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I got a chance to play the demo for Wildstar a bit today at PAX. I played a Draken, I picked up quests at an NPC with an exclamation mark above it's head, interrogated a prisoner by right clicking a gearbox icon, went out in the savannah and I killed x number of monkey things until I didn't need to kill x number of monkey things anymore. I picked up some loot items, and I went over to fight a mini boss only to have another demo player tag it first and get the credit for killing it. Pretty formulaic. The game controlled like you would expect an mmo to control, with the added bonus some quick dodge left and right abilities, a double jump and a short forward dash. Positioning was important because all the Draken's attacks occurred in a short AoE melee attack directly in front or in a frontal cone of the player, and enemies had boss-like AoE abilities they would frequently use. Things got interesting, however, when I wandered into an area with a Solider specific questline. Suddenly I found myself rocketing a dropship out of the air and frantically laying a path of carnage through an Exile base while a timer counted down the minutes I had to complete the quest. Cornered by several baddies, I decided not to give them the satisfaction of my death and detonated a fuel canister to end us all. Sadly, I don't know how effective of an end it would have been in my glorious four minutes and thirty seconds of Ragnarok because the entire demo server froze. Then I got a free Wildstar TShirt for playing. All in all a good experience. Looking forward to more time with Wildstar.
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Mar 23, 2013 04:43
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:53 |
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After playing the Wildstar demo my interest was piqued so I went home that night and did some research. Armed with a new understanding of the game I went back again this weekend and got in round 2 with Wildstar at PAX. Last paragraph for general Wildstar impressions if you don't want the play by play. This time I played a Cassian (Imperial Human) Spellslinger (guns and magics) with the Explorer path. Cassian's were limited to female characters in the demo, and customization included hair, hair style, hair color, face, skin color and eye color. There was an "advanced" button that included facial sliders. I arrived in the savannah village again, picked up some quests, interrogated a prisoner by clicking a gearbox icon, then headed out into the wilderness. The Spellslinger was armed with ranged attack abilities. The first ability was a rapid fire shot that hit targets in a long thin cone in front of the character. I found that if I kept a long enough range on my enemies I could hit multiple baddies at the end of the cone. The firing animation was very fluid, and each subsequent attack changed the animation slightly, giving the Cassian lady a sort of pistol dervish dance. The second ability was a charged shot that I couldn't seem to get to work in or out of combat. The third ability was a blink-like teleport that would transport the character a short distance forward, stunning any enemies that were in her path. Fourth was a snare, which had a nice animation of the character drop kicking a block of ice ahead in a straight line, and the fifth ability was rapid fire redux, with a cooldown and the ability to shoot while moving. Finally, the Spellslinger also had a spellcharge mechanic that could be prepped with three charges, represented by three red orbs on the UI. According to the tooltip, the Spellsingers abilities would change depending on how many charges she had saved up. Like the charging shot, I couldn't seem to get this ability to do anything in combat, and I ended up running around for the duration of the demo with three orbs up. This may have been user error. Combat consisted of hammering the 1 key for rapid fire with the occasional blink/stun. While the Draken Stalker was all about positioning and slipping behind stunned or casting enemies for backstab, the Spellslinger is all shooting all the time. I tried using the snare ability mixed with the run and gun ability (when both were not on cooldown) and found that the ranges were a bit short to make much difference, the enemies were never really far enough away to make the snare effective. Combat seemed to go best by just hammering 1 repeatedly, and hitting run and gun when I needed to move out of an enemy cast area. Blinking around the combat area was very satisfying and the stun mechanic is a nice touch, but again the combat really came down to just hitting 1 as fast as possible. I want to note here that I do find the combat fun, it seems like the natural evolution of combat in MMO's, mixing elements of previous games and sort of bringing together multiple concepts. It also looks great, very fluid and natural. Even with all that, however, it does get repetitive, as I will mention later. After a few minutes of laying waste to the savannah with dual pistols I was excited to see an Explorer icon pop up on the mini map. Explorer is one of the four paths you can choose for your character, which is separate from your race and class, and gives you unique ways to interact with Nexus (the game world). I ran to the icon's location near a tree in a clearing and was disappointed to find nothing there. I jogged around the clearing a bit to see if I was missing an interactive object or quest toggle, but it looked like the minimap indicator was a fluke. It only occurred to me at the last second to look UP the tree and sure enough, above me was a complicated twisting tree trunk with an objective at the top. I started my climb and ran into a frustrating case of the game's mechanics working against itself. The explorer mission up the tree was very platformer-esque, the twists and turns of the narrow wooden path had to be navigated carefully or the character would fall. Unfortunately, lightly tapping a movement key would send my Spellslinger flying into a rolling dodge, somersaulting off the tree trunk back to the ground. Using the run/walk toggle didn't prevent the character from attempting a dodge, and in several places the trunk was so narrow anything more than a few steps of movement would send you to the ground. After making it about half way up the tree four times only to have my character dive like an idiot head first into the ground each time, I gave up on the platforming to finish up the combat quest. The combat questing ended with a Good Ol' Boss Encounter. Here is where I will say the combat being a bit repetitive showed, as every enemy I had fought to this point had a boss type AoE or special attack, and the boss itself was no different, just bigger. Bigger model, bigger AoE's, exact same strategy of shoot shoot shoot, move left, shoot shoot shoot, and so on. My demo time ended with me killing the boss. I made sure to track a developer down to ask about the PVP Warplots system. The words I was desperate to hear were "Open world" and "Sandbox", but it sounds like they are going for a heavily instanced system where you and your team spend time constructing your base, then challenge other teams to combat. Within the instance, the flags go up and the gates come down and you can charge across a landscape to attack an opposing player base that the other team has constructed. The developer I spoke to said the system was still in the works and they were saying nothing official yet. I asked if it was possible to see an open world pvp system with contestable resources and warplots in an open persistent area, perhaps on one of Nexus's moons. He wouldn't comment. My overall impression of Wildstar is that it is a spiritual successor to past accomplished MMO's, taking ideas and mechanics and perfecting and polishing them into a very tight presentation. It is clear from the various Wildstar video's that a lot of heart has gone into this game, and it has a lot of CHARACTER. The game looks great, the animations are fluid and the characters are at the very least unique. The demo starts at level 6, so it is hard to say how much tutorial the actual game will have, but the demo launches you into the world expecting you to already know some MMO basics about combat and ability timing, particularly the movement of combat that has in past MMO's been reserved for boss and instance type encounters. I personally feel like current generation MMO's succeed or fail in the end game, as a certain sci-fi MMO learned fairly recently you can have the best leveling and gameplay system out there but if you can't keep players interested in the end game you are going to lose your subscribers. I think Carbine is banking on player housing and PVP Warplots to carry them, and it should be interesting to see how it all plays out.
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Mar 25, 2013 15:39
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Cabbit posted:Despite what they think they're banking on, I'm thinking this is what's going to carry them to success if anything does. It seems like character it's the missing ingredient that all the past WoW Killers and knock-offs have failed to replicate, and this game seems to have it in spades. I tried hard not to name any names in my mini-write up there, but I really think it was WoW's character and presentation that carried it through the rough patches and growing pains of it's first few years and made it the power house success we all know and love/hate.
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Mar 25, 2013 16:18
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Valatar posted:Everyone who's nerdgasming over the game's character is going to be sorely disappointed if the game doesn't have a super voiceacting cast who have been hidden up until this moment. You can't have a zany Ratchet & Clank MMORPG with zero dialogue and just text and emotes; all of the great attitude in the trailers is going to be nonexistent in the game itself. The quests I played through in the demo were voice acted, specifically the dominion agent who would call you over the radio and update your quest and the huntress who had you track down some killer panthers and an eventual boss fight.
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Mar 26, 2013 22:38
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Housing is currently in instance. They are working on ways to have nearby "neighbors" actually display as plots owned by your friends, guild, and possibly your mortal enemy. Load the (defensive) cannon!
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Mar 28, 2013 14:45
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Wildstar panel from PAX East, should clear up some questions that have been bouncing around the thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZvHDkW4X2M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttc2STpy6h8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Axd_wwV5DI
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Apr 2, 2013 16:48
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Midrena posted:I was reading the latest Wildstar Uplink post and realized I didn't know that they'd already confirmed cross-server LFG for launch. The devs said there were concerns and feedback about this from fans who wanted a healthy server community, so they came up with this solution: Local server for tank and heals, all the servers in all the world if I queue as dps. I like it.
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Apr 4, 2013 22:39
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Cyster posted:Maybe throwing in a Wildstar video released yesterday will stop it. I noticed in that video that they've add CTRL to the strafe keys to dodge left and right. I wonder if that means you can't double tap to dodge in the current build. I posted earlier in the thread my experience with the sensitivity of the dodge keys causing me to fail at platforming. Beach posted:
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May 10, 2013 17:20
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Doh004 posted:People keep mentioning this survey and I've never seen it Merope posted:Goddamit Wildstar, wrong email. It was this one. It's not open anymore.
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May 23, 2013 14:26
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My heart jumped when I saw a new email from Wildstar, but I already know about the new paths, give me beta/stress test invite!
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Full Metal Boxers posted:I apologize if this has been said already, but check your spam folders religiously if you are waiting for/hoping for/conducting dark, obscene rituals for a WildStar Beta invite. Every time they send out an email about a new devspeak video it goes to my spam folder and makes my heart skip a beat when I see the words WILDSTAR in my spam.
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Nov 13, 2013 21:48
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Pryce posted:Funnily enough, that's what the entire purpose of our next beta patch is. Details to leak later this week :P Very excited to hear there is info coming!
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Feb 3, 2014 20:31
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That is a huge improvement.
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Feb 26, 2014 18:42
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:53 |
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I can't even log into the alienware site. These key giveaways are going to be the death of me.
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Mar 4, 2014 18:17
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