well on my two year old gaming laptop. I am not running anywhere near ultra settings but I still get a usable/playable framerate and only have a tiny amount of stuttering if there are a lot of other players on my screen. So far I am very impressed since my computer is not great and that was a major worry for me coming into this game.

- Some hiccups with language in the sense that not everything has been translated yet. I have come across a few things like healing serums that still had descriptions in English.

- Some bugs with the questfinder. I noticed that the allocation of quest numbers was a little haphazard and at one point had four or five "1's" on my minimap but I had quests 1 through 5 in my journal. I also had one quest that showed up as several numbers stacked on top of each other. Some quests that I was following randomly disappeared from the map and then reappeared, stuff like that. I think it needs a little bit more work.

 

Second the artistic:

- Beautiful game world, rich, full of (virtual) life, fantastic to explore, lovingly crafted and full of humor and detail. This game has such an intense character of its own and that is one of my favorite aspects of it already. For me this is something very important because since the 90s I liked virtual, persistent worlds that I could get lost in. The big carrot for me playing this game is discovering more of Nexus and its weird denizens, places to visit and vistas to see (and more likely than not, more dirt naps).

- I am surprised someone griped about animations in another thread. I think they are really quite good, very loony toonsish. Like WoW's a lot of detail went into these animations, a very big plus.

- Character models are well done too. I did like the millions of sliders for customizability but perhaps I am a bit weird in saying that they don't seem to have much noticeable effect on how your toon looks especially while you are zoomed out? I did manage to make a big bottomed, wasp-waisted, evil looking robot woman though so all is good.

- The few voice overs in the game (no that is not a critique, I think the lack of VO is good) fit the game ambience as well.

- Only gripe I have is that some of the text UI is a bit ugly and spartan. Perhaps that is customizable somehow, somewhere but I have been too busy playing the game to fiddle with settings at the moment.

 

Third the game mechanics:

- Overall, I love them! I hope Carbine never change how the combat works. I am no twitch player, but for some reason I love how you have to dodge, aim, think about what skills you have in your hotbar, when to use those skills, etc. No autoattack either. I am already feeling myself descending into the long, dark, winding tunnels of game addiction just from the combat alone.

- The increased mobility and dynamism is a big plus, even for a hamfisted player like me.

- Only minor gripe is with the challenges. I did not like the fact that sometimes inspecting an object even inside a town sparked a challenge where you have to drop everything and run out to go do it. Challenges do not always seem to be clearly indicated despite there being an icon available for it on the minimap. Challenge triggers in the game world look no different from other usable objects.  Worse yet, if you click on the x in the challenge dialogue window, no more challenge and at least so far no apparent way to trigger it again. I think that a "do challenge later" button should be added.

- The character classes are something I am still getting my head around. I don't have much to say at this early stage in the game. I like the Engineer that I rolled. The bots are cool, but seem to not like attacking things when I order them to. I guess they are just shy?

- The UI is sort of meh. I think that the UI might possibly be the only thing I don't like that much about the game but I need some more time to get used to it because it does do a few things differently from the MMO standard.

 

Forthly and finally, the fluff:

- This game seems to have a good amount of fluff already. I blew up a plant that gave me seeds that I will be able to plant in my garden once I have one. That was very satisfying. The fact that I have the prospect of having a garden in the future is a big plus.

- Appearance item slots are a big plus too. I am impressed the game starts out with them rather than them being added in as an afterthought 6 months after release.

Will say more when I have played more.

 

Verdict: very positive so far.

 

There are a few minor bugs and quips but overall this headstart was an A+ experience. I am one of the lucky ones that did not have a huge queue, a server that was taken down, huge amounts of goldspammers, or anything of that nature. The things I will not discuss right now are: longetivity, difficulty of the game, balance, and other long-term stuff because I quite simply do not know how things will pan out. So far, I have not seen any huge major flaws but that does not mean that there aren't any.