Carbine Studios' "Wildstar"

[Miasma]

Pretty sure when anyone has used the term hardcore for wildstar it has always been relative to WoW, not EQ or Vanguard.  They wanted "hardcore" vanilla WoW and that's exactly what they made.  Except broken, even more boring, even worse UI and an endgame that could definitely be labeled hardcore.

It's also easy to mistake boring grind for hardcore because the two usually go hand in hand.  Also sounds like you quit at the exact level when people hit a wall because suddenly everything did become more difficult, from solo levelling to dungeons.

[Nebu]

Wildstar was poorly made for the ADD/console generation.  It was all about button mashing and evading in a messy/clunky system.

The world was good.  The humor was good.  The combat system was a mess.  The classes were worse.  PvP and dungeons were just a confused overlay of 867769846807 ground effects.

I wouldn't say it was hardcore so much as poorly thought out. 

[Lantyssa]

Hardcore as in you had to be a masochist to complete all the content.  That doesn't say anything about its difficulty, the skill required, or the quality, just that a more 'casual' (perhaps sane) player would be driven away.

[Nija]

Hardcore avoid the red bullshit on the ground. Stupid looking fractal patterns that you had to move through while doing your simple damage rotation.

[Draegan]

Other than sam saying some of the dungeons were tuned too hard, no one has mentioned what was hardcore about the game. I guess everyone here is falling under stupid. Oh I forgot, it's F13 group think pile on time. So predictable.

Here's a devspeak on how the raids were HARDCOOOOOOORE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbItL4qcugk

You said you read the thread. I said outside the raids, what was hardcore about the game? The raids were super hardcore by all accounts. It was stupid. But the game was a lot bigger than a 40 man raid and a 20 man raid. That's just two pieces of content out of the whole game.

[Draegan]

Wildstar was poorly made for the ADD/console generation.  It was all about button mashing and evading in a messy/clunky system.

The world was good.  The humor was good.  The combat system was a mess.  The classes were worse.  PvP and dungeons were just a confused overlay of 867769846807 ground effects.

I wouldn't say it was hardcore so much as poorly thought out.  

Exactly. The dungeons were "hard" because the tanking classes couldn't hold aggro properly. The combat system was shitty as fuck making it even more difficult. If you want to call the game hardcore because the control scheme was awful, then I'll concede that. Since I alpha tested the game on and off for 2 years prior to release (don't get me wrong I hardly played the game, but jumped in every once in a while to check out a dungeon or two), I can tell you right now the game was not made for the ADD/console generation. They didn't actually know who they were designing the game for which was the problem. 2-3 year prior to release the combat system was a standard tab target with a bit of dodging like GW2 thrown in. Shit 6-10 months prior to release they didn't have those ground shape things on most abilities.

It was all half assed and half thought out which was the whole problem.

Here is a big "if". If you took WOW's control scheme, combat, class system etc and plopped it right into Wildstar, the game would be a casual with some shitty hardcore raiding scene.

[Paelos]

You said you read the thread. I said outside the raids, what was hardcore about the game? The raids were super hardcore by all accounts. It was stupid. But the game was a lot bigger than a 40 man raid and a 20 man raid. That's just two pieces of content out of the whole game.

I did, and immediately followed it up with polls ranking the dungeons as harder than a 3 average, amongst a bunch of people who signed up for "hardcore" shit based on the dev groundwork. But you didn't address that part, Slappy.

[Draegan]

You said you read the thread. I said outside the raids, what was hardcore about the game? The raids were super hardcore by all accounts. It was stupid. But the game was a lot bigger than a 40 man raid and a 20 man raid. That's just two pieces of content out of the whole game.

I did, and immediately followed it up with polls ranking the dungeons as harder than a 3 average, amongst a bunch of people who signed up for "hardcore" shit based on the dev groundwork. But you didn't address that part, Slappy.

Read my next post.

[Paelos]

So the game's not hardcore because the combat scheme is terrible. And the people designed a game for a different audience.

I mean, the game is bad because combat is shitty. We can all agree on that. I don't know if you can use that as a reason that it's not hardcore. Their marketing and developer team was actively telling you about it being hardcore. The posts on forums were talking about hardcore.

If you don't believe it was designed to be hardcore, what was supposed to be different about it than WoW? And I think the "it's easy guys really" is a copout. You're basically saying things are hard in dungeons because combat is terrible, yet nothing was hard up to level 30 using the same combat.

[Draegan]

So the game's not hardcore because the combat scheme is terrible. And the people designed a game for a different audience.

I mean, the game is bad because combat is shitty. We can all agree on that. I don't know if you can use that as a reason that it's not hardcore. Their marketing and developer team was actively telling you about it being hardcore. The posts on forums were talking about hardcore.

If you don't believe it was designed to be hardcore, what was supposed to be different about it than WoW? And I think the "it's easy guys really" is a copout. You're basically saying things are hard in dungeons because combat is terrible, yet nothing was hard up to level 30 using the same combat.

I never said any of that.
1) The raids were designed to be hardcore. I don't think the rest of the game was designed to be so. The raids were a small percentage of the overall feature set.
2) The marketing, outside of mentioning raids, was never marketing to hardcore players. They made big deals about questing, housing, crafting, solo instances and all of that kind of stuff.
3) My point about the instance difficulty is that it wasn't designed to be "hardcore". I will admit that if you use the argument that the combat and class systems handicapped you so much that it made everything hardcore based. The content itself wasn't anything difficult if you plunked down WOW's class/combat systems (or any other balanced well designed system).

Personally, I thought all the dungeons were easy. Some people might think they were hard because combat/class design probably got in their way.

[Nebu]

So the game's not hardcore because the combat scheme is terrible. And the people designed a game for a different audience.

I didn't find it hardcore as a game.  I found it hardcore because you had to overcome the combat/encounter mechanics in order to accomplish anything. 

I think they wanted to be hardcore, but designed a system that got in the way of itself. 

[ezrast]

I didn't play past like level 5, but wasn't there a thing where you would only get the best dungeon loot if you executed perfectly? I associate "softcore"/"casual" with instant gratification, and withholding loot for minor fuckups is pretty counter to that.

[Threash]

None of us actually managed to play this dreck long enough to know wtf we are talking about, onward to 100 pages!

[Paelos]

None of us actually managed to play this dreck long enough to know wtf we are talking about, onward to 100 pages!

Who says we can't entertain ourselves? 

[Venkman]

Hardcore schmardcore. It didn't sell well. It didn't for reasons already discussed, none of which relate to "hardcore".

Whatever your personal definiton of "hardcore", that's not a market. It's more a subsegment of the players you end up with. Hardcore is just another way of saying "pinnacle". That applies to all games. You've got one best, one worst, and the gradient in between. Good games support most. Poorly executed games blame the casuals.

We knew what went wrong with this dozens of pages ago. I suspect THEY knew long before launch. The motivated people got out. The resume/portfolio builders stayed on. Whatever funding they have keeps them solvent for as long as whotheheck knows.

[UnSub]

None of us actually managed to play this dreck long enough to know wtf we are talking about, onward to 100 pages!

Grinding ain't easy, no matter the venue.

[Setanta]

None of us actually managed to play this dreck long enough to know wtf we are talking about, onward to 100 pages!

I wish that was true :( Engineer to cap and I hated the last 3 levels as my sub counted down I then unsubbed and uninstalled.

[Nebu]

None of us actually managed to play this dreck long enough to know wtf we are talking about, onward to 100 pages!

I did.  I played to 50 and did dailies for nearly a month.

[Trippy]

That's cause you're hardcore

[Azuredream]

I also played an Esper to 50, for what it's worth. There just wasn't anything to do once you hit 50 except for the raids and dungeons, which were ridiculously difficult. Well, and a daily zone, but I hate dailies. The reputation vendor wasn't even patched in for a while. The adventures were not as stupidly hard but as a concept they were just terrible. You had the 'choose your own adventure' crimelords adventure, where as soon as someone found out the fastest route everyone always did that one and none of the other options were ever seen. You had the Oregon Trail adventure which, again, once people found out the fastest route they always did that one. And that one was oh-so-fun because of the random element of a caravan member possibly going missing. If you don't find him, he dies, and you lose your gold rewards. Then there's the MOBA adventure which initially was what everyone ran because it was so easy, but then they nerfed it by making you have to complete optionals- one of which was literally impossible because the quest credit was bugged. You had to a) hope you didn't get that one optional and b) wait around, because optionals were granted at a certain time from the start of the instance, so you could complete it too quickly if you did it "normally" so you had to only cap a certain number of points so as not to win too fast and lose out on the second optional. There's nothing quite like wasting 30 minutes sitting around with your thumb up your ass only for the bugged optional to pop up and invalidate the entire run. And lastly, the tower defense adventure which threw 5 random bosses at you from a pool of 12 or so. 1 of them was absolutely brutal and on par with their dungeon difficulties, only doable which a very good group, 1 of them was pretty hard, and basically all others were very easy. So it boiled down to either getting 'that one boss' and the adventure being cockstabbingly difficult or not getting that one boss and the run being a cakewalk.

Phew. I actually played this one a lot when it first came out. Another thing that was obnoxious were the players- since I was amongst some of the first 50s in the game, I got to hear a lot from 'super hardcore dudes' about how awesome it was that the dungeons were so hard and how they looked forward to hearing all the plebs complain about it when they try them. 'Go back to WoW kiddies' was a way more common sentiment than it should've been.

I actually didn't mind the combat. It's got nothing on WoW's, because it's just not smooth, but it wasn't completely awful, in my opinion.

[Shatter]

I got to level 7(trial key), logged out and uninstalled it...what do I win?

[Samprimary]

I got to level 7(trial key), logged out and uninstalled it...what do I win?

Precious hours of your life to spend on other idle distractions

[KallDrexx]

I got to level 7(trial key), logged out and uninstalled it...what do I win?

The right to talk about how shitty the game was, of course 

[Rendakor]

I got to level 7(trial key), logged out and uninstalled it...what do I win?

I think I made it to level 5 or so in the beta.

[Kageru]

I think I made it into the teens with two characters. But it was almost impressive how quickly the game lost it's charm or interest and started to feel like tiring work.

Of course seeing the raid and dungeon videos and realising how well those would work at Australian latencies helped.

[sam, an eggplant]

I found the world colorful, engaging, and full of character. Animations and graphics were excellent. Sadly I hated the actual gameplay.

[Tannhauser]

Yeah that was my take too.  A bright, vibrant world to joylessly grind in.

[Signe]

Me, too.  I thought the colour, animations and the ideas they had (like exploring) would make me feel like WoW did when I first started.  Unfortunately, what Tannhauser and sam, the eggplant said is true.  That PvP trailer fooled me, too.  I was actually pissed off that it was nothing like I expected.  I never get pissed off at games, either.  I just quit. 

[luckton]

Behold, the herald of the Free to Play conversion.

http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/news/2015-04-15-announcing-the-wildstar-box-mystery-box-promo/

The word is that its a clearing house promo to try and move what physical copies of the game are still out there, as apparently so e retail shops have either stopped ordering new copies or have already pulled and liquidated their stock.

Official forums a bit up in arms about the deal.

[01101010]

Q: What if I’ve already bought WildStar?
A: This is only for boxes sold from today forward, so go out and get a box today!

What. the. fuck?

If I bought one box, now I am going to have to buy another box for an ingame fluff item? I am having a hard time with this logic. Ingame purchase I can see, but another copy of the game a person already has?

[Hawkbit]

Was this announced as F2P conversion? If so, when is that launch?

[luckton]

Was this announced as F2P conversion? If so, when is that launch?

Nothing aside from what I linked has been announced, but some kind of revenue conversion is about to take place. Whether it's F2P or Buy Once is up in the air, but the writing's on the walls.

[luckton]

Impending doom intensifies. Best Buy in NA is now clearing out their copies. Anyone that wants to get the fluff stuff from the aforementioned thing I posted can pick up copies for $20.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/wildstar-windows/5240002.p?id=1219115991943&skuId=5240002

[sam, an eggplant]

It's not doom and gloom at all, it's their preparation to relaunch as F2P or B2P, just like ESO. Got to get rid of the old boxes to do that. Zenimax just took them off the shelves; Carbine put on their thinking hats and decided to cleverly monetize those boxes.

Not saying Wildstar's B2P transition will be as successful as ESO's was, particularly since they don't have a console release waiting in the wings. But it's not a negative change, certainly.

[Threash]

If they were going b2p why do they need to get rid of the boxes?