Welcome to the first WildStar Wrap-up for 2014! Â The Carbine team is back in the office, and things are chugging along.
The big news for this week was supposed to be the the Stalker Live Stream, and the long-awaited Pappy vs Frost PvP event.  Sadly, it  had to be pushed back a week due to illness.  So, we’ve got that coming next week (Go Pappy!!!).
That didn’t stop us from getting at least some news out of Carbine this week though.
David Bass chimed in on a reddit thread, asking about the future of WildStar Wednesdays:
I’ve now worked on two huge games that did weekly updates for the years leading up to launch, and I think this type of content rollout has its plusses and minuses. On the one hand, you establish a weekly rhythm that fans grow accustomed to and look forward to each week. However, as that community grows, the expectations for each weekly update grow larger and larger until we simply can’t match the fervor no matter what we do. Before the Chua and Mordesh were announced, every week everyone truly believe that was the week we’d reveal them, and they’d be disappointed when we didn’t. After Chua/Mordesh, it was Medic/Engineer. Now that those are done, we see “Pre-order announcement,” “Release date,” and “Warplots” as the big things everyone expects to see week after week.
So all that said, after two big projects with this content cycle, I’ve come around to thinking that while irregular updates mean we can’t give you a regular schedule to watch and get hyped for, we can promise that when we DO post something, it’ll be juicy, full of information and imagery, and not just something we put out because we have to post something that week.
Will we post things on Wednesdays going forward? Probably, because it’s a good day to publish things so that the most people see and share it. Will it be every Wednesday from now through launch? It’s unlikely, but I’m not going to commit either way. We’re just getting back into the swing of things from our holiday break, so you’ll definitely have to wait a bit before our next big thing, but I’ve seen some of the stuff the team is working on (Devspeak and Flick-wise) and we’re planning to start off strong.
Curious about your thoughts on this, though. What do you guys think?
PS. Of the top of my head, here are some (not all) of the major topics we definitely plan to cover in the next few months:
Customization (Character, Gear, Housing, and [REDACTED])
Adventures
Battlegrounds
Arenas
Raids
Warplots
Tradeskills
Guilds
I’d love more information on crafting, which isn’t on his list, along with other economy related information (gotta know if I can corner the market on widgets and build a fortune, retire, and never have to adventure again!). Â I do get his point about how hard it is to always have something ‘new’ and noteworthy to release on Wednesdays, eventually you end up releasing information that your fans consider ‘pointless’, so it is a hard pace to keep up.
I’d much rather see slower releases, but with ‘bigger’ topics, so it’ll be interesting to see what they end up doing.
Via the WildStar twitter, we got confirmation that Beta invites are going out weekly now, so make sure you’re checking your inboxes regularly!
Jeremy Gaffney also swung by reddit to answer some questions regarding the NDA:
We do hang out here though. By the way, thanks mods for all the work!
After the holiday break we’re working now on updating our plans for extending testing in various ways (making sure we get as much elder game testing as possible, planning on various short- and long-term testing cycles) as well as the order for what the next sets of reveals/deep dives will be, etc.
Re: the NDA – we’re still planning when to raise the level limits for the press, when we drop the NDA for non-press, all that. So while we have some planned dates in mind, we’re still bouncing schedules off the various groups involved (dev folks, Scooter, the video guys, etc.) so nothing final to announce.
Also, we learned a lot by dropping the press NDA from 1-15 and we like to take what we learn to modify our old plans, so plans shift (example: we’re factoring plans for twitch/streamers/etc better into our plans than we were before)
We’re actually kinda anti-NDA in many ways (obviously the game is pretty fun for most folks I think from all the footage that’s gone out even in mid-beta stage, it’s not like we’re trying to hide too much, and I think as devs it’s pretty obvious that we’re on the casual side) but it does let us stage out reveals over time to hold up some hype for near launch while simultaneously letting us actually get testing and iteration done.
Also, IMO we still have work to do on some things (some of the early tradeskills IMO need a pass now that we have more data on em, capital cities could use some loving, lots of UI tuning to do, class tuning, work on group play in the early zones, etc.) And so how much do we want out there on systems that we’re changing? What if (say) a tradeskill specialist checks out early footage and decides to pass before we react to feedback? Or what if a fan falls in love with a system we then decide to change and feels screwed?
So we debate that a lot on spreading info vs. feeling locked in via public disclosure. We’ll see.
Looking forward to a more relaxed NDA, and it will be interesting to see if the ‘press’ NDA is raised to cover additional levels, or if the NDA drops in whole first.
Speaking of press.. MOGNation now has permission to stream the 1-15 content, so if you’re looking for a WildStar stream to check out, head over to the MOGNation twitch channel!