'Games Had Shifted' WildStar's Nine-Year Development May Have Led to Its Demise | MMORPG.com

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'Games Had Shifted' WildStar's Nine-Year Development May Have Led to Its Demise | MMORPG.com

When WildStar took nine years to develop, developer Tim Cain says that "games had shifted" and talks how the long process may have doomed Carbine's MMORPG.

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StoneRoses

This game was great!
I recall folks bitching about the telegraph which now we see in so many games. Not only that, folks complained about the difficulty meanwhile we have many games have adapted to Soul Like gameplay.

Games like Wildstar and even Firefall, players were just not ready for them.

Aeander

The game was alright, but I really do think that the job system (explorer, etc.) was the only really exceptional quality. 

ValdemarJ

StoneRoses said:

This game was great!
I recall folks bitching about the telegraph which now we see in so many games. Not only that, folks complained about the difficulty meanwhile we have many games have adapted to Soul Like gameplay.

Games like Wildstar and even Firefall, players were just not ready for them.

I think there is a lot of truth in that. I also think it's true that very long development times are risky and that people move on. Popularity is fleeting and changes a lot over a decade.

This is just one factor in why I think modern live service and AAA games are facing difficulties though. High production costs for high fidelity graphics, sound, and voice acting is a big factor. Unrealistic revenue and adoption expectations by increasingly less patient and demanding executives and shareholders. The gaming demographic is more diverse than every and still very fickle. Those are just a few examples that suggest that despite hitting revenue records, individual games and studios are facing greater challenges than ever.

Apridise

I'm going to have to disagree with this, the game was super popular when it came out, the issue was they didn't listen to the the main player base that was actively playing, but instead trying to catering only to a subset of those users. So solo content bugs got ignored, casual grouping issues got ignored, and eventually these players got fed up and left.

Xiaoki

WildStar was a buggy mess of a game. It was horrible. Every single aspect of the entire game had a mountain of bugs.

Even if you could make your way to maximum level your reward was more bugs!

The dungeons were very buggy which made getting the Silver medals for them difficult. The attunement quest line to raid was buggier and the raids were the buggiest content of all! Yay!

I was in the WildStar closed beta, open beta and played pretty hardcore at launch. The WildStar revisionist history is always fascinating to me. 

mitech616

Wildomar was fun, even though it had bugs they needed to iron out. But EVERY MMO launched eith bugs. The game never should have been canceled, but when big companies run MMORPGs, it's either rake in the cash, or it's canceled. The game was likely sustainable with moderate ongoing development and a smaller team, but corporate fat cats want millions in profits or it's a "failure".

Same with Tabula Rasa (and most other shut down MMOs from NCSoft, SOE, etc.).

Angrakhan

The hubris of the wildstar devs killed the game. They were absolutely convinced that they had the right formula such that they listened to absolutely no one except the other people in their tight inner circle echo chamber. Casuals need not apply because it was only for the truly hard core. There were enough easy games out there. They literally said that. Well, what they neglected to consider was that they needed the casual revenue base to pay for their very expensive MMO. It wasn't until they had already crapped in the casual bed multiple times to build an entire mountain worth of shit talking and negativity around casuals that they realized their error and refactored the game to be more casual friendly. By then the casuals had moved on and weren't even aware they made the change. I didn't even know they made the change until after the game shut down. I guess their marketing department shares some blame because they certainly failed to get the message out. 

On a side note I disagree with the comparison to dark souls. MMO hardcore is almost purely about grind and a player's willingness to invest long hours. If you have the gear the content becomes easy. Dark souls requires skills. Investing hours helps build those skills but dark souls can be beaten in under 80 hours to 100% the game. Speed runners do it in about a half hour. My oldest son has beaten dark souls 3 times now. He is not a hardcore gamer. MMO hardcore is a different animal than a dark souls player. MMO hardcore expect to be able to gear up to the point they can face roll the content. There is never a point in a souls like game where you can just face roll the bosses or even the trash.

Neoyoshi

Think of all the awesome 40-60 dollar singleplayer rpg's we could have gotten over the years if these suckers stopped wasting money and resources trying to make the next World of Warcraft.

JudgeUK

Loved the music. The game was easy to play for the short term, harder to stick with though.

k61977

The game was great. The biggest issue is they took the worse elements of MMO's and doubled down on them.

40 man raids were already failing in other games because the logistics of that is a nightmare. When it takes over an hour or more to even get started you are dooming your game. Imagine trying to herd 40 cats into all doing what they need to do. Hell get them to all show up on time and actually have done what needed to do to even be able to get in.

Then you had the update cadence they promised which no studio in the world could have done. They started releasing things with placeholder names still in place, missing items for quest completion, etc...

Hit boxes where the main complain with the pvp crowd. Personally didn't care about pvp to much so wasn't a huge issue for me.

The game had one of the best housing systems I have yet to see even today. Being able to place games and events on your homestead for others to come do an actually get rewards from doing it was great.

The skills system where you had to rely on others to complete things was a decent idea but not something that truly worked. I found myself shouting to ask someone with the needed skill to come open something so I could do my part. All in all didn't work that great as completion stuff was locked behind this and being a completionist this really slowed down my gameplay.

Scot

I was put of by the humour, that is something I always look out for in a game. As I don't replay single player games that is an issue for me particularly in MMOs where I may play an alt. I had the same problem with Borderlands but just put up with it there, how many times is the same joke funny? MMOs test that to the limit.

cheyane

I was unable to heal because the telegraphs were also used in healing. The fact that you had to avoid their insanely actively moving telegraphs while healing and aiming the heals meant I was completely stumped and promptly gave up.

Have  look at these.






 There was one I cannot find where there were moving concentric balls of AOE targeted circles that kept changing their trajectory so you were never sure where they were going and then I had to also target my heal. For me it was impossible so I knew the game wasn't for me.

I did love the classes and the wonderful world with the literature that was written by writers who dropped so many real literature references that if you were unaware of the scifi novels would never click. That was amazing and so much passion in the game design. I would have loved the game if it wasn't so hard to heal others in dungeons.

ShinyFlygon

Wildstar failed because it was based on a wide array of flawed concepts.

-- It was both too much like WoW and not enough like WoW.
-- Melee combat makes very little sense in a distant-future sci-fi setting.
-- Development was focused on the top 5% most hardcore players, to the exclusion of all else.
-- Someone in leadership vastly underestimated the difficulty of coding an MMO.
-- Someone in leadership vastly underestimated the need for testing in an MMO.

But the reason I just couldn't get into it was that everything just felt so forced. It never came together as an organic gaming experience. It always felt like a pile of systems that everyone agreed all MMOs have to have, but they were all taped together around a hollow shell.

Quizzical

The problem with WildStar is that the game was bad.  A bad game when it launched would have still been a bad game five years earlier or later.

They tried to make the game difficult, but the difficulty wasn't done in a fun way.  The combat difficulty was more about fighting against an awkward control scheme than anything that the monsters did.  Non-combat activities created a ton of artificial difficulty by requiring you to get people with particular specialties to help you, and there were no such players around on deserted servers.

slowz2secret

Quizzical said:

The problem with WildStar is that the game was bad.  A bad game when it launched would have still been a bad game five years earlier or later.

They tried to make the game difficult, but the difficulty wasn't done in a fun way.  The combat difficulty was more about fighting against an awkward control scheme than anything that the monsters did.  Non-combat activities created a ton of artificial difficulty by requiring you to get people with particular specialties to help you, and there were no such players around on deserted servers.

this is no true, ffxiv was super bad when it came out, even the combat, the ui, everything was very bad, the quests and everything, but look at it now.

Quizzical

slowz2secret said:

Quizzical said:

The problem with WildStar is that the game was bad.  A bad game when it launched would have still been a bad game five years earlier or later.

They tried to make the game difficult, but the difficulty wasn't done in a fun way.  The combat difficulty was more about fighting against an awkward control scheme than anything that the monsters did.  Non-combat activities created a ton of artificial difficulty by requiring you to get people with particular specialties to help you, and there were no such players around on deserted servers.

this is no true, ffxiv was super bad when it came out, even the combat, the ui, everything was very bad, the quests and everything, but look at it now.

The way you interpreted what I said is not what I meant.  I meant that if WildStar had launched five years earlier or later in the state that it was in when it actually launched, it would have still been a bad game five years earlier or later.

deniter

My problem with WS was linear questing and small zones, very arcade kind of gameplay (platform jumping), limited skill bar, and automated dungeon finder (hate it with passion).

I didn't even try dungeons or raids before i was done with it. It's a shame, really. The game was one of those with good quality.

Theocritus

I only played it a short time....I just remember the combat being too wacky and moved on pretty quickly

Xiaoki

ShinyFlygon said:

-- Someone in leadership vastly underestimated the difficulty of coding an MMO.
-- Someone in leadership vastly underestimated the need for testing in an MMO.

These statements are very true and a root cause of all the problems with WildStar.

Many ex-employees of Carbine have come forward and talked about how much of a shitshow the company was.

Finding posts by them on the internet is not hard.

Management were out of control egomaniacs that were dead set on their vision.

Also, the reason there were so many bugs is because the game engine was a proprietary engine built by the lead designer. This engine was so terrible it slowed development to a crawl and had lots of duplicate data which caused bugs.

If developers were able to fix a bug it would sometimes take 3 to 6 months to push it to live game.

Nanfoodle

Game sucked. I never wanted a game to be so good. I tried three times to play solid for a month. It was not a MMO. It was a dance in a pattern game. Scripted patterns you needed to dance in to kill bosses. Twitchy and repetitive. The game died because it sucked. 

StoneRoses

Nanfoodle said:

Game sucked. I never wanted a game to be so good. I tried three times to play solid for a month. It was not a MMO. It was a dance in a pattern game. Scripted patterns you needed to dance in to kill bosses. Twitchy and repetitive. The game died because it sucked. 

what you just described is mechanics in the game that every other game has had since and currently has. Maybe just sucking at game mechanics sealed the deal.

lordsmok

wildstar problem is that it should be 2 more years in dev stage

Scot

I heard about the bugs, but remember back then we were more prepared to put up with them. If you go back even further rubber banding was a semi regular occurrence in DAOC.

Kyleran

Scot said:

I heard about the bugs, but remember back then we were more prepared to put up with them. If you go back even further rubber banding was a semi regular occurrence in DAOC.

In 2002 many were still on dial up so yeah, rubber banding and long load times were something players put up with.

By 2014 everyone had far better connections so expected good performance which from what I l've read Wildstar didn't have.

Reading through this thread people have collectively reminded me why I never gave Wildstar a look when it came out.

40 person, hard core raiding was something I gave up in 2006, dancing with the stars telegraph combat systems were a non-starter (Did Gandulf ever dodge roll?), very buggy game code, tedious attunement activities, dungeon finders, action laden combat design making healing (my preferred role back then) a nightmare, small zones, linear gameplay, while I was at my peak in EVE and my preferences had shifted to open world sandbox style gameplay.


So many hateful designs in one package, a Sci Fi game with melee combat, come on, that's just silly, stay in the fantasy genre if going down that route. Pew pew or go home. (No, I don't like Star Wars either, light sabers are stupid. )

I am amazed at revisionist history, so many people today saying the game was great, or shouldn't have been shut down.

I was there, I remember, it was slagged on viciously, few were playing it, the costs of making it well exceeded projected and actual revenues and it was impossibly buggy and apparently couldn't be fixed so it was rightfully closed.

Kyleran

StoneRoses said:

Nanfoodle said:

Game sucked. I never wanted a game to be so good. I tried three times to play solid for a month. It was not a MMO. It was a dance in a pattern game. Scripted patterns you needed to dance in to kill bosses. Twitchy and repetitive. The game died because it sucked. 

what you just described is mechanics in the game that every other game has had since and currently has. Maybe just sucking at game mechanics sealed the deal.

Now you know why this dead genre is dead, every other game has same dull, repetitive twitch mechanics.

BTW, not every game has this but some folks don't get out much I guess.