I loved the art. It's Pixarish, and hope those who commented about the art can also claim they could never play wow, otherwise it doesn't make sense. I think they targeted the hardcore, but the hardcore:
expected as much content as a 10 year old game
didn't like tab the action combat
never really showed up
went back to WoW when the new expansion dropped a few months after launch
I've mentioned it once before. Once you start to lose subs it's hard to get them back, and I think their efforts to keep players happy at that point weren't enough. Taking away reserved names, killing RP. Just a couple examples that come to mind that they dropped the ball on.
I do think at launch it was more impressive than any other MMORPG that has launched in recent memory.
For me was the endless quests, were so many quests you had to run back and forth to the same cave so many times to just complete ONE quest chain. The quests were boring repetive and copy paste and as I sead it were crapload of those, after lvl 25 I unsubbed right of the bat and uninstalled it.
I do think at launch it was more impressive than any other MMORPG that has launched in recent memory.
I won't go as far as saying it was a good or smooth launch by any means... But it did have it's charms, of which died very quickly in my experience of the game... As a fresh game I didn't expect a ton of content. But there certainly wasn't much of it, still isn't. Other than I guess casual content? For a casual player I would probably actually recommend this game today, though if you're looking for something indepth or challenging, not much to see here in my opinion and experience.
Optimization is probably the big downer for most... Unless you run Intel, and even then you'll still be restarting the client every half hour, and reloading UI every five minutes. Plain and simply, it could have been a good game, it even has a decent following considering otherwise. But if a game doesn't work on most hardware (high-end at that) it will not last long to even the people that have never heard of MMORPGs. If someone with AMD hardware and knew nothing about MMO's -- yet alone this game -- picked it up off the shelf at the local retail shop because they liked the cover or something, they would be wanting their money back rather quickly.
It was in development for 7 years - which means that by the time it released WoW clones were not popular anymore.
If WS launched 3 years prior it would have rode at least a year or 2 of the tail end of wow-era games.
This. To long in development. If you add the 2 years that Carbine - as an independent company - worked up the concept that is 9 years. Add in the year it has been out and that means the core idea originated 10 years ago back in 2006.
And long development = high development cost which will have seriously limited their options.
Total cost. In addition to development NCSoft spent over $16M on marketing; box production costs - another $1-2M; as a first guess lets sat $200M total. Wage bill, rents, hardware etc. Then add in a profit target - EA's is high 60s - so lets say 50%. First guess recovery target of $300M.
As a B2P game with a $60 box cost - lets be optimistic and say NCSoft / Carbine would make $30 a box. (Unknown IP etc. so probably less). $30 per box looking to make $300M means they would need 10M sales. Warning Will Robinson; doesn't take a genius to know that this wasn't going to happen.
You can play around with the target figure; allow for what the Texas tax payer will have contributed (possibly just over 20%) but the bottom line is that once you have spent a lot of money you need a lot of box sales. A bigger marketing campaign than they run means even more box sales needed etc.
So they launched with as B2P + Sub. And done some calcs and come up with some targets. 2M sales and maybe 500k long term sub retention say, break even after 2.5 years; make a profit after 4. These are just ball park numbers but they highlight the dilemma that Carbine will have faced.
Fundamentally caused by the game taking so long to make and became to expensive
$200m on wild star? really? Do you have any source to back this up cause I'm not buying it.
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Its pretty hilarious that people actually think its because its a "WoW clone" or nonsense similar to that.
Wildstar failed to retain and grow because it had a mountain of performance problems, bugs, imbalances and quality of life issues.
Pretty much every aspect of the entire game suffered from more than 1 of these issues. Then Carbine made things even worse by putting out new content that broke more things than they fixed instead of fixing what was already broke.
Even the people that did like WS were leaving. The people that didnt care if WS was a "WoW clone" or a themepark.
But, then, how many people saying "its because its a themepark and themeparks suck" in this topic played Wildstar?
I tend to agree with this. My biggest gripe with the game was performance. It just ran like shit so I gave up quite quickly on it. Good thing they had a trial.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
I started out playing a healer class, i don't remember what it was called, but none of my attacks felt like they had impact, it all felt very light and unimpressive, there was little feedback as to how powerful i was which made combat less exciting then it should've been.
despite not enjoying the experience i decided to push on, until i got to try PvP. My god it was AWFUL, prompts all over the place, it was a total utter cluster*beeeep* I couldn't see anything.
After that first PvP match i closed down the game and never looked back again, i somewhat enjoyed the artstyle, but everything i had done up to that point felt standard and boring, the game excelled at nothing, WoW was simply better, despite not playing WoW at the time, i knew the option was out there.
Been playing since Beta - they have made tons of QoL changes and really did away with the hardcore stuff. They really did listen.... The game takes some getting use to but you can't just do the whole sit there and be dumb in combat. You have to get use to your character and understand combat has a flow to it. Raiding in their main raid now, Datascape, WoW has nothing on Wildstar's raids. They are amazing with their mechanics and the way combat works. If you had issues before, you should look into F2P and give it another try. Be sure to leave your fanboi attitude at the door if you do give it a shot, it shines in it's own light.
Like I said there no good attunement is just going be a grind for a lot other not, but very small % players out there want things harder when this are hard end up being a forum of a grind + content people hate to run just cuz people can't pass it. If a player think they had more skills they don't end up passing that boss they will call it a sucky game, or it's broken. Lets face it mmo that make things super harder to do what ever form it is yes grind is a form of hard people are getting burn out on it.
As there is no right way of hard as there a % player base will find things fun, and bigger % find it not worth there time what ever form of hard if the bar is way to high.
Like I said there no good attunement is just going be a grind for a lot other not, but very small % players out there want things harder when this are hard end up being a forum of a grind + content people hate to run just cuz people can't pass it. If a player think they had more skills they don't end up passing that boss they will call it a sucky game, or it's broken. Lets face it mmo that make things super harder to do what ever form it is yes grind is a form of hard people are getting burn out on it.
As there is no right way of hard as there a % player base will find things fun, and bigger % find it not worth there time what ever form of hard if the bar is way to high.
Very true on the difficulty side, to the average player... During my time I've seen both the good players and the bad players in excess.
It may not necessarily be a "sucky" game -- I couldn't do much better designing one, and it's certainly not my profession -- but it can be called a broken one considering my before mention of constant UI and game reloads that everyone must do to even play (Without it players experience frame drops to as low as 1-2fps even on the best hardware). Though in the not too distant future -- my assumption Drop 7/8 -- optimization may finally be addressed and dealt with. If not, even free to play can't save it and the players will eventually lose interest from frustration.
This went wrong... They tried to be WoW. Right down to stealing art.
This is hardly a reason the game went wrong. There are trees in the game as well just like WoW, and many other things that look familiar. I wonder why that could be? I'm sure if we looked we could find things from EQ, ESO, WoW and about any other game that have similar art. The problem with this game is no one wanted to play the end game and it died do to the stringent requirements.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
if they would have sunk all that money into City of Heroes which is way better then Wildstar instead of making a new fail game that is probably in worse shape now then City was City of heroes would have taken off it is a game that you can't currently replace with whats out there now and the fact the game was out before WoW it could never be a wow clone. The customization in that game is and will always be the best in any mmo. Really miss the game everyday but NCshaft had to go and shut it down to make a stupid game like Wildstar makes no sense at all
oh yea, they could revamp the entire game AND make a decent expansion with those resources but some of the suits had a better idea, to make cash..how did that work out? a revamped CoX could prolly pull a million subs as long as they keep it up i doubt WS will reach a mio subs even as F2P
It was targeted towards an audience that already had an MMO they played. People who don't like WoW were never going to like W*. People who do like WoW were just going to keep playing or go back to WoW.
if they would have sunk all that money into City of Heroes which is way better then Wildstar instead of making a new fail game that is probably in worse shape now then City was City of heroes would have taken off it is a game that you can't currently replace with whats out there now and the fact the game was out before WoW it could never be a wow clone. The customization in that game is and will always be the best in any mmo. Really miss the game everyday but NCshaft had to go and shut it down to make a stupid game like Wildstar makes no sense at all
oh yea, they could revamp the entire game AND make a decent expansion with those resources but some of the suits had a better idea, to make cash..how did that work out? a revamped CoX could prolly pull a million subs as long as they keep it up i doubt WS will reach a mio subs even as F2P
At this point of time a sub game would not pull out the numbers, not many games can pull off a sub with out a remake after the first fail and gamers are hard on a mmo if it fails on them the first time. Even FF14 after the first time failing, and now there doing better then befor but the amount of work there putting in to the game and having hell of the time breaking more numbers then what they had last year or the year befor.
If i had to put it down to one thing, i would say the 'cartoon style' graphics, and of those that do like that kind of thing, perhaps not enough of them were 'cute' enough for them, WoW after all, introduced Blood Elves into the Horde faction because the Alliance had all the 'cute' races
If i had to put it down to one thing, i would say the 'cartoon style' graphics, and of those that do like that kind of thing, perhaps not enough of them were 'cute' enough for them, WoW after all, introduced Blood Elves into the Horde faction because the Alliance had all the 'cute' races
I think its more the combination of that aesthetic + hardcore raiding. Plenty of games have been massively successful using "cartoony," graphics, not just WoW. Borderlands comes to mind as a standout, and it has a similar style and humor (though much funnier, in my opinion).
They just made the same mistake every MMO makes anymore - they tried to appeal to too many people at once instead of sticking to their core audience (which for Wildstar, was raiders).
Please visit my youtube channel for some H1Z1/DayZ casual roleplay videos!
I think the over-use of telegraphs ... and the carpal tunnel syndrome. :awesome:
I mean think about it on the real. It takes about 30-40 more button clicks to kill a mob in this game then any other game. All those extra clicks...no thanks.
You gotta do your directional, you gotta line up your telegraph...you have to dodge out of the way of incoming shots...telegraph fires and your mind is setup to line up another telegraph straight away after the last one. That's about what 15-20 clicks in 5-10 seconds? Half those clicks likely don't even register lol.
If i had to put it down to one thing, i would say the 'cartoon style' graphics, and of those that do like that kind of thing, perhaps not enough of them were 'cute' enough for them, WoW after all, introduced Blood Elves into the Horde faction because the Alliance had all the 'cute' races
I think its more the combination of that aesthetic + hardcore raiding. Plenty of games have been massively successful using "cartoony," graphics, not just WoW. Borderlands comes to mind as a standout, and it has a similar style and humor (though much funnier, in my opinion).
They just made the same mistake every MMO makes anymore - they tried to appeal to too many people at once instead of sticking to their core audience (which for Wildstar, was raiders).
Had nothing to do with the aesthetic. Regardless of what a few vocal people may say here, most can at worst tolerate the aesthetic. Its not the mix of hardcore + aesthetic, WoW proved the hardcore audience goes for that.
I've said it earlier in this thread: Its the mix of hardcore + action combat, especially poorly done action combat. When you want your game designed around needing large time investment, a combat system that is best suited for short play bursts is not the way to go.
If i had to put it down to one thing, i would say the 'cartoon style' graphics, and of those that do like that kind of thing, perhaps not enough of them were 'cute' enough for them, WoW after all, introduced Blood Elves into the Horde faction because the Alliance had all the 'cute' races
I think its more the combination of that aesthetic + hardcore raiding. Plenty of games have been massively successful using "cartoony," graphics, not just WoW. Borderlands comes to mind as a standout, and it has a similar style and humor (though much funnier, in my opinion).
They just made the same mistake every MMO makes anymore - they tried to appeal to too many people at once instead of sticking to their core audience (which for Wildstar, was raiders).
Well, the Disney style surely didn't help but I doubt it is the only reason Wildstar did so badly. The setting in itself is probably part of the problem as well, raiders generally play Forgotten realms like games.
But I think a big issue was the gameplay until you start to raid. I think that turned away many potential players. And raiders aren't a that large group anyways, the majority of them still play Wow as well, maybe because starting all over to get a guild guild is a bother.
Find a specific gocus group and make the game for them is the right way to go. I agree with you there. Wildstar didn't really do that.
One thing is for sure and that is Wildstar will never know why my playing partner and I left the game as they did not conduct an exit poll on subscription cancellation. I took that to mean that they didn't care btw.
Comments
I think they targeted the hardcore, but the hardcore:
- expected as much content as a 10 year old game
- didn't like tab the action combat
- never really showed up
- went back to WoW when the new expansion dropped a few months after launch
I've mentioned it once before. Once you start to lose subs it's hard to get them back, and I think their efforts to keep players happy at that point weren't enough. Taking away reserved names, killing RP. Just a couple examples that come to mind that they dropped the ball on.I do think at launch it was more impressive than any other MMORPG that has launched in recent memory.
In short bad focus and bad follow up.
The quests were boring repetive and copy paste and as I sead it were crapload of those, after lvl 25 I unsubbed right of the bat and uninstalled it.
Optimization is probably the big downer for most... Unless you run Intel, and even then you'll still be restarting the client every half hour, and reloading UI every five minutes. Plain and simply, it could have been a good game, it even has a decent following considering otherwise. But if a game doesn't work on most hardware (high-end at that) it will not last long to even the people that have never heard of MMORPGs. If someone with AMD hardware and knew nothing about MMO's -- yet alone this game -- picked it up off the shelf at the local retail shop because they liked the cover or something, they would be wanting their money back rather quickly.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
I started out playing a healer class, i don't remember what it was called, but none of my attacks felt like they had impact, it all felt very light and unimpressive, there was little feedback as to how powerful i was which made combat less exciting then it should've been.
despite not enjoying the experience i decided to push on, until i got to try PvP.
My god it was AWFUL, prompts all over the place, it was a total utter cluster*beeeep* I couldn't see anything.
After that first PvP match i closed down the game and never looked back again, i somewhat enjoyed the artstyle, but everything i had done up to that point felt standard and boring, the game excelled at nothing, WoW was simply better, despite not playing WoW at the time, i knew the option was out there.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
As there is no right way of hard as there a % player base will find things fun, and bigger % find it not worth there time what ever form of hard if the bar is way to high.
They tried to be WoW. Right down to stealing art.
It may not necessarily be a "sucky" game -- I couldn't do much better designing one, and it's certainly not my profession -- but it can be called a broken one considering my before mention of constant UI and game reloads that everyone must do to even play (Without it players experience frame drops to as low as 1-2fps even on the best hardware).
Though in the not too distant future -- my assumption Drop 7/8 -- optimization may finally be addressed and dealt with. If not, even free to play can't save it and the players will eventually lose interest from frustration.
The problem with this game is no one wanted to play the end game and it died do to the stringent requirements.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
but some of the suits had a better idea, to make cash..how did that work out?
a revamped CoX could prolly pull a million subs as long as they keep it up
i doubt WS will reach a mio subs even as F2P
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
They just made the same mistake every MMO makes anymore - they tried to appeal to too many people at once instead of sticking to their core audience (which for Wildstar, was raiders).
Please visit my youtube channel for some H1Z1/DayZ casual roleplay videos!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrQoK5VZlwBBzpsksmXtjMQ
I mean think about it on the real. It takes about 30-40 more button clicks to kill a mob in this game then any other game. All those extra clicks...no thanks.
You gotta do your directional, you gotta line up your telegraph...you have to dodge out of the way of incoming shots...telegraph fires and your mind is setup to line up another telegraph straight away after the last one. That's about what 15-20 clicks in 5-10 seconds? Half those clicks likely don't even register lol.
I've said it earlier in this thread: Its the mix of hardcore + action combat, especially poorly done action combat. When you want your game designed around needing large time investment, a combat system that is best suited for short play bursts is not the way to go.
But I think a big issue was the gameplay until you start to raid. I think that turned away many potential players. And raiders aren't a that large group anyways, the majority of them still play Wow as well, maybe because starting all over to get a guild guild is a bother.
Find a specific gocus group and make the game for them is the right way to go. I agree with you there. Wildstar didn't really do that.