Carbine Studios' "Wildstar"

[Surlyboi]

And fuck them.

[Simond]

"Poopsocking cannot fail, only be failed" or something like that. 

There is a market for the sort of game those people want but it's much, much smaller than their echo chamber thinks it is so the game would likewise have to be made more cheaply - but they don't want that. They want a game which cost hundreds of millions to develop but only caters to <100K subscribers and, well, good luck with that.

[Numtini]

They will argue that it failed because it wasn't hardcore enough. 

No, they'll argue it failed because WE aren't hardcore enough.

[Simond]

Nah, they think casuals don't matter. As in the game devs can safely ignore them because if they (we) quit it makes the game better. Less filthy non-loot-havers cluttering up the server, dontchaknow.

[Abelian75]

Speaking personally (so, y'know, a data point of one), I think the massive-ass raid sizes were a pretty huge misstep, even when going for a more hardcore audience.  I was loving the game (and still sorta do love it in retrospect), but once I hit those 20-man raids and we were ALREADY dealing with the logistical hassle of running two 20-man raids at once, that would eventually be merged into the later 40-man raid... fuck, man.  I mean, fuck.  So many logistical nightmares right off the bat.

It's especially weird, because all of the combat mechanics make it LESS important for raids to be large.  10-man and 20-man would easily have been enough, if not just, y'know, 10-man.  There's easily enough complexity in their combat to make a 10-man dungeon extremely, extremely challenging in interesting ways (not just gear levels and such).

This more than anything seems to have been... rather foreseeable.  I dunno man, 40-man raids.  Just weird.

[sam, an eggplant]

Supposedly none of the 40 man raid bosses have been killed yet, 3 months after release. Does such difficult content appeal to the hardcore, or repel everybody else? I think we have our answer.

[Nebu]

The tragedy is that nothing will be learned from the failure of ESO and Wildstar.  NOTHING. 

[Rokal]

Supposedly none of the 40 man raid bosses have been killed yet, 3 months after release. Does such difficult content appeal to the hardcore, or repel everybody else? I think we have our answer.

A couple guilds have killed stuff in the 40-man raid (Datascope) and plenty have finished off the 20-man raid (Genetic Archives). The difficulty is really about logistics more than anything at this point. Finding 40 people that are willing to commit to the same play schedule, are on the same server & faction, and have finished the attunement process is nuts. After you finish attuning for the 20-man raid you have defeat the last boss *and* grind out a bunch of quest items from end-game content before the 40-man raid will unlock. Lastly, you need to be on one of the few high population servers for any of the above to be feasible.

Regardless of whether the attunement stuff is too-demanding, I don't see how anyone could think 40-man raids would be a good idea for Wildstar. There is so much shit going on on-screen in even small group content, scaling that up to 40 people just seems like a PC-killing nightmare. 10-man raids really would have been the appropriate size for the game, with the combat system in mind.

[sam, an eggplant]

Ahh, so my info is dated, thanks for the correction. How many is "a couple"?

[Rokal]

Ahh, so my info is dated, thanks for the correction. How many is "a couple"?

I'm using http://www.wildstar-progress.com/ but it looks like many of the kills were very recent. One guild on there has 2/9 bosses (and 16/16 minibosses) in the 40-man raid killed, but killed those 2 bosses this week. It's a shockingly low number of guilds, but when you consider the attunement and other logistics requirements it's not too surprising.

[Miasma]

So I guess the president/lead guy of carbine just quit?  Was he just a suit or would he have been like a ghost crawler who made the final call on all decisions?  Because those final calls were retarded.

[Numtini]

That's the first time I ever read one of those letters and didn't think it was just a cover story for being fired. The guy sounds sincere.

The game, on the other hand, is doomed. I'm pretty sure FFXIV is the new EQ2, ie the secondary game that people play who simply hate WoW. Wildstar is just a placeholder and no matter how bad, the new WoW expansion will deplete subs.

[Threash]

I would say GW2 is the new EQ2.

[Miasma]

I should try FF, I hear there is a free trial now.

[Venkman]

The tragedy is that nothing will be learned from the failure of ESO and Wildstar.  NOTHING. 

Who's left to learn it anyway?

I have been wondering this recently and think I said in this thread earlier, so apologies for the dupe post if so. But it does feel like MMOs have run their course. The most high profile entries were attempts to retread old school ideas. Neither production values, humor nor the slow decay of WoW could do anything to override design and production systems that even core MMO gamers have outgrown, much less the rest of the people who never liked MMOs because they only ever liked WoW.

I'd go even further back. People learned plenty from WoW, but nothing anyone could action. GW2 maybe was the closest. And I hear some think FF did too, but that was only after they rebuilt the whole thing after the complete failure of the first one. Nodoby gets that kind of second chance.

So really, who's learned anything that's resulted in a WoW killer ever? And who's even left to try?

There's no easy money here. It's all extremely difficult, highly risky money at a time when goddamned match 3 games are still generating millions.

[HaemishM]

I think fundamentally, a set type of MMO-style gameplay got standardized and ossified in the minds of MMO designers and not one game has really done enough to change that. I mean, mechanically speaking, there isn't a whole lot of wiggle room from EQ1 to Arche Age in how the game plays. Everything in between has tweaked or twerked that base standard gameplay but no one has been able to really make it fresh in anyway. They've sped it up, made it require more active involvement, but really, how much different is combat in Wildstar from WoW or EQ1 or DAoC or GW2? I think it's part of why the last 3 betas I've been involved with have just bored me to tears (ESO, Wildstar and Arche Age). It all feels like variations on a theme I've burned way too many hours playing since 1998. The delayed gratification that is long level grinds contributes to the problem - I mean, if you look at Battlefield 4, they've grafted the level grinds from MMO's onto both player unlocks and gun specific unlocks, but I've probably put 200 hours into that game since November 2013 and I'm still enjoying it. I didn't make 10 hours in Arche Age or Wildstar and even less in ESO.

The F2P market is killing big budget MMOs because they are able to iterate the same tired ass gameplay for less development budget and more short-term returns. Blasting $100 million on an MMO is insane when you can spend $20 million, micro-transact the hell out of it and have a user base twice as large.

[Malakili]

Which is odd because it was never really the "MMO style gameplay" that attracted most people to the genre. At least I don't think so.  It was an ok take on RPG mechanics, but I was certainly there for what was at the time a new way to play video games in general.  That is to say, without thousands of people in a shared world.  That idea still interests me in principle but it isn't enough on its own to warrant me caring about a game anymore. 

So the one thing that made the genre stand out isn't what got focused on (and in most/many cases has fallen off in favor of instancing, phasing, etc).  At this point it's not really an exaggeration for me to say that if I want modern MMOs are offering I'm best off choosing something like Diablo 3.  I still get the co-op, the loot hunt, the character progression and I get much more fun gameplay (to me at least).

That might just be me though.  Maybe there really is a large audience out there who likes the tab targeting/hotbar style RPG gameplay and keep coming back for it. 

[Ingmar]

Maybe there really is a large audience out there who likes the tab targeting/hotbar style RPG gameplay and keep coming back for it. 

<---

[Sjofn]

I like hotbar combat within reason. SWTOR has a lot of bars but the classes and specs I tend to play I can lazily keep below my personal tolerance as far as "buttons I ALWAYS have to push" goes.

Part of it is because more "actiony" combat gets way more annoying the laggier you are. So while I don't mind "don't stand in fire" mechanics, when that is essentially the only mechanic you have, it's not any more interesting (to me) than quickbar combat, but has the added annoyance that I might die in a run of the mill fight because of an ill-timed lag spike.

[Threash]

I liked hotbar combat just fine in age of wushu, it was well done and i considered it one of the selling points for that game.

[Fabricated]

The answer IMO is content, and lots of it on a regular basis. Even if it's refreshing old content. I may have hated how they redid Deadmines in WoW but I thought Shadowfang Keep was pretty good.

I'd resub to WoW if a major content patch was just Blizz going over all of the 5-man dungeons that have ever been in the game, and touching it all by hand to make bosses/mobs interesting, then using their content-scaling system and putting various dungeons in on rotation with various tier qualities of loot and difficulties.

[Venkman]

Too expensive. Each expansion is purchased by fewer than the last set of people who bought them, but they're still very expensive to make. The love of PvP by publishers is an attempt to offset this ("players are content"). But that only works if the PvP is any good (which if it is any good means the PvE/casual side probably isn't). Tough nut to crack and nobody's coming along to try anymore.

Or even less. F2P games are huge in part because everyone else who's never played a game turned out to have the same tweakable brain centers as regular gamers if the sessions could be shortened to minutes, they could be played anytime/anywhere, and the themes changed to appeal to more than just neckbeards.

But also, I totally agree.

I personally started wondering about the end of MMOs as a unique thing when CoD and BF integrated XP meters, levels and unlockables. Used to be you needed tabletop modules and then just RPGs. Not any more. And shortly after, that convention jumped to Facebook games that then spawned all the mobile shit.

Further, everything that was unique about MMOs were the very things everyone complained about. Random social encounters [with asshats]. Emergent behaviors [that exploited loopholes]. Pickup groups [that sucked so lets create guilds and DKP and etc]. Players filled in all that was wrong with other players until publishers took notice and turned those into competitive advantage.

So I don't think there's anything left that is uniquely "MMO" which anyone is willing to spend money to try.

[Riggswolfe]

As far as I'm concerned, MMOs have two unique things going for them:

1) Persistent worlds
2) Social gaming

I'm getting to a point where I care more about those two than I care about mechanics. Good mechanics don't hold me anymore but bad mechanics will make me leave.

[Rokal]

So I don't think there's anything left that is uniquely "MMO" which anyone is willing to spend money to try.

I think this is it. The novelty of playing a "massively multiplayer online" game is gone at this point. What was once a exclusive feature worth paying $50 + $10-15 a month is now the status quo for every online service, console game, and F2P game that has made in the last 5 years. The 40-50 million + customers that made WoW as big as it was, and found something unique in the idea of playing in a persistent world with their friends, are now able to experience something similar in every cheap facebook/mobile/F2P game they touch. That consumer base left that cares about MMOss, and what makes them different from the Destinys, Borderlands, and CoDs of the world backed by social online services (Xbox Live, PSN, Steam) that they already pay for, is much smaller. Just as importantly, they are entrenched in existing games/communities and are tired of repeating the same style of game with some debatable minor changes and a fresh coat of paint.

Wildstar did a lot of great things to innnovate. It wasn't a broken feature-poor product at launch like most MMOs from the last decade have been. It made some good progress in making questing more interesting with the path system, and it completely nailed the housing system and character customization. It also modernized the combat of MMOs pretty sucessfully. Still, it's an MMO, and who wants to play a new MMO for 2+ months in 2014?

The only thing unique to MMOs at this point, IMO, is the group content which is what Wildstar leaned into for better or worse. I can get the experience of questing and chatting with friends in dozens of games released over the last 6 months. The PvP community has moved onto MOBAS and rightly so since MMO PvP has always been and will always be terrible. The group content is really the last thing that feels unique to MMOs, and there are too many stars that need to align for that to be a winning feature. If you imagine an alternative version of Wildstar with easier group content, it still wouldn't have reinvigorated the market even a little bit.

If there was a lesson to be learned by other devs from Wildstar, it's not to make MMOs. The market has moved on and they haven't gotten any cheaper to make. Given that the only in-development Western MMOs are crowd-sourced and destined to fail/disappoint, it sounds like publishers have already learned this lesson and moved on too.

[Setanta]

Great summary Rokal - between this and other previous posts I think you've nailed it. GW2 is alive and viable (yet stagnant) and Wildstart did so much right - but forgot that the bread and butter is the casual who pays their money to fund the game. Leave them in the cold and they won't pay to play.

I think the bottom line with MMOs is that there is only one WoW killer.

WoW.

[Typhon]

Wildstar did a lot of great things to innnovate. It wasn't a broken feature-poor product at launch like most MMOs from the last decade have been. It made some good progress in making questing more interesting with the path system, and it completely nailed the housing system and character customization. It also modernized the combat of MMOs pretty sucessfully. Still, it's an MMO, and who wants to play a new MMO for 2+ months in 2014?

[snip]

If there was a lesson to be learned by other devs from Wildstar, it's not to make MMOs. The market has moved on and they haven't gotten any cheaper to make. Given that the only in-development Western MMOs are crowd-sourced and destined to fail/disappoint, it sounds like publishers have already learned this lesson and moved on too.

I see iteration, not innovation.  Path system is the only system that you could call new, and no one is raving about it.  Everything else, including the combat, is just an iteration of things done before.  They went all in on EQ-style difficult combat with large groups and it seems like it was a bad bet.  Their housing system borrows the best parts of other systems, looks good, but it's not new.  Character customization has too many competitors that actually did innovative things, like CoX, except that CoH went live nine years ago.  Wildstar modernized combat as long as you don't know about GW2, Terra, Neverwinter Nights Online, etc etc.

If there was a lesson to be learned BY WILDSTAR from WoW and SWTOR it's that content-driven games are better made as co-ops not MMOs because good content is hard to make and it's easier to do when you aren't fighting with MMO infrastructure/systems.

I still think there are spaces for exploration in MMOs, but all of those spaces are in areas where the game shines with large numbers of users.  Hand-crafted content is made worse by large numbers of users, not better.  Land ownership and corporation conflict (using 'corporation' here to indicate a guild, a town, a star empire, whatever) a la EVE and SB seem to be able to hold player attention without a burdensome amount of content creation - both of those games had other issues that prevented the game from reaching broader appeal (EVE is a spreadsheet and SB was comically unstable).  I also think there are way to do landownership in PvE games, the combat is a means to 'pay' for the amount of land/influence a corporation holds.

But if what you and Darniaq are saying is that hand-crafted content-driven MMOs are dead, then I agree.

[Mithas]

Why hasn't someone tried to eliminate or greatly reduce the solo level grind? Some of my favorite memories of WoW are running dungeons. I've had fun with friends and interesting times with strangers. I would play a game that had a short leveling experience and tons of group content. Group content that ramps up, so it doesn't all have to be casual.

[Venkman]

Group only content appeals to the kind of gamer that can dedicate exclusive time to gaming sessions. And you'd think that the only people who want to play "massively multiplayer" games would only want things that are massive and require other players.

But what all the early games showed is that while everyone might say that in a survey, the amount of gamers who really wanted it were smaller than the size of the audience publishers wanted to attract. By an order of magnitude or more. And even the core multiplayer gamer isn't always going to be available for exclusive game sessions. So many of us aged out of that, through marriage, houses, kids. I mean shit, I've been playing this stuff since before I even met my wife. Only way I could get back to my early UO days would be to go back to that lifestyle, which no way am I doing.

That'd be fine if the next generation of narcissists were as attracted to MMOs as we were. But they're not. As Rokal so well summarized, they're getting all the social hooks they need from the games that borrowed the best parts and ignored the crap.

Persistent shared spaces include a bunch of social issues publishers had to design around. Hell is other people and in shared spaces with permissive rules, it only takes a handful of people to fuck up an entire server (if sharded, as most are). So publishers continually diluted and compartmentalized the game rules until they're so contrived, the actual multiplayer experiences in MMOs might as well be session-based games anyway. And the few standouts like DAoC's old RvR continue to have such narrow appeal it's hard to afford the live costs much less justify the development ones.

So it's no surprise session-based genres like FPS, RTS and more recently e-Sports like LOL/DOTA thrive on the social hooks that work without being burdened by the persistent world costs and player issues nobody can afford nor wants to touch.

I should say that Landmark/EQ Next is doing something very interesting. They've outsourced a lot of the content cost of development to players paying for the privilege of being noticed. It's an open question how much this defrays the otherwise expensive development of a full on MMO, but they wouldn't be doing it this way unless they thought they cracked some type of code. Proof in the pudding and all that. But it's good to see someone trying.

[tazelbain]

Will you stop with the Landmark is a scam to get players to build content for free. Its PR gimmick to appeal to player's desire to be a part the game.

Players: I wish there was game that design and customize a part of world to my hearts content.
Developers: Here you go!
Players: Fuck you, you're trying steal my artwork and effort.

[Mithas]

Group only content appeals to the kind of gamer that can dedicate exclusive time to gaming sessions. And you'd think that the only people who want to play "massively multiplayer" games would only want things that are massive and require other players.

I think there is a middle ground here somewhere. Dungeon queuing was a great idea and allowed a lot of people on limited time to jump right in. If I had more time I'd either raid or try to get a bunch of people together to chain run dungeons.

[UnSub]

So I guess the president/lead guy of carbine just quit?  Was he just a suit or would he have been like a ghost crawler who made the final call on all decisions?  Because those final calls were retarded.

Just had to mention the whole "I had cancer that I had to let go untreated to get this game out" is just insane.

[Rendakor]

In this industry it doesn't even surprise me.

[Venkman]

Will you stop with the Landmark is a scam to get players to build content for free. Its PR gimmick to appeal to player's desire to be a part the game.

Players: I wish there was game that design and customize a part of world to my hearts content.
Developers: Here you go!
Players: Fuck you, you're trying steal my artwork and effort.

What? I was speaking in short hand because I already have lauded Landmark repeatedly, first when I played it and then when I stopped but still (repeatedly) recognize it as an important innovation for MMOs.

It's also not a PR gimmick. It's an expensive experiment based on a large publisher's interpretation of how Minecraft coulda been built to make lots of money lots of different ways if only it wasn't all given away for free, with an updated creation engine that has much more flexibility.

It COULD provide a great deal of content for EQ Next, but I'm skeptical. All the great sculptures in Landmark are wonderful achievements by players pushing the engine. But good game content that can respond to game rules and players actions is difficult to get right. And expensive to develop.

Players are paying for the privilege of possibly getting noticed, either by other players or by SOE. That's not a value judgment, it just is there.

tl;dr: important, interesting, possibly effective, enjoyed, and monetizable

[Numtini]

Just had to mention the whole "I had cancer that I had to let go untreated to get this game out" is just insane.

I read that as "I had this thing that I should have gone to the doctor to have checked out, but I was too busy at work to bother. It turned out to be cancer."

[Venkman]

Yea me too. Still bad, but bad in a guys don't go to the doctor/"cowboy up" old-school sorta way.