Mike Donatelli & Chris Behrens Leave Carbine

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Mike Donatelli & Chris Behrens Leave Carbine

Carbine Studios is two employees short with Friday's announcements that Mike Donatelli and Chris Behrens have left the WildStar development team. Mike Donatelli stated he is leaving due to health issues and Chris Behrens did not give a reason but said that he'd enjoyed his time with NCSoft and working on both WildStar and City of Heroes.

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Albatroes

I'd jump off a sinking ship too.

Kabulozo

It's just a matter of time intil the plug is pulled. NCsoft has no mercy when it comes to low performing games.

Kabulozo

I still can't believe over 100 million bucks were invested, the most expensive funeral ever.

VicodinTaco

I booted the game back up on a whim last week. I played it for a handful of hours after free to play and I didn't care for it much. The intro game was typical and bland. After the last few days though I'm kind of digging it. I only have an hour a night so jumping in and running around has been a pleasure. The game really has it's crap together for the most part. Really well engineered and runs great on the older rig I have it loaded on.

On a side note though the game is DEAD. At least the starting areas are. It boggles my mind, I know the game isn't a favorite in most circles but to see it this dead is kind of creepy.

Tintagil

I still get bummed when I think of WS and its failures. I love the aesthetic and really wanted it to be a huge success... it's such a shame.

Mikeha

Should NC Soft just keep the game running until the last player leaves?

Kabulozo

Recore said:

Should NC Soft just keep the game running until the last player leaves?

It depends on the income / expenses ratio.

barasawa

I actually like Wildstar a lot. Sure it's not perfect, but nothing ever is. Too be honest, I haven't seen any criticism of the game that I can agree with, but still it doesn't have the numbers, so there has to be some reason for that. By the way, I found GW2 very bland.
Also, with all the loss of personnel, it's made me very nervous about spending any more money on it. I've been in games when they've gone away, and there is no good way for that to happen, especially when you have real money credits. (Those either go away, or get transferred to another game, and so far it's always been a game I don't like in the first place.)

I'd love to say this isn't a good time to be playing Wildstar, but if a lot of people jumped in, it might turn things around. Of course, nobody wants to join the apparently sinking ship.

The move to Steam gives a cause for hope, but it's still seems iffy, especially since it just feels like it'll never reach the Steam release date. (They haven't told us a date, so that vagueness only makes it seem more likely to be in the far future.)

This is not a good position for players. Too unsure of it's future to invest or new ones to join. And yet for me, I have no good alternative. The new games out or coming out have embraced a 'feature' that I find utterly detestable. (Not so much for it's existence, but rather how certain people will take advantage of it to ruin any chance of enjoyment on my part. This is from long experience of it happening, though oddly enough, that kind of antisocial behavior was very rare 2-3 decades ago, even though that 'feature' existed.)

So now I'm looking hanging on to see if this ship will make it through the meteor shower, and trying to find a safe landing spot in case the apparently imminent podding occurs. It's beginning to feel like one more hit will be a total hull breach and we'll be sucking vacuum.

Yeah, I made some scifi/space references to lighten the mood, but it still feels like the Titanic after this last bit of departure news.

sayuu

Sukiyaki said:

Recore said:

Should NC Soft just keep the game running until the last player leaves?

They could let it run for a year without anyone playing and most of the usual visitors of NCSoft news on MMORPG wouldnt change their tune. Its mostly just dedicated trolling by well known dead sworn NCSoft hater and obvious fanboys of other games for the sake of reputation smearing. They don't actually care about the game and just look excuses to "complain" or twist something to the negative and if they don't see excuses they just repeat/paste the same bullshit fearmongering and made up libel like the last 50 times.

you are right, the NCSoft financial report that showed a 50% plus drop in revenue in just one quarter totaling barely 1 million USD for the entire 1Q16  was totally hatemongers "made up Libel" and "trolling" 

I don't think there is much twisting of facts needed to make a pretty educated prediction that Wildstar is on it's last legs.

Albatroes

BUT STEAM CAN SA....lol sorry I couldn't stop laughing half way through typing that.

Kabulozo

Albatroes said:

BUT STEAM CAN SA....lol sorry I couldn't stop laughing half way through typing that.

[insert something] can save wildstar.

Companies should stop trying to think they can grab WoW players, even the old school ones that love the hardcore raiding of the past, with any other MMO.

The general western player just continues to land on the newst shit on the market, spend some time on that, then fly to the next big shit.

MMOs require players to stay in the game for years, that why eastern market is better for that.

SinfulChris

"Health Issues", the game is literally causing cancer.

Shaigh

With so many lead devs leaving carbine it feels like no-one is left anymore. The timing is odd with them being so close to a steam release, although understandable in Mike's case.

ryanmahaffe

Kabulozo said:

Albatroes said:

BUT STEAM CAN SA....lol sorry I couldn't stop laughing half way through typing that.

[insert something] can save wildstar.

Companies should stop trying to think they can grab WoW players, even the old school ones that love the hardcore raiding of the past, with any other MMO.

The general western player just continues to land on the newst shit on the market, spend some time on that, then fly to the next big shit.

MMOs require players to stay in the game for years, that why eastern market is better for that.

which is why they should not of cancelled china when it was nearly done anyway...

donger56

I can't feel bad for them because they didn't listen to anything the players told them. They defiantly proclaimed the game would never go F2P, would never be made more casual and then they caved on every single thing they said they would never do. They released this game 10 years too late in a market that wasn't looking for another WoW. I would like to think that developers would take a lesson from this failure but none of them seem to figure it out. All they do is run to kickstarter and beg for money to fail all over again thinking they know better than the players what sort of game people want. Is it any wonder this genre is completely in the toilet the last decade? RIP.

d_20

I logged in last week. It could be fun if there were other people playing. I saw one other person (though I do play at off times). It was depressing to play with no one else around. I never would have thought that Aion would outlast this game.

kjempff

Maybe it is more a case of abandoning ship before fingers get pointed, knowing you steered it towards that reef.

reeereee

NightHaveN said:

They just remade the tutorial (again), and now arkships are skipped completely. While they show housing and hoverboards, now the tutorial is the same for both factions.

They still don't learn the problem is not the tutorial, but the questing zones after level 6.

Regrettably it's about 5 years too late to do anything about that... or the combat... or the art style... or the 40 man raiding...

gervaise1

@ryanmahaffe posted
which is why they should not of cancelled china when it was nearly done anyway...


Given WS's lack of success I suspect potential partners wanted paying upfront - to cover their launch costs: servers, marketing, initial staff hires etc. + guaranteed $$$.

Of course they would take a smaller share of any revenue but if WS tanked - again - NCSoft would essentially have been left carrying the costs of two operations (until the plug was pulled in China) at a time when reducing costs is paramount.

Ah well June 3rd is the Steam launch data (as per Steam) so we should know soon what sort of future it has.

josko9

The game that was going to kill ESO lol. In the old days when ESO was getting so much hate and Wildstar just praise. It's funny how the tables turned. At least it proved that Titan would have been a garbage game as well (after all, ex-blizzard devs stole concepts and ideas from it).I can imagine Blizzard wouldn't sell shit if it wasn't for their marketing either.

Volgore

josko9 said:

The game that was going to kill ESO lol. In the old days when ESO was getting so much hate and Wildstar just praise. It's funny how the tables turned. At least it proved that Titan would have been a garbage game as well (after all, ex-blizzard devs stole concepts and ideas from it).I can imagine Blizzard wouldn't sell shit if it wasn't for their marketing either.

IMO Wildstar had the potential to "kill" many games and hit the market hard, but Carbine had not.

Seelinnikoi

As the other devs that left said, the game will soon sunset and shutdown.

Its a matter of a couple months.

Seelinnikoi

gervaise1 said:

Ah well June 3rd is the Steam launch data (as per Steam) so we should know soon what sort of future it has.

No. June 3rd 2014 was the game release date.

Learn to read properly lol...

Thupli

I would have played this game if...

It was optimized lots better

It was at least closer to tab target. Action just doesn't work well with a hard, challenging, work-through-it mmorpg, imo.

jesteralways

Former WoW devs decided to make a game that plays like vanilla WoW; except for a slightly different combat system and the game fails terribly. And there are people who constantly spam all over internet asking for vanilla server..just go play Wildstar and save these poor devs who believed in vanilla WoW community!!