What wen't wrong started 7 years ago when the laid the foundations for the game. They designed and build an mmo which would fit excellent in 2007's or 2008's market but definitely not in today's over-saturated environment.
Action combat -- there are free-to-play games like Neverwinter and DCUO that do it better. You can change some of the settings in Wildstar to make things easier on your fingers -- get rid of double-tap to activate, use an addon to permanently enable mouse look -- but it's still not very good.
And, Wildstar doesn't have good archetypes. We have all played terrible RPGs because we wanted to play the role of some archetypal character. A gunslinger, a Jedi, a knight in white armor, Batman, whatever. Some sort of character we had heard of before. You get into Wildstar and you can play... a spellslinger? WTH is that?
My wife and I recently unsubbed to Wildstar and resubbed to WoW. We really love alot about the game but there are two main reasons we just can't continue to play it.
1. Hardcore: Getting into raids, downing bosses, and the entire raiding process which we were super interested in is just way way way to hardcore for us. We thought it would be like WoW where you get together, try the boss for a week or so, and down it. That is not the case, only two bosses have been downed in GA as far as I am aware of currently and that is by people who can play for 30-35 hours a week. I can play for about 15 hours on my best week with kids and work. There is just no way I will continue to sub to a game where I have no chance of doing one of my favorite parts of the game.
2. Vacancy: Horrible loss of players. I have never seen an mmo lose players this fast, I gave swtor 5 months to get it's shit together and I have seen a few tank pretty bad only to recover later, but Wildstar servers really feel empty as hell right now, even with the free transfers they initiated, the "high" pop(see low) servers are totally vacant 90% of the time now.
This game made me realize that the oversimplification and extreme casual nature of World of Warcraft is about all I have time for at this point in my life. I can do my 10 man raids and my bg's and arenas and honestly the only thing I miss about wildstar is the hoverboards and the housing. If Wow would just do another overhaul expansion and add real UNinstanced housing I wouldn't see a reason to even try any other mmo's at this point. Maybe that will change but I think alot of players who were doing 6-10 hours a night 6-10 years ago are all grown up now an can only spend 1-2 hours a night playing in a fantasy world anymore at best.
I think megaservers would have made a huge difference...So many people stopped playing...it just felt empty. And than in itself is what drove me to leave.
But my two issues were thus
1) PVP was completely repetitive with only 2 maps available for selection (one of which most hated). It made me long for TOR's.
2) I'm a completionist. In the end, the PVE quests just became too boring...not to mention there were much too many.
Finally, it had a lot of Q&A issues. It took ages for a ticket I had to be answered and really started to piss me off.
Yet....I still think it's too early to count this one out. People were saying the same about SWTOR and looked how that managed to turn itself about.
The delay in updates, if it means really sorting through the prevalent issues, along with the megaserver could turn this one around. But it needs a lot of work to get there.
One big problem was a lack of polish. Too many quests just have too many annoying things. Having to grab another player to come help you get some quest or data cube or some such at no benefit whatsoever to himself--he doesn't even participate in the quest, but just lets you unlock it--is a stupid nuisance. And WildStar has a lot of stupid nuisances. A game requires you to type some mysterious console command (found via Google with no in-game hints) to acquire a quest is doing something severely wrong.
Combat was also mediocre. People cite action combat as being the problem, but I don't think of Wildstar as really being an action combat game. The combat is certainly less actiony than Guild Wars 2 or Champions Online, let alone a real action combat game like Spiral Knights.
It seems to set the combat in some nether region where it's mostly trading hits with mobs like traditional MMORPG combat and even being halfway across the zone won't let you dodge an attack, but occasionally you get a spurt of action where it really matters if you run away or some such. That's not enough action for action combat players to like it, but too much action for people who are trying to avoid action combat.
But the biggest problem is that the controls are just plain awkward. I'm not sure who had the bright idea to have the same keys sometimes make you turn, but other times make you strafe, and to switch back and forth at unpredictable times so that you often can't do the one that you intended to do. I've never seen another game try that, and hope not to.
Does this game even have a chance now that archeage is released? A great free to play game vs a mediocre pay to play. I love eso but i just cancelled to play Archeage.
It went wrong because at the end of the day, it's just more of the same. Despite the differences like the humor and clever writing, and the different take on combat, at its core , wild star was just another theme park mmo. Gamers are tired of the same old game stereotypes. People have different tastes these days, and the genre has grown stagnant. Those companies that realize this sooner will capitalize on those changing tastes.
Yet....I still think it's too early to count this one out. People were saying the same about SWTOR and looked how that managed to turn itself about.
TOR has maybe the most iconic and "heavy" IP to back it up. It was this IP which helped to pull the wagon out of the mud. WildStar doesn't have this luxury.
-I would say despite the combat working decently well with PVE it did not work well for pvp. Without going into so much detail such as pigeon holing builds and not being balanced, to other issues such as dfferent classes being much easier with melee vs range without tab targetting.
-PVE environment was not as dynamic as they suggested in their videos/hype
Im a pvper, and while i can enjoy raiding, but if pvp is a fail for me, then I cant enjoy the game despite pve/raiding being very well done for Wildstar since I am only stuck with raiding which is not my main focus on gameplay.
They have great ideas, but they added too much without perfecting what they had such as combat and class specs to be balanced, quality questing with dynamic events.
They could have made their game a lot shorter to reach end game, but if the story was a lot better as it was towards the end, then to add quality dynamic events, and combat be more balanced, then I would have alted and delved into end game with war plots. I didnt even try war plots.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
PvP people hated the ARENA and it ELO system. The rating system for Arena punished players for not zerging to level 50 a day from launch. You lost 5x more points than you gained if you played arena, and gear needed to be competitive in PVP was locked to arena tiers.
Would of been better to sell the gear for a currency, and allow people who go after high ratings to get visual gear/ titles / mounts.
The Auction House was a mess. Raiding had a ridiculous quest grind associated it with to even get a chance to do the raid.
Class imbalances were very glaring in PVP. The way they patched the game caused us to wonder if they were actually playing the same game we were.
So at the end of the day , after that pivital 30 day mark you had people who were trying to progress in either PvP or PvE... I tend to think most people gravitate towards pvp eventually regardless of what they claim to be focused on.
Anyways, so 30 days goes by and most people are stuck trying to get their Arena Rating to 1800 to have competitive gear. Because it was so cut throat and because of class imbalances guilds started in fighting because if you were not the right class no one wanted to bring you to an Arena and risk losing a ton of points in a single loss and setting back the last 2 hours of grinding wins.
PVE people are stuck with a very boring grindy quest. It did not have the same feeling as a super long quest chain in WoW or the old EQ days.. it just felt like a laundry list of annoying things you had to do too many times to finally be able to see a raid. Most people said fuck it, tried to pvp for gear, realized that was a dead end... and then realized they were stuck with to grinding the same "strikes" or whatever they were called over and over... and to have a chance at getting decent game there you had to deal with buggy mechanics governing what would get your group a "gold" rating and a chance for a decent piece of gear.
If you are going to go Hard Core... then go hard core. If you are going for a gear tread mill then make sure people have easy to reach time based plateaus and you will keep your subs after the 30 day mark.
Wild Star instead focused a ton of time on things like War Plots.. which a handful of players every even tried. Guilds do not have 40 people online to do them enough that it would become a thing to do.
How WildStar can fix it's self:
Add a currency, players buy gear from pvping and getting said currency. Same Currency comes from BG's / Arena's/ Warplots.
Change Warplots to a queable instance 40v40 where players can spend pvp currency to upgrade the plots of the matches they are in. Design matches to last a long time ( like old AV matches in WoW)
Add guild wars. Add player bounties.....Let guilds decalre on each other and fight around the world. Allow players to place bounties on other players that players can take ( similar to SWG bounties) This would add a hard core element to game.
Raiding: remove the stupid quest and do it like this.
Make the t1 raid zone have a quest that involves getting certain achivements done in that raid zone to be able to move onto the next raid zone.
This way PVE raid whore type people could raid while working on an attunement quest.
Also the Raid Mechanics with bosses was buggy and rather easy to exploit. It was the kind of thing where once you knew how to screw with the AI it was easy and if you tried to do it the way the devs wanted you to it was impossible without way over gearing it.
N2: Waiting for hours with a bunch of *** to do stuff? No thanks - Dota or LoL for PvP!
Love this quote, it sums up both the average teenage PC gamer and the 30+somethings who are their parents these days who both want an instant fix because of either lack of attention spans or real life responsibility taking up all their time.
Games like MOBAs, CS:Go, Battlefields etc cater well to these demographics and Wildstar needs to get with the program or be kill.
Also, others have said it, but hardcore != rep grind. Grind = boring. I lose interest really quickly these days when faced with one in a game.
Originally posted by rylaar I'd install it again if it went FTP.
Because its not worth your time and effort to play now, but if its free you won't feel bad about wasting your time on a game you find dull/boring/lackluster???!!!
Originally posted by rylaar I'd install it again if it went FTP.
Because its not worth your time and effort to play now, but if its free you won't feel bad about wasting your time on a game you find dull/boring/lackluster???!!!
Honestly, the 20 & 40 man raids are what finally pushed me away. As you stated I'm not the same gamer from 10 years ago who had all the time in the world to sit and help gather large groups of people together to clear content for hours on end. I'm not sure how long a raid took in Wildstar, but there was absolutely no appeal to me in getting together and waiting for 20-40 people to log on and go through content. I still don't understand why they didn't go with smaller numbers. I think they could have gotten the same nostalgia factor with difficult raids, especially with a game like this whose main feature is more action oriented combat and constant movement. Other than that I agree, the end game grind was ridiculous and I think I had done two quests towards attunements before I got bored and started alt hopping which is usually a bad sign for me.
Also, during said alt hopping the classes became very bland, but that might just be a symptom of my already growing boredom and frustration.
I'll simply chime in with personal experience rather than a repeat of some logical reasons that others have been mentioning since it's launch.
For me...
I loved the aesthetics, graphics and setting. A sci-fi fantasy-esque game? Yes please. The look was that of a 3-d Saturday cartoon, and that satisfied me to no end.
But then I got to play it and beheld a myriad of things that did not agree with me.
1) The comedy. I enjoy comedy. I laughed at some of the jokes in here. But when I got to leveling up and heard things such as "OH SH**... you just leveled up! Good job, cupcake!" as well as other lines... in addition to the whole "DOUBLE KILL" and "TRIPPLE KILL"... my immersion and interest were both lost. I don't like to call games childish -- what is that, anyway? There are many adults with high amounts of imagination and responsibility both that love what some would describe that as. But this game? It just seemed juvenile in many of it's attempts... for lack of a better word.
2) Too many telegraphs. Telegraphs everywhere! It's my belief that even FFXIV has too many... but at least it's more controlled there. Here it's wild.
3) Mechanics-gone-wild. Many top rated guilds have come forth and said that mechancis in game are simply too unreliable as a whole. From what I experienced, this was something I concur with. Everything just seemed to be a bit pedantic as a whole.
4) Hubris. People and research both have been telling them that a game that focuses on the "hardcore" will lead to this exact path. It's nice to give the less than 1% something to do, but you should never do it at the expense of the 99% that would give you the bulk of your money. Their statements of being "The best MMO ever and we dare you to try it" was met with harsher criticism and probably gives more credence that they went in too cocky. This and Gaffney's words in saying "Making a successful MMO really isn't that hard" in an interview years back.
5) Combat. The combat for some classes at the start were fun... but it all got so repetitive (and I'm a guy who actually enjoys repetition). The quests were moreso repetitive and uninspired than anything else to me. They seemed to lack focus or a soul in most cases. This is the same feeling I got with Rift's quest when it was first released. What WoW has improved upon greatly in WoD to the point you feeling you're playing in a story that moves fluidly and makes sense. The quests I experienced felt like there were just placed there, just because.
6) Races. None of the races really spoke to me. How they looked and their backgrounds. The new sci-fi races seemed okay, but I didn't like how some moved or some looked. As a whole, I just couldn't feel invest with any character I made.
7) Classes. There didn't seem to be enough classes for me. Though this may have stemmed from the fact that I just couldn't find one that I clicked with as a whole. In fact, I had to restart about five times and play the classes up to a decent level in what I found to be a boring tutorial for both sides.
8) Boring Tutorial for both sides. In beta I gave a massive amount of feedback that more action was needed in their tutorial rather than just doing... whatever we did. I don't even remember anymore. Picking up data pieces, traveling around, trying to find spies, etc. By the time I exhausted all of the characters and classes, I just wanted to play a different game. Though I pushed on with a couple classes only to find the above mentioned problems.
9) The overall model. The final decision not to continue with this game was the fact there were other games out there that I enjoyed so much more. That felt like they were expertly crafted. Wildstar just felt like a game that should be B2P or F2P and I didn't want to feel like I was working a job just to buy a month's time with in game gold, or shell out another $15 for something I thought was mediocre.
Due to frequent travel in my youth, English isn't something I consider my primary language (and thus I obtained quirky ways of writing). German and French were always easier for me despite my family being U.S. citizens for over a century. Spanish I learned as a requirement in school, Japanese and Korean I acquired for my youthful desire of anime and gaming (and also work now). I only debate in English to help me work with it (and limit things). In addition, I'm not smart enough to remain fluent in everything and typically need exposure to get in the groove of things again if I haven't heard it in a while. If you understand Mandarin, I know a little, but it has actually been a challenge and could use some help.
Also, I thoroughly enjoy debates and have accounts on over a dozen sites for this. If you wish to engage in such, please put effort in a post and provide sources -- I will then do the same with what I already wrote (if I didn't) as well as with my responses to your own. Expanding my information on a subject makes my stance either change or strengthen the next time I speak of it or write a thesis. Allow me to thank you sincerely for your time.
I quit after a couple of months because all I could tolerate was pvp and the pvp was done very stupidly.
It should have been gear-less if they were going to have some chess-like rating system. Everyone knows handicaps should give the lesser player an advantage, but Wildstar launched with a bizarre gear system that still had chess ratings but where the better player had a gear advantage.
I quit and have been playing Smite recently. Smite is all skill and no silly grind for gear, is free, and still has aiming. Wildstar would seriously have to get its act together again for me to consider resubscribing.
I wish nothing but the best for wildstar. I gave them my money for the copy despite being just a bit underwhelmed by the concept and didn't finish even the first month. It wasn't that is was bad but I'm sick of games who look like they were made in 2004 not 2014. I can't help but think NCsoft would have had better success (for me) in putting the cash toward a B&S NA release. It's interesting how unmoved I was by this compared how enthralled I am with Archeage. We need more worlds and less WoW themepark copies... Right now my pick for best recent themepark is still lays with FFXIV ARR. I still really like that game despite it missing a lot of my wish list. I'm going to say it's just how they presented their game... Totally subjective I know but that's the first thing that comes to mind.
End game is too hardcore. I used to be about as hardcore as they come, but I really started to think at level 45. Do I really want to do this again? Do I really want to lose any sense of self respect and join an elitist guild with 19ish year old pricks again? The PvP was ok while it lasted. Balance was definitely an issue though. PvP is an MMO is only fun for a period of time before you get frustrated and want to move onto other activities. Unfortunately, those other activities, outside of crafting and housing stuff, are pretty darn hardcore and require time that I was unwilling to invest. These issues coupled with the sub made the subscription cancel a no brainer.
Originally posted by Kaizermos It's easy to see what went wrong. It's what 90% of people were saying - Sub + Box is moronic now days, there is a reason games like WoW stopped 40 man raids with attunment, the old server style is outdated, they lied about 4-6 week updates, the path system was terrible and boring, the questing/gear treadmill is exactly the same as every MMO for the last 10+ years etc etc
edit: I'd love to hear from the people who were excited at the prospect of playing vanilla WoW again. There were heaps of you are one stage. Rose coloured glasses people.
Box + Sub is doing just fine for SquareEnix with FFXIV:ARR. ARR is, in many ways and by Yoshi-P's own admission, cut from the same cloth as WoW and many other Themepark style MMOs.
The difference is (and I say this despite not being a fan of ARR overall): SE are doing it right with ARR. They're developing a game that provides enough quantity and quality of content to keep people playing month to month, paying that sub.
Many have been saying in response to the "subs are antiquated..." type remarks, that sub-based MMOs do poorly not because of their revenue model. They do poorly because they're not good enough games to justify a subscription for enough people.
Make a game that keeps people engaged and entertained enough to pay the monthly sub, and they will continue to pay the monthly sub. Many, many people, myself included, have been saying this all along. Still, the anti-subscription group continues to pretend it's not so.
Let's not forget, also, that a number of F2P MMOs out there offer a sub-like option that comes with a number of nice perks, for those who prefer a flat monthly fee, and those options are still quite popular.
Stop blaming it on subs. The subs aren't the problem. The games are.
Lesson 1: Tell your staff to stop overhyping games that are mediocre.
Lesson 2: If half the game is PVE and the PVE questing system is horrible, that is never a good sign. Wildstar's PVE was a step backwards compared to SWTOR and ESO as well as GW2 in my humble opinion.
Lesson 3: If your eyes are on red circles in combat more than 75% of the game instead of on the environment, the game will fail.
Got to level 20 and attempted the first dungeon. It was crazy hard and had about a dozen party members rage quit in the process of doing it, mind you we never did complete it.
When the group broke, I took a step back and asked myself, 'Is this what you want to be doing for next few months?'. The answer was a resounding 'No!' and I uninstalled about 10 minutes later.
Comments
What wen't wrong started 7 years ago when the laid the foundations for the game. They designed and build an mmo which would fit excellent in 2007's or 2008's market but definitely not in today's over-saturated environment.
I still believe that it is salvageable though.
Action combat -- there are free-to-play games like Neverwinter and DCUO that do it better. You can change some of the settings in Wildstar to make things easier on your fingers -- get rid of double-tap to activate, use an addon to permanently enable mouse look -- but it's still not very good.
And, Wildstar doesn't have good archetypes. We have all played terrible RPGs because we wanted to play the role of some archetypal character. A gunslinger, a Jedi, a knight in white armor, Batman, whatever. Some sort of character we had heard of before. You get into Wildstar and you can play... a spellslinger? WTH is that?
So true.
My wife and I recently unsubbed to Wildstar and resubbed to WoW. We really love alot about the game but there are two main reasons we just can't continue to play it.
1. Hardcore: Getting into raids, downing bosses, and the entire raiding process which we were super interested in is just way way way to hardcore for us. We thought it would be like WoW where you get together, try the boss for a week or so, and down it. That is not the case, only two bosses have been downed in GA as far as I am aware of currently and that is by people who can play for 30-35 hours a week. I can play for about 15 hours on my best week with kids and work. There is just no way I will continue to sub to a game where I have no chance of doing one of my favorite parts of the game.
2. Vacancy: Horrible loss of players. I have never seen an mmo lose players this fast, I gave swtor 5 months to get it's shit together and I have seen a few tank pretty bad only to recover later, but Wildstar servers really feel empty as hell right now, even with the free transfers they initiated, the "high" pop(see low) servers are totally vacant 90% of the time now.
This game made me realize that the oversimplification and extreme casual nature of World of Warcraft is about all I have time for at this point in my life. I can do my 10 man raids and my bg's and arenas and honestly the only thing I miss about wildstar is the hoverboards and the housing. If Wow would just do another overhaul expansion and add real UNinstanced housing I wouldn't see a reason to even try any other mmo's at this point. Maybe that will change but I think alot of players who were doing 6-10 hours a night 6-10 years ago are all grown up now an can only spend 1-2 hours a night playing in a fantasy world anymore at best.
Off to play diablo 3.
I agree on a lot of points.
I think megaservers would have made a huge difference...So many people stopped playing...it just felt empty. And than in itself is what drove me to leave.
But my two issues were thus
1) PVP was completely repetitive with only 2 maps available for selection (one of which most hated). It made me long for TOR's.
2) I'm a completionist. In the end, the PVE quests just became too boring...not to mention there were much too many.
Finally, it had a lot of Q&A issues. It took ages for a ticket I had to be answered and really started to piss me off.
Yet....I still think it's too early to count this one out. People were saying the same about SWTOR and looked how that managed to turn itself about.
The delay in updates, if it means really sorting through the prevalent issues, along with the megaserver could turn this one around. But it needs a lot of work to get there.
One big problem was a lack of polish. Too many quests just have too many annoying things. Having to grab another player to come help you get some quest or data cube or some such at no benefit whatsoever to himself--he doesn't even participate in the quest, but just lets you unlock it--is a stupid nuisance. And WildStar has a lot of stupid nuisances. A game requires you to type some mysterious console command (found via Google with no in-game hints) to acquire a quest is doing something severely wrong.
Combat was also mediocre. People cite action combat as being the problem, but I don't think of Wildstar as really being an action combat game. The combat is certainly less actiony than Guild Wars 2 or Champions Online, let alone a real action combat game like Spiral Knights.
It seems to set the combat in some nether region where it's mostly trading hits with mobs like traditional MMORPG combat and even being halfway across the zone won't let you dodge an attack, but occasionally you get a spurt of action where it really matters if you run away or some such. That's not enough action for action combat players to like it, but too much action for people who are trying to avoid action combat.
But the biggest problem is that the controls are just plain awkward. I'm not sure who had the bright idea to have the same keys sometimes make you turn, but other times make you strafe, and to switch back and forth at unpredictable times so that you often can't do the one that you intended to do. I've never seen another game try that, and hope not to.
TOR has maybe the most iconic and "heavy" IP to back it up. It was this IP which helped to pull the wagon out of the mud. WildStar doesn't have this luxury.
-I would say despite the combat working decently well with PVE it did not work well for pvp. Without going into so much detail such as pigeon holing builds and not being balanced, to other issues such as dfferent classes being much easier with melee vs range without tab targetting.
-PVE environment was not as dynamic as they suggested in their videos/hype
Im a pvper, and while i can enjoy raiding, but if pvp is a fail for me, then I cant enjoy the game despite pve/raiding being very well done for Wildstar since I am only stuck with raiding which is not my main focus on gameplay.
They have great ideas, but they added too much without perfecting what they had such as combat and class specs to be balanced, quality questing with dynamic events.
They could have made their game a lot shorter to reach end game, but if the story was a lot better as it was towards the end, then to add quality dynamic events, and combat be more balanced, then I would have alted and delved into end game with war plots. I didnt even try war plots.
Write bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble
Why Wild Star Failed:
PvP people hated the ARENA and it ELO system. The rating system for Arena punished players for not zerging to level 50 a day from launch. You lost 5x more points than you gained if you played arena, and gear needed to be competitive in PVP was locked to arena tiers.
Would of been better to sell the gear for a currency, and allow people who go after high ratings to get visual gear/ titles / mounts.
The Auction House was a mess. Raiding had a ridiculous quest grind associated it with to even get a chance to do the raid.
Class imbalances were very glaring in PVP. The way they patched the game caused us to wonder if they were actually playing the same game we were.
So at the end of the day , after that pivital 30 day mark you had people who were trying to progress in either PvP or PvE... I tend to think most people gravitate towards pvp eventually regardless of what they claim to be focused on.
Anyways, so 30 days goes by and most people are stuck trying to get their Arena Rating to 1800 to have competitive gear. Because it was so cut throat and because of class imbalances guilds started in fighting because if you were not the right class no one wanted to bring you to an Arena and risk losing a ton of points in a single loss and setting back the last 2 hours of grinding wins.
PVE people are stuck with a very boring grindy quest. It did not have the same feeling as a super long quest chain in WoW or the old EQ days.. it just felt like a laundry list of annoying things you had to do too many times to finally be able to see a raid. Most people said fuck it, tried to pvp for gear, realized that was a dead end... and then realized they were stuck with to grinding the same "strikes" or whatever they were called over and over... and to have a chance at getting decent game there you had to deal with buggy mechanics governing what would get your group a "gold" rating and a chance for a decent piece of gear.
If you are going to go Hard Core... then go hard core. If you are going for a gear tread mill then make sure people have easy to reach time based plateaus and you will keep your subs after the 30 day mark.
Wild Star instead focused a ton of time on things like War Plots.. which a handful of players every even tried. Guilds do not have 40 people online to do them enough that it would become a thing to do.
How WildStar can fix it's self:
Add a currency, players buy gear from pvping and getting said currency. Same Currency comes from BG's / Arena's/ Warplots.
Change Warplots to a queable instance 40v40 where players can spend pvp currency to upgrade the plots of the matches they are in. Design matches to last a long time ( like old AV matches in WoW)
Add guild wars. Add player bounties.....Let guilds decalre on each other and fight around the world. Allow players to place bounties on other players that players can take ( similar to SWG bounties) This would add a hard core element to game.
Raiding: remove the stupid quest and do it like this.
Make the t1 raid zone have a quest that involves getting certain achivements done in that raid zone to be able to move onto the next raid zone.
This way PVE raid whore type people could raid while working on an attunement quest.
Also the Raid Mechanics with bosses was buggy and rather easy to exploit. It was the kind of thing where once you knew how to screw with the AI it was easy and if you tried to do it the way the devs wanted you to it was impossible without way over gearing it.
Everyones got their reasons.
For me the art direction is high on the list. Cartoonie is kinda bleh, and the cheesy cartoonie looks and animation of WildStar is just......
The humor. It fits right in with the looks. The humor is just as cheesy and cartoonie as the animation.
Jamming the amount of NPC's in to the areas around the quest hubs, for me just ruins the immersion.
Text quests....
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
Love this quote, it sums up both the average teenage PC gamer and the 30+somethings who are their parents these days who both want an instant fix because of either lack of attention spans or real life responsibility taking up all their time.
Games like MOBAs, CS:Go, Battlefields etc cater well to these demographics and Wildstar needs to get with the program or be kill.
Also, others have said it, but hardcore != rep grind. Grind = boring. I lose interest really quickly these days when faced with one in a game.
Because its not worth your time and effort to play now, but if its free you won't feel bad about wasting your time on a game you find dull/boring/lackluster???!!!
I'm guessing he's stating it's not worth the sub.
This could end up being very interesting.
Honestly, the 20 & 40 man raids are what finally pushed me away. As you stated I'm not the same gamer from 10 years ago who had all the time in the world to sit and help gather large groups of people together to clear content for hours on end. I'm not sure how long a raid took in Wildstar, but there was absolutely no appeal to me in getting together and waiting for 20-40 people to log on and go through content. I still don't understand why they didn't go with smaller numbers. I think they could have gotten the same nostalgia factor with difficult raids, especially with a game like this whose main feature is more action oriented combat and constant movement. Other than that I agree, the end game grind was ridiculous and I think I had done two quests towards attunements before I got bored and started alt hopping which is usually a bad sign for me.
Also, during said alt hopping the classes became very bland, but that might just be a symptom of my already growing boredom and frustration.
I'll simply chime in with personal experience rather than a repeat of some logical reasons that others have been mentioning since it's launch.
For me...
I loved the aesthetics, graphics and setting. A sci-fi fantasy-esque game? Yes please. The look was that of a 3-d Saturday cartoon, and that satisfied me to no end.
But then I got to play it and beheld a myriad of things that did not agree with me.
1) The comedy. I enjoy comedy. I laughed at some of the jokes in here. But when I got to leveling up and heard things such as "OH SH**... you just leveled up! Good job, cupcake!" as well as other lines... in addition to the whole "DOUBLE KILL" and "TRIPPLE KILL"... my immersion and interest were both lost. I don't like to call games childish -- what is that, anyway? There are many adults with high amounts of imagination and responsibility both that love what some would describe that as. But this game? It just seemed juvenile in many of it's attempts... for lack of a better word.
2) Too many telegraphs. Telegraphs everywhere! It's my belief that even FFXIV has too many... but at least it's more controlled there. Here it's wild.
3) Mechanics-gone-wild. Many top rated guilds have come forth and said that mechancis in game are simply too unreliable as a whole. From what I experienced, this was something I concur with. Everything just seemed to be a bit pedantic as a whole.
4) Hubris. People and research both have been telling them that a game that focuses on the "hardcore" will lead to this exact path. It's nice to give the less than 1% something to do, but you should never do it at the expense of the 99% that would give you the bulk of your money. Their statements of being "The best MMO ever and we dare you to try it" was met with harsher criticism and probably gives more credence that they went in too cocky. This and Gaffney's words in saying "Making a successful MMO really isn't that hard" in an interview years back.
5) Combat. The combat for some classes at the start were fun... but it all got so repetitive (and I'm a guy who actually enjoys repetition). The quests were moreso repetitive and uninspired than anything else to me. They seemed to lack focus or a soul in most cases. This is the same feeling I got with Rift's quest when it was first released. What WoW has improved upon greatly in WoD to the point you feeling you're playing in a story that moves fluidly and makes sense. The quests I experienced felt like there were just placed there, just because.
6) Races. None of the races really spoke to me. How they looked and their backgrounds. The new sci-fi races seemed okay, but I didn't like how some moved or some looked. As a whole, I just couldn't feel invest with any character I made.
7) Classes. There didn't seem to be enough classes for me. Though this may have stemmed from the fact that I just couldn't find one that I clicked with as a whole. In fact, I had to restart about five times and play the classes up to a decent level in what I found to be a boring tutorial for both sides.
8) Boring Tutorial for both sides. In beta I gave a massive amount of feedback that more action was needed in their tutorial rather than just doing... whatever we did. I don't even remember anymore. Picking up data pieces, traveling around, trying to find spies, etc. By the time I exhausted all of the characters and classes, I just wanted to play a different game. Though I pushed on with a couple classes only to find the above mentioned problems.
9) The overall model. The final decision not to continue with this game was the fact there were other games out there that I enjoyed so much more. That felt like they were expertly crafted. Wildstar just felt like a game that should be B2P or F2P and I didn't want to feel like I was working a job just to buy a month's time with in game gold, or shell out another $15 for something I thought was mediocre.
I quit after a couple of months because all I could tolerate was pvp and the pvp was done very stupidly.
It should have been gear-less if they were going to have some chess-like rating system. Everyone knows handicaps should give the lesser player an advantage, but Wildstar launched with a bizarre gear system that still had chess ratings but where the better player had a gear advantage.
I quit and have been playing Smite recently. Smite is all skill and no silly grind for gear, is free, and still has aiming. Wildstar would seriously have to get its act together again for me to consider resubscribing.
many of us had a beta so laggy and buggy the game was unable to be played that word a mouth travels and thats it DONE....
thats not a beta thats a pre alpha.....
Box + Sub is doing just fine for SquareEnix with FFXIV:ARR. ARR is, in many ways and by Yoshi-P's own admission, cut from the same cloth as WoW and many other Themepark style MMOs.
The difference is (and I say this despite not being a fan of ARR overall): SE are doing it right with ARR. They're developing a game that provides enough quantity and quality of content to keep people playing month to month, paying that sub.
Many have been saying in response to the "subs are antiquated..." type remarks, that sub-based MMOs do poorly not because of their revenue model. They do poorly because they're not good enough games to justify a subscription for enough people.
Make a game that keeps people engaged and entertained enough to pay the monthly sub, and they will continue to pay the monthly sub. Many, many people, myself included, have been saying this all along. Still, the anti-subscription group continues to pretend it's not so.
Let's not forget, also, that a number of F2P MMOs out there offer a sub-like option that comes with a number of nice perks, for those who prefer a flat monthly fee, and those options are still quite popular.
Stop blaming it on subs. The subs aren't the problem. The games are.
Lesson 1: Tell your staff to stop overhyping games that are mediocre.
Lesson 2: If half the game is PVE and the PVE questing system is horrible, that is never a good sign. Wildstar's PVE was a step backwards compared to SWTOR and ESO as well as GW2 in my humble opinion.
Lesson 3: If your eyes are on red circles in combat more than 75% of the game instead of on the environment, the game will fail.
There Is Always Hope!
Got to level 20 and attempted the first dungeon. It was crazy hard and had about a dozen party members rage quit in the process of doing it, mind you we never did complete it.
When the group broke, I took a step back and asked myself, 'Is this what you want to be doing for next few months?'. The answer was a resounding 'No!' and I uninstalled about 10 minutes later.