Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
[Column] WildStar: A Tailored Experience
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Carbine Studios is working to make WildStar something special, something to keep players interested in for a good long while. In our latest column, we take a look at exactly how they are accomplishing this task. Check out our thoughts and then add your own in the comments.
While the thought of British Dominion players charging into battle against American Exiles sounds amusing, there’s currently no word on cross-region play. We also don’t know if Carbine plans to introduce a Battletag-style feature for finding and adding friends. Limitations are also in place to prevent cross-realm trading, indicating that each economy will be realm-specifc. I’m interested to see if that will remain the same for all items, particularly with CREDD subscription tokens being bought and sold on the Commodities Exchange.
Read more of Gareth Harmer's WildStar: A Tailored Experience.
Comments
"There’s also talk of a post-launch spectator mode for instanced PvP, and I can see that telegraph toggles would make combat easier and more entertaining to follow."
NO and NO. This does only make spying on the other team easier .... Unless these are "friendly" matches that don't influence anything.
The only way to stop "spying" with spectator modes is to have either a time delay or record-replay system. It's nuances like this, particularly in ranked versus unranked matches, that probably explain why it's not in at launch.
Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
There is a million and one ways to stop that from happening...
Whisper disabled while in SM.
Cant choose the map you wish to SM.
Can only spectate from the view of one side.
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
There is also a million of ways to exploit this system and make it happen.
Since I am short on time and have to go to work...
whisper disabled - get in vent, mumble, team speak, skype, etc.
don't worry, this game wont be enough for people to actually care about these things in the end. it'll be as big as GW2 pvp is (not very big)
I will be honest, I assume every mmorpg is going to be a boring wow-clone piece of shit until I actually play it, Because to this day this statement has held true for pretty much every single mmorpg after wow's release. Also pvp in a pve game really means 0, so I don't know why people care about spying and such.
But overall, Wildstar does sound a bit intersting, but I am holding off final judgement and assuming it is just the newest wow-clone/wannabe until I have actually played it. Not trolling here its just a rule I follow, I'll be pleaently surpized if the game turns out to be more, but I am not honestly expecting it too due to past mmo's all being bascally the same game in diffrent skins.
Tera has simmlar combat to wildstar, and simmlar quest based leveling for your class, and look where it ended up, what will make wildstar honestly diffrent that it just doesn't become another Tera? Just some food for thought.
Now I wish I'd get that beta invite so I can help test and give the game a whirl to see if I'll feel its worth buying or not. I was all for it when I heard the rumor it may be f2p, but now that tey want full box price I am less likely to bother with it unless I get some time in before release to see if I like it or not, I will not buy any mmorpg I have not played before, been burned way to many times doing that.
Being a pessimist is a win-win pattern of thinking. If you're a pessimist (I'll admit that I am!) you're either:
A. Proven right (if something bad happens)
or
B. Pleasantly surprised (if something good happens)
Either way, you can't lose! Try it out sometime!
How do you want to exploit xx seconds delay that is present in every e-sport ?
40 man raiding yay..... that is so fun..........
/pass.
They're stuck in old school mode........the fact that they didn't mention scalability is all the information I need to know that this will turn into a raid or die game along with the bazillion others before it.
The devs have said that 40 man content realistically will be logistically impossible for most guilds and is not targeted towards casual guilds but being made for the hardcore guilds. There is 20 man raid content for casual no competitive guilds.
except the combat isnt like TERA
the combat is GW2
the whole game feels like WOW meets GW2, on some distant space planet
Yeah, great, except small guilds will most likely have problems doing the 20 man raids too.
Wildstar's focus on "hardcore" raiding has me the most worried about the game's future.
If they ditch CREDD the game might be worth playing, but having facilitated cheating in a game is lame, especially in a premium P2P model game. I'm just not interested in MMORPGs where cheating is not only condoned but is provided by the hosting company.
I also think 40 man raiding sucks and is a bad idea. Way too few people can and will do it. Way too hard to keep guilds going that can do it. It was hard enough to do back in the day with fewer online gaming and MMORPG options, but these days, with people having the attention span of flies and flitting around between games so much...good luck. The very few paramilitary style guilds might pull it off but it's generally a waste of content, which is why bliz (one of the smartest developers ever) moved away from it. Creating content for few people is dumb. You don't have to make content ez-mode but going with smaller raid sizes makes for content that's way more likely to get done.
Premium MMORPGs do not feature built-in cheating via cash for gold pay 2 win. PLAY to win or don't play.
What Gaffney has said is that if you lose the hardcore raid guilds there is a big trickle down effect where you lose tons of other guilds who would never even do these raids. Because the perception a game is easy effects everyone. Putting the carrot out that only a few can achieve motivates everyone. It also fits carbines philosophy and that is to teach players to become better player.
At the same time you do not have to like every bit of content to enjoy a game. You may not like the housing, the crafting or the PvP but if there is content you enjoy that is what matters. While Carbine is offering content for the hardcore they are also offering content everyone else. Unlike every other MMO where games are only made for casuals and ultra casuals where the hardcore are left with nothing but oh we will get to you one day. Carbine wants to give everyone content to enjoy, content for everyone to aspire to and to hopefully elevate the play of all players bringing back some challenge and difficulty to a genre that has long been without it.
I think that calling it "facilitated cheating" is a bit of a stretch. I'm curious to see if you hold EVE Online in the same regard, considering that the PLEX system has been in-place there since 2008.
Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
They are charging 1.5 to 2 times the going rate of a standard Boxed fee. Basically, the same price as GW2 (Which was priced as such because it had no sub) Plus they have their CREDD system is is a means to get real money into the game. And since it will be available at launch, the economy will be based on the value of CREDD and not on what players generate in the game. Then on top of that, they want' $15 bucks/month???? Hloy crap that's just greedy. I'll pay a monthly fee in a game if and ONLY if the publisher takes measures against RMT, otherwise, no. Not gonna play it.
With this type of MMORPG, there needs to be content for players to do once they hit cap. It's going to happen sooner or later, and if they don't find anything to do they'll just unsubscribe. Raiding is part of that, as are dungeons, shiphand missions, instanced Adventures, a continuing storyline, housing, various forms of PvP, roleplay, and so on. There are also going to be regular content updates - probably every three weeks.
Yes, if your heart is set on raiding then it will be challenging and brutal. There will be no easy or hard mode. By the same token, raid instances will change configuration each week - a boss may have different adds, or a pool of lava might appear that you can stunlock him in. The challenge won't be server first, but server best on a regular basis. Some weeks it might be easier, sometimes it'll be harder, but everyone will have the same challenge.
Currently playing: WildStar, Guild Wars 2, EVE Online, Vain Glory.
Eve's system is a joke. They took a relatively small niche game and figured out how to re-monetize the mediocre player base and used it to fund the high end players. I constantly hear how there are around 50K active players, yet they have 500K subs. Well how the hell is that gonna work when the resources from 85-90% of those extra 450K accounts that are all paid for by that mediocre player base all go back and keep the top tiered percentage of EVE's player base in power? You have a game economy that is 5-10 times bigger than it should be where the vast majority of it serves ONLY the biggest corps. So all those players looking to get a bit of an edge buying PLEXX get thrown a teeny tiny little bone in exchange for cementing a power base in place that actually works against them. Sure, EVE's PLEX system is absolutely NOT P2W. How can it be when it's really Pay to Lose?
dident liked wild star from the beginning but the more i read about it it looks like a realy well made and intresting mmo ...
as much as i hate me for it but i guess ill gonna check it out
Requiring 40 people to complete content in no way makes it more difficult content, just more difficult to organize in order to complete and/or access the content. Many mmo's have proven that 4-6 man content can be way more challenging than 40 man content. Every 25-40 man raid I have been in across numerous mmo's was never difficult to complete, just figure out the fight then it just becomes farm rinse and repeat.
My only fear is 40 man raid gear far trumps other gear. This is where so many games have gone wrong in the past. I just hope progression is not gated behind 40 man raids. I am all for options in mmo's, so I hope they give us true options when it comes to endgame progression and I don't mean do dailies, then do heroics, then raid or quit. That I can go back to EQ, WoW, EQ2, etc... for that.
Cheers!
MMO Vet since AOL Neverwinter Nights circa 1992. My MMO beat up your MMO. =S
40 man will be a barrier to many people for a variety of reasons. Things like performance issues, scheduling issues, and communication issues that were a big problem back in WoW will continue to be issues regardless of how they implement it. Also larger groups mean less personal responsibility. Now the up side is that it certainly does feel epic when that many people come together to tackle a challenge. My only concern is that it will exclude a large number of people who would like to raid, but can't because of the complications of 40 raids.
All of the instanced group content is also somewhat of a concern. I am a firm believer that grouping should happen on the fly, encounters should scale, and exciting things should happen in the open world. Putting people in queues and pulling them out of that open world has a pretty big impact on the open world and how people interact in it. I'm not so sure that just because that is what everybody has been doing that it is the right way to go moving forward. I do understand that developers like to control the speed at which people can do things, and they use instances and lock outs to accomplish this, I'm just no so sure that is the only or best way of doing it.
All and all I'm really looking forward to Wildstar, I just hope there is fun to be found at end game in the open world and the end game isn't relegated to running a bunch of instanced group content that seems to be the same ol archaic formula we are used to.
Absolutely! And for me all I see is yet another attempt to try to upstage WoW.
We need something new, and I mean really new. This idea that we blitz though material just to focus on end game is tired & clichéd at best. Sure Wildstar has a few novel approaches as you level, but fundamentally it's just the same stuff as we've seen over and over. Also this overdriven hype distracts (as intended) but as gamers we need to look beyond the shiny to push developers to do much, much better in terms of better gameplay.
The MMORPG field is stagnating, we already have had our Waterworld with SWTOR, it's time for our Usual Suspects to bust things up.