Only played late beta. I played a session of 3-4 hours and it wasn't bad. After logging out I just didn't feel like loggin in the next day to see the next step of what WS was about.
I never felt immersed in WS. I know I barely made it out of the starter area, but still I should be somehow interested in what happens next to my character, and I just never cared.
The combat was ok, but not great, definedtly not enough to make up for the lack of immersion into WS and my character.
1) Subscription game in a B2P / F2P market. There are subscription games that are successful, but I can count them on one hand.
2) The hardcore or go home idea was incredibly stupid. Casual players form the vast mass of players today and with virtually nothing to cater for them they lost most of their potential player base right there.
3) No (or limited) voice acting and very limited text for quests makes the questing pretty boring, especially as the quest themselves were pretty terrible and did very little to make the world live.
4) Old school quest hubs. Clear one, move to the next. Boring 10 years ago, boring now. Move on designers.
5) Designing a game that is virtually unplayable outside of the US due to latency. Lost a lot of players that way in growing marketplaces.
6) Poor quality character art. While I understand there was a choice made with the art style, the actual quality of the character designs I thought was pretty poor. Female characters were overlysexualised again. Armour was the standard painted on quality. Better than WoW, but terrible compared to SWTOR, GW2, and TSW which are the other most recent MMOs I've played.
Main problem of the game, design flaw by the devs targeting a small percentage of the player base, if you make a game and advertise it for hardcore only type of players you will get this type of result. The game should have been designed for all players to play and then create a type of scale, easy, hard, crazy hard and supremo loco crazy hard and you would have please the hardcores and casuals as well, but the devs went with this is a hardcore game and shunned away a big vast group of casual players who are the bread and butter of any MMOs, the times of hardcore open world PVP games mentality are over.
"Problem is, we’re not the same MMO crowd we were ten years ago. We have families, jobs and responsibilities."
Man that is my story to a T. I miss the 6 hours a day and all weekend grinds that I used to put in to UO, EQ, and WoW. Now all I can hope for is an hour or so after my kids go to bed and a few hours on the weekends.
"Problem is, we’re not the same MMO crowd we were ten years ago. We have families, jobs and responsibilities."
Man that is my story to a T. I miss the 6 hours a day and all weekend grinds that I used to put in to UO, EQ, and WoW. Now all I can hope for is an hour or so after my kids go to bed and a few hours on the weekends.
I tried it in beta, but it felt like it was made for a younger audience. The game was constantly throwing quests at me, from the quest hubs to the challenges to the calls I got from NPCs. And I didn't find the combat engaging. I didn't enjoy every attack being an AOE.
It seemed very promising before I played it. It was certainly polished and had lots of content, I just didn't find it fun.
Wildstar's biggest problem was it was too much like WoW. The whole game has the feel of been there done that, Next please.
Everything from the graphics, the quests, the combat, down to the sounds the hot keys on the UI make it feel like it is from WoW. It was like hey I played this game before. Log off.
Some of the long time gamers here didn't really care too much for WoW the first time around. The last thing people want to play these days is another WoW clone.
Finally an article on this website that I agree with.
I personally think Wildstar has a ton of great lore, a fantastic combat system, refreshingly difficult dungeons, interesting talent system. And these aspects, I believe, are top dog in the genre, at least in my opinion.
However, I called it months before launch that the good ole days of 40 man raids, and catering to hardcores was going to be a doomed attempt. How are those 40 mans treating you now guys? Oh yah, all of you that LOVED LOVED LOVED 40 man raids back in the day are ...now not playing the game I suppose? I believe I said it best: The people that clamored for hardcore and 40 man raiding are either in their 30s and 40s and looking back at it with nostalgic rose tinted glasses, or are 18-25 years old and never experienced it in the first place. I believe the majority is the ladder. You guys didn't know what you asked for.
Now the bugs, the login queue times, etc...all are normal for a new MMO. I had no issues with it. At all. Because I understood its the launch of a game. I just laugh when people NOW say the game is doomed only after you all have eaten your words and wanted Carbine to pander to your "elite hardcore" selves.
Get over yourselves. Sadly, alas, if you want to raid, head back to easymode WoW. As a side game, I might do just that. Wildstar didn't deliver for me. And I think Im too old for this "must be in a guild to experience endgame" bullsh_t.
I played the beta, but I could not go much father than the starting zone before getting bored. For me, I felt that there were three aspects of WS that turned me off. First, I was not interested in the IP. I had no sense of adventure, because I did not care. I will catch flack for this, but one thing I did enjoy about WoW was the introductory cutscene for each race. Those cutscenes were not perfect or complex by any means, but I at least wanted to venture beyond the beginning realm to see what was going on.
Second, I tried Spellslinger and Esper, and the combat felt overly repetitive in the beginning levels. The worse part is that I am positive that WS's combat picked up drastically, but I just could not stick it out. I wish that the developers added more abilities to those initial levels.
Third, the quests were boring to me. I realize that questing is rarely the high point of any game, but once I got dumped in the jungle planet I just could not push myself to do any more. My reaction to the quests may tie into my dislike of the combat of the initial levels.
I said before. Same thing would happen to every game trying old Wow formula. Even Wow would have same fate as Wildstar if they didn't improve raids over the year. Yes, we got old with responsibilities and would quit long time ago if game requires me to go from attunements to gear to resistance to rep grind for over the 6 months 8h per day just to be able to see boss, not to kill. But, keep listening to Wow 0.1% vocal minority vanilla vets "Vanilla was the best", they should know better.
I was totally in favour of the big raids actually, but I didn't expect Carbine to make them raids this hard... too hard for such a big group.
If you want to make a game with very difficult raid-content, then you need to focus on smaller tight-knit groups of 5 players and you need them encounters to be short enough to be done between dinner and bedtime. The bigger the groups get the easier the encounters need to be actually, as it gets more difficult to coordinate a growing number of players.
Look at a game like EvE Online in that regard, where there's battles with hundreds if not thousands of players. The coordination of these large groups is very difficult, but the actual combat is the easiest there is.
Last but not least... the combat. It gets tedious after a very short while. You need to decide between fast combat or tactical combat. Both at the same time doesn't work the majority of players. Carbine trying to implement fast paced action combat with a ton of tactical elements simply didn't work for the majority, atleast that's what most people told me when I asked them about it. Also, most people I talked to felt rushed all the time with no time to relax.
So what went wrong you ask?
Carbine didn't investigate their potential playerbase enough and instead listened to the vocal minority.
Get over yourselves. Sadly, alas, if you want to raid, head back to easymode WoW. As a side game, I might do just that. Wildstar didn't deliver for me. And I think Im too old for this "must be in a guild to experience endgame" bullsh_t.
Actually, several end-game Wildstar raiders said they actually found WoW's hardest content to be harder than Wildstar's.... not including Wildstar raids that were literally MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE after the devs made some changes to them apparently without actually testing them.
I got a temporary ban from this site for remarking that no one should be surprised that a poorly-done knock-off of WoW, with unappealing graphics, and a subscription, would be having problems.
People don't want to pay a subscription for what they can get in a free game that gives the OPTION of a sub if/when you want it. Aside from a new environment and different skills, what did Wildstar offer that wasn't already available in LotRO, EQ2, Rift, or any other option out there? If there isn't anything special about the game, it isn't going to get people willing to pay a continuous monthly fee for access to the game. The same goes for ESO, which basically fell off the face of the MMO world.
I got a temporary ban from this site for remarking that no one should be surprised that a poorly-done knock-off of WoW, with unappealing graphics, and a subscription, would be having problems.
And here we are.
Me too, I got banned for speaking bad about the game or like the mods like to call it, excessive negative comments, and here we are.
Wish poeple would quit bringing up the combat of why it failed and why action MMO's fail. The reason why MMO's fail is the content pure and simple, if the content is boring nobody is going to stick around and play something boring and it wasnt the graphics either, if it was WoW would never been a hit.
Originally posted by rodingo Not really fan of quest hubs any more which WS relies heavily on.
So true. Surprises me thata people are all goo-goo ga-ga over Archeage because of this, too.
and resource control.
i lold hard, yeah you go control that random spawning iron ore node! what guild conflict? you dont lose gear on death, WHO CARES about dying, you just zerg zerg zerg
For me it wasn't even the leveling. It was fun, kept me entertained, and the story was really good. What killed it for me was that I just got fed up with the telegraph system. It's one thing to have it in PvE to make encounters and content interesting, but it completely different when PvP become nothing more than a spamfest of concentrated fire... Absolutely no skill involved.
Sub fee. Someone else already mentioned: why pay monthly fee when I can get same content from my B2P or F2P games. I cannot justify the monthly fee given the fact my stupid state taxes sub fee! That's even more of an annoyance! I was confused why I had a $16.and some change charge on my CC instead of $14.99. If Wildstar did what TSW did, I'd go back to playing it.
I really enjoyed the game for the first few weeks, but it quickly went from "oh god this is so much fun" to " 1,1,1,1,1,1,2,1,1,1,1,1,1,2,3,1,1,1,1,1,1,1"
I played the game in beta and liked it but felt that it was not worth price of a sub of 15 bucks. I seems that they wanted to recapture the days of the first Everquest game and Vanilla Wow. But there are not gamers out there for those types of games anymore. MMO's should have the guild wars 2 payment model which is buy to play. Some needs to try to make a mmo that is sandbox and theme park all in one if that is possible.
Wildstar is the purrrrfect example of why you shouldn't cater to the hardcore exclusively aka the vocal minority.
If you were to listen to the vocal minority how vanilla WOW was the greatest game, how hardcore crowd are the people that are the most important crowd to please (They aren't and they are just really loud and annoying). So what happened? Carbine makes a game that caters to exclusively to this vocal minority that are letting nostalgia cloud their believes. A lot of these loudmouths believe that the past was great and are not usually smart enough to realize that nostalgia usually only focuses on the fun memories and ignores the bad.
So what went wrong with Wildstar:
Releasing a 2004 game in 2014.
Art style of children's cartoon.
Catering to exclusively the hardcore. Here is the problem with catering to the hardcore, the hardcore makes only less than 10% of the MMORPG population. The second issue is the hardcore are actually less loyal new games than the core and casual players are. Hardcore players are usually less likely to be willing to lose their progress in another game to start over. So they might claim to want a new hardcore MMORPG but what they really want is their current MMORPG but different but exactly the same aka they want a better graphical version of their current MMO. So these "hardcore" players will then move to a new game try and promptly return back to their old game.
You are more likely to succeed if you attempt to carve up your own path than to make copy of another MMORPG. I mean seriously, why would someone want to leave WOW to go play another WOW game? You cannot compete against the king by pretending to be like the KING. You are better off focusing on yourself.
Charging a sub fee for a mediocre game.
With ESO and Wildstar in the dumps, I hope future developers realize that making your own path is better than following another.
Originally posted by Sulherok Wish poeple would quit bringing up the combat of why it failed and why action MMO's fail. The reason why MMO's fail is the content pure and simple, if the content is boring nobody is going to stick around and play something boring and it wasnt the graphics either, if it was WoW would never been a hit.
Don't bother a worrying about those people.
An action combat isn't going to save a mediocre game. Dragon's Dogma for example has the best combat in an RPG hands down, it doesn't matter if everything else about the game is average though which was it's problem.
The point being a good combat system can only do so much if everything else is shitty. I love action combat games and I can never go back to playing that terrible crap like WOW's combat, but even I eventually got fed up with Blade and Soul, because although the combat was great, the classes was great, the character creation great, it didn't help that everything else was terrible and too grindy.
The point being Wildstar's combat while not that really that great wasn't the thing that ruin it. It was the fact that it focused on catering to a non existent demographic. Everything about the game was tedious and the fact that they thought 40 man raids was going to be successful was even dumber. Wildstar is a hardcore crowd wet dream ON PAPER. The problem is hardcore crowd are not very loyal to new MMORPG, to be more precise they hate CHANGE. They hate giving up the progress they have made on their previous MMO and they don't know what they want.
Comments
Only played late beta. I played a session of 3-4 hours and it wasn't bad. After logging out I just didn't feel like loggin in the next day to see the next step of what WS was about.
I never felt immersed in WS. I know I barely made it out of the starter area, but still I should be somehow interested in what happens next to my character, and I just never cared.
The combat was ok, but not great, definedtly not enough to make up for the lack of immersion into WS and my character.
A few things I think they got wrong.
1) Subscription game in a B2P / F2P market. There are subscription games that are successful, but I can count them on one hand.
2) The hardcore or go home idea was incredibly stupid. Casual players form the vast mass of players today and with virtually nothing to cater for them they lost most of their potential player base right there.
3) No (or limited) voice acting and very limited text for quests makes the questing pretty boring, especially as the quest themselves were pretty terrible and did very little to make the world live.
4) Old school quest hubs. Clear one, move to the next. Boring 10 years ago, boring now. Move on designers.
5) Designing a game that is virtually unplayable outside of the US due to latency. Lost a lot of players that way in growing marketplaces.
6) Poor quality character art. While I understand there was a choice made with the art style, the actual quality of the character designs I thought was pretty poor. Female characters were overlysexualised again. Armour was the standard painted on quality. Better than WoW, but terrible compared to SWTOR, GW2, and TSW which are the other most recent MMOs I've played.
The Enlightened take things Lightly
want 7 free days of playing? Try this
http://www.swtor.com/r/ZptVnY
"Problem is, we’re not the same MMO crowd we were ten years ago. We have families, jobs and responsibilities."
Man that is my story to a T. I miss the 6 hours a day and all weekend grinds that I used to put in to UO, EQ, and WoW. Now all I can hope for is an hour or so after my kids go to bed and a few hours on the weekends.
agreed 100%
want 7 free days of playing? Try this
http://www.swtor.com/r/ZptVnY
I tried it in beta, but it felt like it was made for a younger audience. The game was constantly throwing quests at me, from the quest hubs to the challenges to the calls I got from NPCs. And I didn't find the combat engaging. I didn't enjoy every attack being an AOE.
It seemed very promising before I played it. It was certainly polished and had lots of content, I just didn't find it fun.
Wildstar's biggest problem was it was too much like WoW. The whole game has the feel of been there done that, Next please.
Everything from the graphics, the quests, the combat, down to the sounds the hot keys on the UI make it feel like it is from WoW. It was like hey I played this game before. Log off.
Some of the long time gamers here didn't really care too much for WoW the first time around. The last thing people want to play these days is another WoW clone.
Finally an article on this website that I agree with.
I personally think Wildstar has a ton of great lore, a fantastic combat system, refreshingly difficult dungeons, interesting talent system. And these aspects, I believe, are top dog in the genre, at least in my opinion.
However, I called it months before launch that the good ole days of 40 man raids, and catering to hardcores was going to be a doomed attempt. How are those 40 mans treating you now guys? Oh yah, all of you that LOVED LOVED LOVED 40 man raids back in the day are ...now not playing the game I suppose? I believe I said it best: The people that clamored for hardcore and 40 man raiding are either in their 30s and 40s and looking back at it with nostalgic rose tinted glasses, or are 18-25 years old and never experienced it in the first place. I believe the majority is the ladder. You guys didn't know what you asked for.
Now the bugs, the login queue times, etc...all are normal for a new MMO. I had no issues with it. At all. Because I understood its the launch of a game. I just laugh when people NOW say the game is doomed only after you all have eaten your words and wanted Carbine to pander to your "elite hardcore" selves.
Get over yourselves. Sadly, alas, if you want to raid, head back to easymode WoW. As a side game, I might do just that. Wildstar didn't deliver for me. And I think Im too old for this "must be in a guild to experience endgame" bullsh_t.
I played the beta, but I could not go much father than the starting zone before getting bored. For me, I felt that there were three aspects of WS that turned me off. First, I was not interested in the IP. I had no sense of adventure, because I did not care. I will catch flack for this, but one thing I did enjoy about WoW was the introductory cutscene for each race. Those cutscenes were not perfect or complex by any means, but I at least wanted to venture beyond the beginning realm to see what was going on.
Second, I tried Spellslinger and Esper, and the combat felt overly repetitive in the beginning levels. The worse part is that I am positive that WS's combat picked up drastically, but I just could not stick it out. I wish that the developers added more abilities to those initial levels.
Third, the quests were boring to me. I realize that questing is rarely the high point of any game, but once I got dumped in the jungle planet I just could not push myself to do any more. My reaction to the quests may tie into my dislike of the combat of the initial levels.
I was totally in favour of the big raids actually, but I didn't expect Carbine to make them raids this hard... too hard for such a big group.
If you want to make a game with very difficult raid-content, then you need to focus on smaller tight-knit groups of 5 players and you need them encounters to be short enough to be done between dinner and bedtime.
The bigger the groups get the easier the encounters need to be actually, as it gets more difficult to coordinate a growing number of players.
Look at a game like EvE Online in that regard, where there's battles with hundreds if not thousands of players. The coordination of these large groups is very difficult, but the actual combat is the easiest there is.
Last but not least... the combat. It gets tedious after a very short while. You need to decide between fast combat or tactical combat. Both at the same time doesn't work the majority of players.
Carbine trying to implement fast paced action combat with a ton of tactical elements simply didn't work for the majority, atleast that's what most people told me when I asked them about it.
Also, most people I talked to felt rushed all the time with no time to relax.
So what went wrong you ask?
Carbine didn't investigate their potential playerbase enough and instead listened to the vocal minority.
Actually, several end-game Wildstar raiders said they actually found WoW's hardest content to be harder than Wildstar's.... not including Wildstar raids that were literally MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE after the devs made some changes to them apparently without actually testing them.
I got a temporary ban from this site for remarking that no one should be surprised that a poorly-done knock-off of WoW, with unappealing graphics, and a subscription, would be having problems.
And here we are.
People don't want to pay a subscription for what they can get in a free game that gives the OPTION of a sub if/when you want it. Aside from a new environment and different skills, what did Wildstar offer that wasn't already available in LotRO, EQ2, Rift, or any other option out there? If there isn't anything special about the game, it isn't going to get people willing to pay a continuous monthly fee for access to the game. The same goes for ESO, which basically fell off the face of the MMO world.
Me too, I got banned for speaking bad about the game or like the mods like to call it, excessive negative comments, and here we are.
want 7 free days of playing? Try this
http://www.swtor.com/r/ZptVnY
i lold hard, yeah you go control that random spawning iron ore node! what guild conflict? you dont lose gear on death, WHO CARES about dying, you just zerg zerg zerg
Sub fee. Someone else already mentioned: why pay monthly fee when I can get same content from my B2P or F2P games. I cannot justify the monthly fee given the fact my stupid state taxes sub fee! That's even more of an annoyance! I was confused why I had a $16.and some change charge on my CC instead of $14.99. If Wildstar did what TSW did, I'd go back to playing it.
Wildstar is the purrrrfect example of why you shouldn't cater to the hardcore exclusively aka the vocal minority.
If you were to listen to the vocal minority how vanilla WOW was the greatest game, how hardcore crowd are the people that are the most important crowd to please (They aren't and they are just really loud and annoying). So what happened? Carbine makes a game that caters to exclusively to this vocal minority that are letting nostalgia cloud their believes. A lot of these loudmouths believe that the past was great and are not usually smart enough to realize that nostalgia usually only focuses on the fun memories and ignores the bad.
So what went wrong with Wildstar:
Releasing a 2004 game in 2014.
Art style of children's cartoon.
Catering to exclusively the hardcore. Here is the problem with catering to the hardcore, the hardcore makes only less than 10% of the MMORPG population. The second issue is the hardcore are actually less loyal new games than the core and casual players are. Hardcore players are usually less likely to be willing to lose their progress in another game to start over. So they might claim to want a new hardcore MMORPG but what they really want is their current MMORPG but different but exactly the same aka they want a better graphical version of their current MMO. So these "hardcore" players will then move to a new game try and promptly return back to their old game.
You are more likely to succeed if you attempt to carve up your own path than to make copy of another MMORPG. I mean seriously, why would someone want to leave WOW to go play another WOW game? You cannot compete against the king by pretending to be like the KING. You are better off focusing on yourself.
Charging a sub fee for a mediocre game.
With ESO and Wildstar in the dumps, I hope future developers realize that making your own path is better than following another.
Don't bother a worrying about those people.
An action combat isn't going to save a mediocre game. Dragon's Dogma for example has the best combat in an RPG hands down, it doesn't matter if everything else about the game is average though which was it's problem.
The point being a good combat system can only do so much if everything else is shitty. I love action combat games and I can never go back to playing that terrible crap like WOW's combat, but even I eventually got fed up with Blade and Soul, because although the combat was great, the classes was great, the character creation great, it didn't help that everything else was terrible and too grindy.
The point being Wildstar's combat while not that really that great wasn't the thing that ruin it. It was the fact that it focused on catering to a non existent demographic. Everything about the game was tedious and the fact that they thought 40 man raids was going to be successful was even dumber. Wildstar is a hardcore crowd wet dream ON PAPER. The problem is hardcore crowd are not very loyal to new MMORPG, to be more precise they hate CHANGE. They hate giving up the progress they have made on their previous MMO and they don't know what they want.