I played in beta and decided not to purchase it. The more I played the more I felt I was playing WoW. There just was not enough to separate it from WoW.
"Sean (Murray) saying MP will be in the game is not remotely close to evidence that at the point of purchase people thought there was MP in the game." - SEANMCAD
For me it went wrong with the first Screenshot i saw bcs i can not tolerate that Art style.
Aside of that and in General: As MMO-Vet who has played through the Golden Age of MMOrpgs (or should it be named Age of Promise?) the new Generations of so called MMOrpgs offers nothing exceptional and have strolled away far from the once promising path of the past.
Raiding is boring and very time consuming - i am not willing anymore to spend hours of my lifetime for it (for me it was 15 month of raiding and it is not worth it).
PvP - i do Play PvP like in Daoc, Mechwarrior Online, Sportgames (Soccer, Racing i.e.) - i dislike the other PvP styles like WoW-PvP or AoC-PvP etc.
But as stated first: I would not play Wildstar even if it was a good game bcs i can not play a Game or Avatar i hate visualy and that was for me the very first "went wrong".
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
I think damusic2me and Battlerock made good points that the combat was too busy and it felt like work. My previous main MMO was City of Heroes. The combat wasn't as busy, it felt relaxed, teaming was easy since it had "dungeons". Another thing CoH had that W* doesn't is that it's easy to get to the different zones. If my guild-mate needed help with a mission, I could get there quickly from nearly any point on the board. But the lack of fast travel makes it impractical to do the same thing in W*.
I think W* has a bunch of little things it could do to improve the game and make it fun, but at the same time the combat feels broken. It's too busy and too much work to have fun. That's what games are about, fun.
Ah, good ol' CoH. Now there was a unique MMO.
And I agree, sometimes you just want to take it easy. Not every single encounter needs to be an epic battle.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
The reason 40 person raids went away = Coordinating 40 people was the most difficult part of raiding.
Then, you add all sorts of neon blocks and circles and lines that those same 40 people have to dodge constantly = fail.
Sure, maybe there's a very tiny population that wants that, but that's on top of boring combat. Builder -> Finisher. Really? Boring.
So that cuts down the player base some more.
Art style cut down the base even more.
Linear quest hubs cut it down again. I mean, if you're going to go for linear quest hubs that's where you SHOULD look at how WoW does it, because even though they do linear quest hubs, they do it really really well. WS questing was like taking 10 steps back, they thought that the combat would be fun enough to keep people's interest.
Locked weapons for each class. Killing customization is quite possibly one of the worst things you can do in an RPG.
If you just look at all those decisions you can see how each and every step they took just whittled down potential interest from whatever they would have had.
For me (and only speaking for me), Wildstar never entered my radar. I recognize that things I dislike are liked by others and vice versa, but I can only offer insight into my own decisions.
1. The "snap into a Slim Jim" promotional campaign was a non-starter. It struck me as "Barrens Chat: Developer version."
2. I won't play an MMO with twitchy-action combat. If I want twitchy, I'll play a shooter, a fighting game, or a racing game.
3. 40-person raiding is less of a good idea than Flex-Raiding. WoW is completely moving in the right direction on raids. Difficulty can be separated from logistics and we should be making logistics more accessible, not less.
I'm not a hating type of person, I genuinely hoped W* would work, even though it was clearly not built for me. Here's hoping it's salvageable.
Old geezer here - Wildstar was never high on my list and I guess most +30 gamesplayers with a family sort of skipped it. Anyway... Asked a few Q's to my 2 boys (18 and 16)...
About games... How do you rate Wildstar?
Nooblet1 (age 18): Wildstar?
Nooblet2: ????
Ok, lets back up a little. Kind of games you play?
N1: FPS, RTS and MMO
N2: RTS and sometimes an FPS.
Hmm... Favourite game?
N1: Dota2
N2: Dota2
Second place?
N1: CS/CS:Go
N2: CS and a bunch of asian RPG's
How about MMO's with PvP?
N1: PvP works in CS - CoD+rest is a piece of s... buy dlc to win!
N2: Waiting for hours with a bunch of *** to do stuff? No thanks - Dota or LoL for PvP!
Lots of fine MMO's out there - Do you play any of them?
N1: GW2 3-4 sessions a week
N2: Aion sometimes..
How about progression MMO's like WoW or Wildstar?
N1: Liked Lord of The Rings and GW2 is ok. WoW: Not interested, Googling Wildstar: Sounds like WoW = Not interested!
N2: Tried WoW, GW2 and a bunch of F2P MMO's - Don't like any of them!
How about your friends. Any of them into MMO raiding?
N1: Errm... Don't think so?
N2: LOL - Really???
Anecdotal at best, sure - Yet... Oh well draw your own conclusions
Basically: My kids dont give a rats *rse about waiting for a 4hour raid when they can enjoy 4-5 high adren/dopamine inducing dota2 games in less time. I feel quite certain they're not the only ones...
PS: "Nooblet" term chosen purely based on their age and lifeexperience
We dont need casuals in our games!!! Errm... Well we DO need casuals to fund and populate our games - But the games should be all about "hardcore" because: We dont need casuals in our games!!! (repeat ad infinitum)
I was in a top raiding guild in a game once. Eventually I became leader. We spent so many hours discussing tactics, readying gear, going to zones, re-doing fight after fight after fight... we climbed, we conquered, we reached the highest ends and bosses of the game that others had never even seen... it was awesome in many ways when you got past the sheer TIME invested into it.
.....and yet I never ever EVER want to do that again. The sleepless nights staying up to finish things, the DCs in the raid ruining everything, all the re-doing and calculations and how LONG the thing took and the logistics and getting everyone together and dealing out tasks and everything else... that crap is a real life job in and of itself and it amazes me the crap MMO players went through back in the day.
At any rate, the answer "What went wrong?" with Wildstar is... honestly practically everything. I've been keeping watch on posters saying why they left the game and gosh, there are like, TONS of different reasons for each and every person! You could pretty much look at any aspect of Wildstar ever and find something that just grated on some subset of people. If one thing didn't make you want to leave or just not get into the game, it was another, and even if you liked THAT, there was another aspect to the game somewhere that just made you annoyed or tired or apathetic or whatever else. Loot system? Raid logistics? Art style? Combat? Imbalanced PvP? Unoptimized? Bugs? Boredom? Generic grind? Quest hubs? Non-solo end-game? The list just goes on and on and on, where even if you disagreed with several items in the list or LIKED others, SOMEWHERE along the line you'd slam into something that would make you question why you're bothering to sub to the game.
ive stopped vet runs tbh and adventures but still trying to attune and doin my dailies and world bosses because its really only thing todo as a cusual player at endgame.
i still play pvp but on my leveling alt in 'practice grounds' BGS were it feels much better than rated.
im hoping the new solo content in drop 3 will keep my interest- and who knows by then ill be wanting to raid...
bottomline still love the game!- and currently play it.
And I agree, sometimes you just want to take it easy. Not every single encounter needs to be an epic battle.
This is how most combats are for me in W*.
*hit with big attack*
*backup - shoot*
*backup - shoot*
*backup - shoot*
*is someone behind me?*
*backup - shoot*
*backup - shoot*
*do different attack*
*shoot*
*shoot*
*shoot*
*backup - shoot*
It's too stressful. Give me a minion I can take down in three hits and give me a lot of them.
ETA
I really think CoH ruined other MMOs for me. I had such a good time playing it and so used to how it worked, it made shifting gears to different game mechanics difficult. W* combat is too fast, WoW combat felt too slow and confusing. I'm not sure what "quest hubs" are and why they're bad. I don't like grinding for gear because it changes the appearance of your character. It also limits your creativity. CoH was too different from other MMOs so all this "been there/done that" attitude is lost on me.
I will go against others here and say that I liked the art style. I'd rather have something bright and colorful than the drab set of browns we get from other games. You can say a lot of things about the art style, but it wasn't depressing.
But that is what only an MMORPG could be - a fantasy world with so many *different* possible ways to play that it covers most bases. The trick is not to try and get all the players to play one game but provide multiple games for different types of player under the one umbrella game.
"so it makes much more sense to focus on the areas in which it is naturally strong and build a tight game around it. "
That's where these games have been going wrong for years.
There are people who, for example, would quite enjoy playing a character who ran round their starter city zone repairing NPC houses.
(or almost anything else you could imagine no matter how dumb it might seem to most other players)
And a game could do that. A faction starter zone might have a main town and a bunch of villages and the houses randomly spawn repair markers and a player who picked carpentry or house building skill could repair them with their craft tools and some gathered materials for 200xp a pop (and it wouldn't necessarily effect the raiders or pvpers at all).
If you work in an office in a city then running around in a fantasy world doing stuff like that might be a good relaxation before bed. A few hundred people or even a few thousand on a global scale might even sub to a game for something like that because they find it relaxing. And how much would it cost to program? And once programmed it just carries on forever appealing to a few people.
I am one of those crafter types that has great disdain for pvp of any kind. I liked the questing experience of Wildstar but the crafting was a joke. Most of the stuff I crafted I just sold to a vendor. Cooking in Arhceage? All I can say is what were they thinking. I played for about 2 months before cancelling. Sad though. I think the game was beautiful. But with all the emphasis on dungeons and raiding, and with the crappy crafting system, I did not last long.
Action combat. Too much for this old geezer. Housing was an absolute blast in beta but in production I never got that far. Cannot handle the action combat.
My problem with the game? It was so freaking boring. I couldn't get past level ten before giving up. Quests felt like F2P game's quests, not subscription worthy quests. I can't believe the hype behind this game and then playing it to discover how frustratingly dull and uninspired it really was... Some excellent marketing went into it though, that's for sure.
What went wrong was simple. Like Arenanet they were taken in by the 1%ers cries for hardcoreness whatever that means, cept unlike Arenanet they didn't start out being a completely different game and then change into the gear treadmill/dungeon focused mess they started off doing that from the beginning. Just like Arenanet however, they too didn't listen to statistics or demographics, facts or historical precedent, none of that mattered to these people, they just kept trudging on like no one knew anything about mmo history and where we are now. The media however is partly to blame you see, the gaming media has had a long standing silent backroom agreement to never say anything negative about the direction of a game that's in beta or in launch until it's too late. The Wildstar and Archeage outrages are the result of not only the developers misleading the players but also the result of media sites like these not giving a more balanced review of the products before they are released. Once released dependent solely on the amount of marketing money websites like this one received, determines exactly when they can begin to post speculative editorials on just what went wrong highlighting the problems they should have reported on to begin with but never did until it was too late. So while it is partly that these more recent developer teams are missing key members of their decision making process (namely those who have a long memory about what was tried alreadty in the past and what not to do) the media also has it's hands in the guilty jar because of how it handles (or doesn't in this case) the information gamers need to know.
For me it was pvp issues that forced me to leave, 2 bg's and very little world pvp was a slight issue although I was willing to overlook this. The fact that I spent time getting my purple arena gear only to find that it was useless due to how pvp stats worked and my blue pve gear from broker was better for pvp. pvp was no where near balanced plagued with various other issues.
Personally, I thought the character designs, classes and skill system were the biggest issues. All of them were just completely annoying and/or boring.
Character design most of all, though. I just didn't enjoy the look of ANY of the races and their customization options. This usually only happens for me with Asian MMO's where all the characters are skinny, kids, long-haired and/or feminine even as male.
The story was also incredibly boring with no draw whatsoever up to level 16 or so that I played. I never felt compelled to continue to see what would happen next at any point, and all that good stuff.
The game seems to have a decent combat system, but it fails at so much otherwise, imo. It actually drove me back to playing other games such as FFXIV and WoW again.
I played during the beta on 3 different occasions. I loved the Explorer and tried both the warrior and the esper. I played the Dominion human and my favorite, the Aurini cat-person. I only made it to level 14 or so, but I had fun playing, got to do fun things, even found a way to swim from the starting zone to the end of the next zone and ran through it in reverse, all the monsters double my level and all. It was great!
Then they released that video where they go 'hardcore!' every half-sentence, and did the best job of using advertisement to convince me not to buy a product of any company I've ever seen, anywhere, ever. Then watching the forums I saw the hardcore with their oh-so-hardcore elitist attitude (despite the fact they were dropping like flies) and was glad I didn't get in on it. I really wanted WS to do well, but they told me in no uncertain terms the game wasn't for me, and the playerbase cheered them on and said "Yup, get lost Lissyl!". Instead I gave some money to Neverwinter and am still playing it and having fun.
Comments
For me it went wrong with the first Screenshot i saw bcs i can not tolerate that Art style.
Aside of that and in General:
As MMO-Vet who has played through the Golden Age of MMOrpgs (or should it be named Age of Promise?) the new Generations of so called MMOrpgs offers nothing exceptional and have strolled away far from the once promising path of the past.
Raiding is boring and very time consuming - i am not willing anymore to spend hours of my lifetime for it (for me it was 15 month of raiding and it is not worth it).
PvP - i do Play PvP like in Daoc, Mechwarrior Online, Sportgames (Soccer, Racing i.e.) - i dislike the other PvP styles like WoW-PvP or AoC-PvP etc.
But as stated first: I would not play Wildstar even if it was a good game bcs i can not play a Game or Avatar i hate visualy and that was for me the very first "went wrong".
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
MWO Music Video - What does the Mech say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF6HYNqCDLI
Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0x2iwK0BKM
Ah, good ol' CoH. Now there was a unique MMO.
And I agree, sometimes you just want to take it easy. Not every single encounter needs to be an epic battle.
My SWTOR referral link for those wanting to give the game a try. (Newbies get a welcome package while returning players get a few account upgrades to help with their preferred status.)
https://www.ashesofcreation.com/ref/Callaron/
The reason 40 person raids went away = Coordinating 40 people was the most difficult part of raiding.
Then, you add all sorts of neon blocks and circles and lines that those same 40 people have to dodge constantly = fail.
Sure, maybe there's a very tiny population that wants that, but that's on top of boring combat. Builder -> Finisher. Really? Boring.
So that cuts down the player base some more.
Art style cut down the base even more.
Linear quest hubs cut it down again. I mean, if you're going to go for linear quest hubs that's where you SHOULD look at how WoW does it, because even though they do linear quest hubs, they do it really really well. WS questing was like taking 10 steps back, they thought that the combat would be fun enough to keep people's interest.
Locked weapons for each class. Killing customization is quite possibly one of the worst things you can do in an RPG.
If you just look at all those decisions you can see how each and every step they took just whittled down potential interest from whatever they would have had.
For me (and only speaking for me), Wildstar never entered my radar. I recognize that things I dislike are liked by others and vice versa, but I can only offer insight into my own decisions.
1. The "snap into a Slim Jim" promotional campaign was a non-starter. It struck me as "Barrens Chat: Developer version."
2. I won't play an MMO with twitchy-action combat. If I want twitchy, I'll play a shooter, a fighting game, or a racing game.
3. 40-person raiding is less of a good idea than Flex-Raiding. WoW is completely moving in the right direction on raids. Difficulty can be separated from logistics and we should be making logistics more accessible, not less.
I'm not a hating type of person, I genuinely hoped W* would work, even though it was clearly not built for me. Here's hoping it's salvageable.
Ryahl - writer of eye-bleeders
FFXIV Fansite | TSWGuides
Follow me on Twitter
Old geezer here - Wildstar was never high on my list and I guess most +30 gamesplayers with a family sort of skipped it. Anyway... Asked a few Q's to my 2 boys (18 and 16)...
About games... How do you rate Wildstar?
Ok, lets back up a little. Kind of games you play?
Hmm... Favourite game?
Second place?
How about MMO's with PvP?
Lots of fine MMO's out there - Do you play any of them?
How about progression MMO's like WoW or Wildstar?
How about your friends. Any of them into MMO raiding?
We dont need casuals in our games!!! Errm... Well we DO need casuals to fund and populate our games - But the games should be all about "hardcore" because: We dont need casuals in our games!!!
(repeat ad infinitum)
I was in a top raiding guild in a game once. Eventually I became leader. We spent so many hours discussing tactics, readying gear, going to zones, re-doing fight after fight after fight... we climbed, we conquered, we reached the highest ends and bosses of the game that others had never even seen... it was awesome in many ways when you got past the sheer TIME invested into it.
.....and yet I never ever EVER want to do that again. The sleepless nights staying up to finish things, the DCs in the raid ruining everything, all the re-doing and calculations and how LONG the thing took and the logistics and getting everyone together and dealing out tasks and everything else... that crap is a real life job in and of itself and it amazes me the crap MMO players went through back in the day.
At any rate, the answer "What went wrong?" with Wildstar is... honestly practically everything. I've been keeping watch on posters saying why they left the game and gosh, there are like, TONS of different reasons for each and every person! You could pretty much look at any aspect of Wildstar ever and find something that just grated on some subset of people. If one thing didn't make you want to leave or just not get into the game, it was another, and even if you liked THAT, there was another aspect to the game somewhere that just made you annoyed or tired or apathetic or whatever else. Loot system? Raid logistics? Art style? Combat? Imbalanced PvP? Unoptimized? Bugs? Boredom? Generic grind? Quest hubs? Non-solo end-game? The list just goes on and on and on, where even if you disagreed with several items in the list or LIKED others, SOMEWHERE along the line you'd slam into something that would make you question why you're bothering to sub to the game.
as a current player and supporter of WS.
ive stopped vet runs tbh and adventures but still trying to attune and doin my dailies and world bosses because its really only thing todo as a cusual player at endgame.
i still play pvp but on my leveling alt in 'practice grounds' BGS were it feels much better than rated.
im hoping the new solo content in drop 3 will keep my interest- and who knows by then ill be wanting to raid...
bottomline still love the game!- and currently play it.
This is how most combats are for me in W*.
*hit with big attack*
*backup - shoot*
*backup - shoot*
*backup - shoot*
*is someone behind me?*
*backup - shoot*
*backup - shoot*
*do different attack*
*shoot*
*shoot*
*shoot*
*backup - shoot*
It's too stressful. Give me a minion I can take down in three hits and give me a lot of them.
"An MMO cannot be all things to all people"
But that is what only an MMORPG could be - a fantasy world with so many *different* possible ways to play that it covers most bases. The trick is not to try and get all the players to play one game but provide multiple games for different types of player under the one umbrella game.
"so it makes much more sense to focus on the areas in which it is naturally strong and build a tight game around it. "
That's where these games have been going wrong for years.
There are people who, for example, would quite enjoy playing a character who ran round their starter city zone repairing NPC houses.
(or almost anything else you could imagine no matter how dumb it might seem to most other players)
And a game could do that. A faction starter zone might have a main town and a bunch of villages and the houses randomly spawn repair markers and a player who picked carpentry or house building skill could repair them with their craft tools and some gathered materials for 200xp a pop (and it wouldn't necessarily effect the raiders or pvpers at all).
If you work in an office in a city then running around in a fantasy world doing stuff like that might be a good relaxation before bed. A few hundred people or even a few thousand on a global scale might even sub to a game for something like that because they find it relaxing. And how much would it cost to program? And once programmed it just carries on forever appealing to a few people.
I remember when comparing Wildstar to WoW used to make WS fanboys foam at the mouth with rage
now all of them are chanting that it's a WoW clone XD
Smile
"Launched to huge critical acclaim" indeed mmorpg.com gave the game a score of 9 for longevity.
So what went wrong? Clearly the review.
Personally, I thought the character designs, classes and skill system were the biggest issues. All of them were just completely annoying and/or boring.
Character design most of all, though. I just didn't enjoy the look of ANY of the races and their customization options. This usually only happens for me with Asian MMO's where all the characters are skinny, kids, long-haired and/or feminine even as male.
The story was also incredibly boring with no draw whatsoever up to level 16 or so that I played. I never felt compelled to continue to see what would happen next at any point, and all that good stuff.
The game seems to have a decent combat system, but it fails at so much otherwise, imo. It actually drove me back to playing other games such as FFXIV and WoW again.
I played during the beta on 3 different occasions. I loved the Explorer and tried both the warrior and the esper. I played the Dominion human and my favorite, the Aurini cat-person. I only made it to level 14 or so, but I had fun playing, got to do fun things, even found a way to swim from the starting zone to the end of the next zone and ran through it in reverse, all the monsters double my level and all. It was great!
Then they released that video where they go 'hardcore!' every half-sentence, and did the best job of using advertisement to convince me not to buy a product of any company I've ever seen, anywhere, ever. Then watching the forums I saw the hardcore with their oh-so-hardcore elitist attitude (despite the fact they were dropping like flies) and was glad I didn't get in on it. I really wanted WS to do well, but they told me in no uncertain terms the game wasn't for me, and the playerbase cheered them on and said "Yup, get lost Lissyl!". Instead I gave some money to Neverwinter and am still playing it and having fun.