Carbine Studios' "Wildstar"

[Draegan]

If you like quest treadmill games, dungeons, heroics and raids. This game is pretty good.

It has two big detractors though:
1) The combat in this game is downright fucking awful. There is no hidden meta, there is not subtle tiers and layers to it. It's just bad and simple.
2) Everything about the class system is bad. The AMP/Milestone system is really bad and shallow. The class mechanics are boring and typically the same. The class design has absolutely no depth at all. Everything is bland and boring.

The game is like they took every aspect of MMOs and distilled them down so that all the imagination, fun and inspiration of other games is gone and you're left with a sterile experience. The game was better over a year ago before they took apart their original design system.

[Paelos]

I was feeling the grind at level 6. That's when I decided it wasn't for me.

[Nebu]

I was feeling the grind at level 6.

How many levels until cap?  I haven't played this yet, but from what I'm reading here this may be the first big budget MMO I end up taking a pass on at release.  I didn't like GW2 combat, I don't like their art direction, and I'm too burned out on these games to tolerate a pointless grind again.

[01101010]

I was feeling the grind at level 6.

How many levels until cap?  I haven't played this yet, but from what I'm reading here this may be the first big budget MMO I end up taking a pass on at release.  I didn't like GW2 combat, I don't like their art direction, and I'm too burned out on these games to tolerate a pointless grind again.

50 

[Paelos]

The last time I felt a grind this hard was DAOC in it's original format.

[Draegan]

And yet it's about 4-6 days played to cap.

[Nebu]

And yet it's about 4-6 days played to cap.

That's not so bad. Is it the combat that makes it feel so long?

[Rasix]

I imagine the same-ole quest grind doesn't make it feel any faster.  Additionally, most game's we're capping in currently are far enough along or have nerfed their leveling curves to the point where this will feel slow.  Or they have more levels or several level milestones due to expansions. 

4-6 days is long time in dad-hours. 

[Draegan]

And yet it's about 4-6 days played to cap.

That's not so bad. Is it the combat that makes it feel so long?

What makes it feel long is that the combat and class mechanics is boring. So it makes doing anything boring and long. If you like the combat and find a class you enjoy, the game is really good.

[Ingmar]

And yet it's about 4-6 days played to cap.

That's not so bad. Is it the combat that makes it feel so long?

The combat is crappy but I think for me a big part of it was that it just does a really bad job of disguising the grind compared to other MMOs. There isn't much in the way of interesting sub-goals like other MMOs have, other than 'find the 3 things in this zone for your path', and the narrative isn't interesting enough to keep you focused on advancing that rather than eyeing your XP bar all the time.

I never managed to check out the PVP, and I haven't really seen anyone else talk about it here? So maybe there's something to be had there, since I know that's an interest for you.

[Nebu]

I have friends that want to play this.  My interest would be mostly for the pve/dungeon/housing stuff.  I'll stick with WoT for pvp until something better rolls around.

[HaemishM]

I've already said most of what I felt about it already but...

Combat is WAY TOO SLOW when you start the game. The addition of more abilities doesn't help that feeling - combat juts feels like a constant wait for cooldowns to finish. Adding hit points to mobs would seem to only exacerbate this problem. Walking speed is just too damn slow, and in the 2 hours or so that I played it, I never got the impression there would be speed buffs to alleviate that problem. With the slow combat speed, that means it almost immediately felt grindy because the quests weren't really anything special.

The UI... dear God, for a game with such a strong sense of art design in the world and characters, this UI is HORRIBLY designed. My main complaint is with the dull, plain font for quest text on a translucent spacey-blue background. Hard to read and often other things obscure this text.

The biggest thing is that 2 hours in, and I didn't feel like it was going to substantially improve. The setting didn't rope me in, the zones weren't all that special and I felt way too much of the grind way too early due to the combat and run speeds. It wasn't a bad game, but it wasn't anything I'd pay money to play.

[HaemishM]

I also hope they improve their chat by release.  Not being able to turn off or filter barrens chat the advice channel was really annoying.

This. Holy God, this. I went in to try to filter out the "I'm a clueless fuckstick" channel and determined that either I couldn't turn off specific chat channels (and thus the devs are clueless fucksticks who should know better than to be this close to release without a basic, MMOG 101 QOL feature) or it was such an obscure option that their UI sucks bigger monkey balls than I thought.

[Paelos]

Putting down one character from the rebel side and immediately going to play the empire side, I was sort of amazed that they were exactly the same. I expect a bit of a different experience, but no. They are almost carbon copies of each other. I suppose I'm spoiled that the WoW starting zones have different stories and completely different tones.

[Sjofn]

If you like quest treadmill games, dungeons, heroics and raids. This game is pretty good.

I like all those things. I didn't like Wildstar, and I totally wanted to. Remember, I still play SWTOR, so I am all over doing quests, dungeons and heroics (not so much raids). I still got bored before hitting level 20.

Combat is WAY TOO SLOW when you start the game. The addition of more abilities doesn't help that feeling - combat juts feels like a constant wait for cooldowns to finish. Adding hit points to mobs would seem to only exacerbate this problem. Walking speed is just too damn slow, and in the 2 hours or so that I played it, I never got the impression there would be speed buffs to alleviate that problem. With the slow combat speed, that means it almost immediately felt grindy because the quests weren't really anything special.

Settlers can build kiosks that buff all sorts of things, one of those being run speed (and I believe those last a while, 20 minutes or something). Being a settler was the biggest thing I liked about the game. I loved building buff kiosks and seeing everyone in the area run over for candy.

[Riggswolfe]

I never got into this beta but I'm disappointed by what I am hearing. This game had so much character in the little videos and stuff but it sounds like very little of that translated to the game.

[Nevermore]

If you like quest treadmill games, dungeons, heroics and raids. This game is pretty good.

I like all those things. I didn't like Wildstar, and I totally wanted to. Remember, I still play SWTOR, so I am all over doing quests, dungeons and heroics (not so much raids). I still got bored before hitting level 20.

For me a large part of the reason why I thought questing was so boring in Wildstar was because the missions had no voice acting, so I wasn't engaged at all in what I was supposed to be doing.  Quest text blocks are about as exciting to me now as watching rocks age.

[Tannhauser]

TESO has those and they are quick and to the point. Can also spacebar to speed them up.

[Lantyssa]

I never got into this beta but I'm disappointed by what I am hearing. This game had so much character in the little videos and stuff but it sounds like very little of that translated to the game.

If the game was like the videos I'd be throwing my money down now.  It's nowhere near as exciting.

[Fordel]

Yea, this is very much a feeling of one of those movies where you've already seen all the cool parts in the trailers.

[kildorn]

And yet it's about 4-6 days played to cap.

Define days played. 4-6 days of a bit of playing, or 4-6 days /played?

Because the latter is pretty much the grind problem: that's ~120 hours of play. And most of these games seem to hide the sticky content at cap.

My issue with the game was that it was a bit grindy, and had no obvious redeeming features for it. It was so freaking bland that I repeatedly forgot I was in the beta. And if you hide your depth behind more than two hours of gameplay, I'm likely not going to stick around.

I saw them trying to keep me occupied by making almost everything new into a timed "kill X/click Y in 5 minutes!" kind of challenge thing, but I just wasn't biting.

I absolutely won't saw Wildstar is a bad game. I just don't think it has anything it actually does well beyond make clever trailers.

[Sjofn]

If you like quest treadmill games, dungeons, heroics and raids. This game is pretty good.

I like all those things. I didn't like Wildstar, and I totally wanted to. Remember, I still play SWTOR, so I am all over doing quests, dungeons and heroics (not so much raids). I still got bored before hitting level 20.

For me a large part of the reason why I thought questing was so boring in Wildstar was because the missions had no voice acting, so I wasn't engaged at all in what I was supposed to be doing.  Quest text blocks are about as exciting to me now as watching rocks age.

Yeah true, that didn't much help. And the way they approached the quest text - they basically wanted to keep all the text as short as possible - is double edged. On the one hand, no, I don't want to read a novel, so keeping it shorter is better buuuuut ... on the other, boiling down your quest text to "go kill those things because I say so," exposes the treadmill WAY too much.

[Sjofn]

While I'm thinking about it:

When I was still playing (they may have tweaked it since then), one of the things that was also making it feel grindy was that there is a stupidly sharp decrease in XP gained the instant you pass whatever level you're "supposed" to be doing the thing. This had the unintended-I-am-sure side effect of all those Kill X quests taking longer because instead of being "kill ten bears" it was "kill this amount of XP-worth of bears." But oh, now you're a level higher than the bears and they're worth half the XP they used to be. NOW YOU HAVE TO KILL TWICE AS MANY BEARS.

I liked the "kill this much XP" concept but the way they did it was like. The worst possible way of doing it. Not enough hard, high XP mobs laying around so you can go "I'm going to kill two REALLY BAD ASS BEARS" to get through it quicker, and the sharp XP drop off made you want to kill yourself if you had the audacity to level up after your first bear.

[Ghambit]

Most of the 'kill bear' quests had a monarch/alpha that you could stealth to, assassinate, and be on your way once the trash mobs went friendly.  I believe that's the way that system works.  I actually appreciated that system more when confronted with off-peak pop. and a full spawn of challenging mobs.

[Zetor]

I wanted to get to level 15 [?] just so I could see how a dungeon or party-based adventure/scenario works (PUGging a levelling dungeon usually tells me most of the things I need to know about a diku). I couldn't do it -- I stalled out at 12ish after a few sessions, and never had the urge to log back in afterwards. The entire levelling experience is just so bland, saturday morning cartoon look-and-feel or not. GW2 and TSW (and probably Tera, never played that one) did the action combat much better, and the ability range isn't anywhere interesting enough for a diku (really, Rift was my blandest diku levelling experience so far, and even that was much more exciting due to all the random PQs/events and generally the interesting character / skill system). I played an esper, which probably didn't help.

I don't really care about voice acting one way or the other (I was fine with games like COH that told their stories through text only -- may just be my MUD background), but the bite-sized twitter quest text was even less substantial than clicking through quest text in WOW -- and honestly, in WOW, I'd still take a look at the quest text and maybe even remember bits that were somewhat amusing or ones that reflected the questgiver's personality/mannerisms... none of those things were present in Wildstar.

[Sjofn]

Most of the 'kill bear' quests had a monarch/alpha that you could stealth to, assassinate, and be on your way once the trash mobs went friendly.  I believe that's the way that system works.  I actually appreciated that system more when confronted with off-peak pop. and a full spawn of challenging mobs.

That works for one whole class. I am pretty sure it wasn't designed thinking everyone was going to be doing that. Most of the kill bear quests *I* did, the spawns were far apart, there was no alpha to be found, and there were no goddamn "challenging" mobs. If there WAS an alpha, it was a different quest and while I appreciated it turning its little minions neutral, that still made it grindy as fuck. AND, like I said, if I was even just one level higher than that biggest of bears, I had to kill two of them rather than one.

Even worse, that's how the challenges work too! And if there is even ONE other person trying to do it at the same person, well haha, fuck you, you're not even getting bronze on that, buddy. And better hope you don't level in the middle of it!

[01101010]

That works for one whole class. I am pretty sure it wasn't designed thinking everyone was going to be doing that. Most of the kill bear quests *I* did, the spawns were far apart, there was no alpha to be found, and there were no goddamn "challenging" mobs. If there WAS an alpha, it was a different quest and while I appreciated it turning its little minions neutral, that still made it grindy as fuck. AND, like I said, if I was even just one level higher than that biggest of bears, I had to kill two of them rather than one.

Even worse, that's how the challenges work too! And if there is even ONE other person trying to do it at the same person, well haha, fuck you, you're not even getting bronze on that, buddy. And better hope you don't level in the middle of it!

Challenges were a nice idea, but not well thought out as to how they actually work in the game. You nailed it in the fact that if you aren't the only one on a challenge, you will never get it done because respawn times on the mobs you need are too slow in relation to the timed event and the number of mobs never increases in relation to the players in said area. Caught myself a few times wondering if the challenge was actually in another spot after I got done plowing through the 5 mobs in my immediate area and was only at 12%. The completionist side of me got very frustrated. I even tried failing out the challenge and looking for other spots with those mobs and re-starting the challenge - same result. Of course, all that said, the rewards for the challenges were not worth the effort IMHO. Nice thought in theory, but doesn't seem to work unless you are the only one in the area which begs the question of why in an MMO. *shrug*

Voice acting... Really? Never saw the need for the game to talk to me for each quest. I can read it faster, and the voice or funny accent does nothing to immerse me into the game. I pounded through most of the voiced quests in SWtoR because the time it took to sit there and listen to a story was twice as long - then having to run and do the quest... no thanks. Might be great for some people and add to the environment, but it is fluff that I don't see as necessary to the core of the game, which is pretty shallow in this game I'll admit.

I'll still buy the box and a couple months to get me through the summer and see where it goes. I have no regrets doing that in FFXIV and got my money's worth of entertainment there and probably will here as well.

[Lantyssa]

Is that what was happening?  I'm such a completionist that it was killing me then.  No wonder it felt like grinding.

[Modern Angel]

The release date seems a bit early, but I guess it's timed well to move boxes.   But honestly, I see this game doing pretty poorly in the market.  It'll sell poorly, retain poorly, and will most likely mean the death of this studio.

I really wanted to like this.  I like WoW/diku. I like GW2 stye combat.  I like the art style in theory (see WoW).  The marketing/dev chat videos were great.  I like space.   I do not like what I played. It was so boring, that I didn't even get to housing.  I can't even remember what level I got to.  I just didn't want to play anymore after a handful of sessions. The combat was not interesting.  The interface was terrible. It ran like Skyrim on an iPhone. The leveling pace was slow, even at noobie levels (that is honestly one of the worst game intros I've ever experienced).  The game just looked like a bad mess.

The only semi-interesting part was the different paths: explorer, builder, etc.  It looks like that could be something.  The only way I would give this a second look is if they did a serious optimization pass.  I'd want to at least not be lagging to shit on my PC that can run every other game on the planet in high settings without issues.

This is essentially my experience. I honestly forgot, repeatedly, that it was on my hard drive. On my desktop, no less. For over a year. And then I'd see it and go, oh yeah, I should play that. And I would for three hours. I'd think it wasn't so bad, but I'd immediately forget that it existed again.

I know a couple of devs. At base, they want to recapture a very specific slice of WoW's history (vanilla), with 40 man raiding and all of its attendant buzz, plus a few QoL improvements. They're going to be bitterly disappointed; those years were at least as much about a very specific set of people during a very specific span of years at a very specific point in their lives. It's not coming back. I don't think that most MMO devs know it's not coming back, but these guys, especially, don't realize it.

[Falconeer]

For those curious about PvP, and see how it plays out.

[Nebu]

For those curious about PvP, and see how it plays out.

I like the way that she explains both the mechanics and her decision making during the match.  Sadly, the mechanics of the action don't really give a flattering demonstration of the game.

[Sir T]

Yes, I'd agree. I still like the art style of the game from looking at that but there is no way I'd try it.

[Draegan]

I've already said most of what I felt about it already but...

Combat is WAY TOO SLOW when you start the game. The addition of more abilities doesn't help that feeling - combat juts feels like a constant wait for cooldowns to finish. Adding hit points to mobs would seem to only exacerbate this problem. Walking speed is just too damn slow, and in the 2 hours or so that I played it, I never got the impression there would be speed buffs to alleviate that problem. With the slow combat speed, that means it almost immediately felt grindy because the quests weren't really anything special.

The UI... dear God, for a game with such a strong sense of art design in the world and characters, this UI is HORRIBLY designed. My main complaint is with the dull, plain font for quest text on a translucent spacey-blue background. Hard to read and often other things obscure this text.

The biggest thing is that 2 hours in, and I didn't feel like it was going to substantially improve. The setting didn't rope me in, the zones weren't all that special and I felt way too much of the grind way too early due to the combat and run speeds. It wasn't a bad game, but it wasn't anything I'd pay money to play.

Slow combat? Combat is not slow at all. TTK is maybe long in some spots, but speed of combat is way too spammy/fast.

[Draegan]

If you like quest treadmill games, dungeons, heroics and raids. This game is pretty good.

I like all those things. I didn't like Wildstar, and I totally wanted to. Remember, I still play SWTOR, so I am all over doing quests, dungeons and heroics (not so much raids). I still got bored before hitting level 20.

That's because combat mechanics and the classes are boring as fuck. If you like the combat and the classes, you'll like the rest of the game.

[Draegan]

And yet it's about 4-6 days played to cap.

Define days played. 4-6 days of a bit of playing, or 4-6 days /played?

Because the latter is pretty much the grind problem: that's ~120 hours of play. And most of these games seem to hide the sticky content at cap.

My issue with the game was that it was a bit grindy, and had no obvious redeeming features for it. It was so freaking bland that I repeatedly forgot I was in the beta. And if you hide your depth behind more than two hours of gameplay, I'm likely not going to stick around.

I saw them trying to keep me occupied by making almost everything new into a timed "kill X/click Y in 5 minutes!" kind of challenge thing, but I just wasn't biting.

I absolutely won't saw Wildstar is a bad game. I just don't think it has anything it actually does well beyond make clever trailers.

4-6 days /played. That's just about on the high side of standard these days.