Launch: June 3rd
"Another MMO!? No more, no more!"
There will always be another MMO, at least until Titan releases and collapses under its own hype, forming a black hole from which no MMO can escape. But Wildstar looks like a game that is just about having some fun instead of promising the revolutionize the genre. Here, have an intro video.
It's a bit...enthused, sure, but there's a bit of potential to be had here. The game's a cartoony sci-fi type that plays almost like a WoW 2 than anything, with kinetic combat that feels like a step up from Guild Wars 2, but it also makes sure to focus on areas besides combat with deep features like housing and paths. Carbine, the developers, seem to be making sure the end game is there, with raids and PvP content like war plots. So once you hit level cap there should be plenty left to do.
Might as well start at the beginning, with Wildstar's bevy of content. Can we get a neat little banner for that?
Awesome. Let's begin.
Wildstar features a revolutionary feature called Stuff. Carbine has even taken one step further, and Wildstar allows you todo stuff. "Incredible!" you exclaim, credit card already in hand, "but just what is this Stuff?" Well, let's split it up.
- Dungeons: Your basic loot run with your closest friends (or complete strangers). Go in, kill the bosses, get the loot, and repeat until you're armed to the teeth. It's been said that raiding enough can result in earning loot on par with raiding gear, but it may take longer than raiding (depending on how (un)lucky the raider is).
- Adventures: Dungeons, with a twist! These take place in the wide outdoors, and the scenarios vary a bit more than just "kill them all." Tower defense, escorting a convoy, even a pseudo-MOBA experience that you can try. Adventures also feature a number of choices that will change how the rest of adventure plays out, offering a bit of replayability.
- Housing: At level 14 you unlock your own little piece of Nexus. Housing is completely bonkers in Wildstar, giving you tons of furniture to collect from dungeons, finding collectibles in the world, and so on. You can adjust the size and position of your stuff, and even pick the lighting that suits you best. You also have plots where you can build various odds and ends like a crafting station, a garden, targeting dummies, and even buff stations. If you like Animal Crossing, housing may utterly consume you.
- Raiding: Yes, Wildstar loves the raid game. Like dungeons, this is very standard business, but Wildstar features 20 and 40 player raids in case you have some kind of sick longing for the old days of WoW raids.
- Lore Searching: There are tons of datacubes and lore entries scattered across Nexus, and you get neat rewards like comic book covers to place in your house for finding enough.
- Dress-Up: Wildstar doesn't just feature costume slots for you, but also for your mounts. Get the fanciest hats for your lizard mount, or deck out your hoverboard. Wildstar is all about being the prettiest space princess.
- Crafting: Wildstar features a robust crafting system that is fairly deep and hard to fully explain here. I mean, each tradeskill has its own talent tree.
- Battlegrounds: Wildstar will launch with two delicious battlegrounds, in both regular and ranked flavors. You can level just fine in battlegrounds, and get both loot bags and PvP currency after a game.
- Arenas: Be it 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5, ranked or practice, Wildstar has you covered. The arenas here are a bit different, giving each team a pool of respawns to draw from. Once your team is out of respawns, you're gone for good once you die.
- Warplots: This is the real shit. A 40v40 war against two fortresses. Using war coins, your gang customizes your warplot with all sorts of weapons and defenses, the most appealing of which is plopping a boss you downed in a dungeon or raid and letting it loose on your enemies.
But hey, in order to dive into this deep pool of stuff, you're going to need a diver. And a swim suit. And...sun screen? Okay, let's stop torturing this metaphor and break down the two factions and their respective races.
Refugees, renegades, and rebels, the Exiles are a loose coalition of peoples that are united in their opposition against the Dominion. For these haggard mercenaries and soldiers of fortune, Nexus offers at long last the possibility of a new place to call home, and they've banded together to keep it free from the Dominion.
Splitting from their Dominion counterparts centuries ago in a civil war, humans are largely a nomadic species looking for a place to call home. Tough and gritty, they're basically space cowboys without the cows. And they're not all boys. Alright, maybe that wasn't the best comparison, but you get the idea.
Exiled somewhat unfairly from their planet by their elders for breaking ancient rules in order to fight off the Dominion, the Granok are nonetheless a simple species. They like to fight, drink, and drink while fighting. Oh, and they're huge rock people. Is that worth mentioning? I feel it's worth mentioning.
Aurin are your standard treehugging pacifists, or they would be had the Dominion not torched their home planet. Sporting huge bunny ears and weird cat tails, they seek a new home while also checking off the prerequisite furry race. It's okay, we won't judge. Much.
Originally working for the Dominion, the Mordesh were left hanging after a botched immortality elixir left them with particularly undesirable side effects like rotting flesh and a desire to eat people. While they've since found a cure to the symptoms of their illness, they've hooked up with the Exiles while they search for a permanent cure. They tend to do the black ops and morally grey scientific research of the Exiles.
Formed by the ancient, advanced, and now mysteriously absent Eldan, the Dominion is a vast and powerful empire. While benevolent to their citizens, the Dominion also keeps them on a short leash, and refusing to keep in step can have dire consequences. Nexus is the legendary homeworld of the Eldans, and thus the Dominion is claiming the entire world as theirs.
Handpicked by the Eldan to lead an empire, the humans of Cassus have taken the task with gusto over the many centuries. Cassians tend to be the stuffy, arrogant prudes that one might expect from a race having their egos stoked for countless generations as the Chosen Ones of the Cosmos.
Drakens love hunting and fighting, and not much else. After a duel in which their Clan Lord lost to one of the Dominion's Emperors, the Draken have served as a rather potent part of the Dominion's military. They possess a love for skulls that rivals Khorne.
Built by the Eldan themselves, you can say that the Mechari are the ones that keep the Dominion running from behind the scenes. Centuries of protecting their creators' empire, however, have not done much for their sense of humor. Do not pull pranks on the deadly robot people.
Scientists, inventors, and researchers of the Dominion, the Chua are typically the black sheep of the empire on account of their insatiable lust for painful experimentation and all-around asocial tendencies. This is a race that turned their own home planet into a lifeless ball of slag and pollution. Aurin, the EPA, and Captain Planet do NOT care for the Chua.
Wildstar has six classes that each have three aspects: Assault, Support, and Utility. Every class does DPS through the Assault side, and the only difference is between ranged and melee. Support roles are either tanking (Warrior/Engineer/Stalker) or healing (Esper/Medic/Spellslinger), and have their own strengths and weaknesses. Utility is mostly for stuff like mobility, CC, and stuff that tends to be more useful in PvP, and these skills scale off a split of your Assault and Support power.
Warriors believe that if swords were good enough for Conan, then they're good enough for them. These muscle-bound berserkers are not luddites, however, and they know Conan would have used arm-mounted cannons if he had them back in what historians call Barbarian Times. Your handy arm cannon can fire missiles, ropes that drag your victim back towards you, and just generally solve the problem that vexed Conan for years: people running away from you.
Engineers have come up with a very simple principle: the best friends are the ones you build. Backed up by a small squadron of deadly automatons, the engineers finally had struck the perfect balance of companionship without backtalk, teasing, or being asked to pick up the bar tab. Miss the warmth of human physical contact? Strap on an exosuit, which provides both warmth and about 237% more firepower than the average hug. As a an Engineer, you'll enjoy the latest technological advancements that make loneliness someone else's problem.
Stalkers learned early in their lives that the best game of Hide and Seek involves just two people. And the hider is also the seeker. And the other person doesn't know they're part of the game. And the game ends with their abdomen being pierced by clawed gloves that would even make Freddie Krueger do an impressed little whistle. Dressed up in fancy nanosuits that can offer both cloaking AND defensive options when the whole "run and hide" thing isn't working out, Stalkers are the reason therapists are seeing a spike in patients with extreme paranoia.
Experts say we only use ten percent of our brains. In reality, these "experts" need to head back to school and really buckle down and finish this time. We use all our brains, and the Espers use them better. A lot better. Like "using your brain to take mastery over life itself" better. Think warm thoughts and watch as your allies recover from even the most grievous of wounds. If you ever wanted to think someone to death, then start working on that Esper application. Psychic swords that really cut? Taking your very nightmares and siccing them on your enemies? For an Esper, critical thinking means someone is about to lose a limb.
You might think Medics would be pretty straight-forward. They heal people, right? But on Nexus, healing is only half the story. This breed of Medics are borderline quacks that don't use their instruments as directed, utilizing their powerful resonators to heal and liquefy the viscera of others. Far away from hospitals and medical tents, these maniacal MDs strap on medium armor and get right in the thick of things. To really envision a Medic, just imagine a doctor with questionable credentials running around zapping people with a defibrillator.
Cowboys are boring. Spellslingers, however, are more like a spaghetti western mixed with a magic show. They dual-wield pistols, sure, but they also use magic sigils and spells to amplify their damage and recover from wounds. Spellslingers also consider armor to be incredibly wasteful and just outright unfashionable. Why give up a cool hat and badass coat when you can just use SPACE MAGIC to teleport all over the place? If you're in real trouble, then enter the "Wild West", by which I mean "an alternate dimension" and take a breather. Spellslingers are like being Clint Eastwood and Merlin at the same time, only without having to be the offspring of demons or yell at chairs.
Paths are something you pick when creating your character, and it sticks with you for the rest of that character's time on Nexus. Roughly based on the Bartle personality test for MMOs, it provides an alternate progression based on what activity you like doing best. As you complete normal quests out in the world, you'll also discover missions for your path which will award path experience upon completion. Your path has its own level, and you unlock various goodies as you level up such as costumes, titles, and abilities related to your path.
Are you the person that likes to uncover every spot on the map? Do you enjoy finding little shortcuts and hidden areas? Are you a fan of jumping puzzles? Well, Explorer might be up your allow. Explorer missions include seeking out special areas of Nexus, getting to specific landmarks, and trying to find the quickest route between two points. Explorer rewards help facilitate your lust for dangerous terrain by offering several abilities that reduce or outright stop fall damage. High level explorers can even tag any location in the world and teleport there later.
Scientists like to know stuff. If you've ever edited a wiki about some obscure factoid, then consider the path of Scientist. You'll get a little scanbot that follows you around and analyzes the various flora and fauna of Nexus. Scientists get abilities that help them navigate the world by reducing mob aggro radii, summoning groups to your location, and creating a portal back to your capital when you're all done.
So you're a people person. You like that "massively" part of MMO, and enjoy socializing with others. That's why you wisely picked Settler. They construct various structures in towns and quest hubs, from flavorful doodads to large projects that offer special quests when completed. There are even little camps out in the world that you can build up to be safe havens for questing players. A Settler's skill set includes enough abilites to basically summon a mini town, including vendors, mailboxes, and crafting stations.
Alright, fuck all that. You don't care about running around, clicking on shit, or dealing with people. You like grinding for bear asses and by god you're going to grind for bear asses like nobody else. Then be one of the proud Soldiers, who basically kill a lot of shit, be it with experimental weapons or whatever they have on them. Soldier gain combat techniques like quick healing between fights and the ability to dip out of a fight when things get too hot. Level up enough and you can enough drop a weapon supply crate for you and your group.
Wildstar has scads of media on their YouTube channel (check out the DevSpeaks), but I made sure to give you the prime bits.
You can buy Wildstar in standard or deluxe flavors, and the game has a standard $14.99/mo subscription fee (with the first month being free). However, players can buy an in-game item called CREDD for $19.99 that, when consumed by a player, extends their current subscription by 30 days. CREDD can be sold on the auction house, essentially giving players a legal way to buy gold with real-world money and game time with gold.
The are a few beta weekends left, and finding keys should be easy. In fact, it looks like ANYONE that has signed up is pretty much a shoe-in for future weekends. There will also be a brief open beta prior to launch, so plenty of opportunities to give it a test drive.
Whew! That was quite the info dump. Take a minute to digest all that, and then meet back up here.
Good now? Great, let's wrap this thing up.
Okay, so right now there's a G&T guild (and possibly a smaller Exile guild on a PvP server) forming for launch, and you can head over there for more information. It might be best in the long-term to try for one guild instead of a G&T/SE++ split, but we'll see how it shakes out.
Hope to see you in game!
