WildStar Wrap-up, Volume 9

Not only were the Chua not happy with eating last week’s Wildcast from the MOG Nation folks… They apparently ate my calendar too (or, caused all the stuff at work that kept me too busy to write this last week.. take your pick).  This is what happens when you let Chua eat after midnight folks, so keep that in mind!

 

Over the last two weeks the big official news drop out of the Carbine camp… was all about customization!  Check out this DevSpeak:

This week’s disclaimer gives us a ‘leaked’ look at an unannounced (and, not real) PvP mode “Asaraven’s Assault”.  You can read the whole disclaimer here.

Highlights from the DevSpeak.

• We see some armor with various dyes applied to it (same suit, different colors).
• We get a quick look at the character customization sliders.

Quick look at some housing customization:

 

Definitely a wide variety of housing appearances possible, not to mention all the internal customization.

• You appear to be able to customize part of the sky’s appearance (shows changing it from snowing to a rainbow).
• Weapon stats can be customized (after level 15)
• Crafting system provides for a lot of variability/customization on the ‘standard’ recipes.
• Mounts can be customized!

We’re also given a sneak peek of the talked about (but not seen) WarPlots, which will allow quite a bit of customization as well.  Carbine has a write up, showing some screenshots of the dye interface as well, so check that out over here.

We got part 2 of the “B-Team” web comic (featuring the Engineer’s Bots!).  This part, we find out what ‘the new guy’ is actually capable of doing.. and he does it well!

Jeremy Gaffney swung by Reddit, and offered a small glimpse into some of the challenge in marketing WildStar based off just one ‘thing’ (Like Rift’s rifts, for example).:

The pro and con for WildStar is that the “thing” is action combat, environmental hazards that affect combat, discoveries, raids, housing, housing dungeons, 100’s of hours of levelling content, adventures, level by pvp/group pve/solo pve, Paths affecting a % of content and having social benefits, warplots, solid elder games for solo pve/pvp/group pve of various sizes, frequent updates post launch, yadda yadda.
So honestly how to package all that? Dunno, you can go trite with “MMOs done right” or pick one and hype it up knowing that any single feature some people will love and some won’t care about, or any single feature might not carry the freight of the whole enchilada.
We made a game that was fun to play, not easy to market – it’s the downside (and upside) of being a dev team at inception rather than a biz team. Good games sell in our opinion. We figure if we work our butts off to make it fun, the main goal then is just let people play it and figure out if they like it. In the interim we’ll dig deep into every given feature through devspeaks and let players who like it decide for themselves.
Maybe Rift (and similar titles) had a better plan – there were a lot of good systems in that game beyond the Rifts, but that was a good one (IMO) for them to segment out and have as being a sellable reasonably unique feature.
We could market ourselves as being “Paths of Pathy Pathness Online” or “World of Warplots” but that IMO would be selling it short (that last one is kinda catchy but might not fly with legal).
So yeah, tough question. YMMV. It’s double tough with a new IP; everyone knows what Star Wars Online implies. City of Heroes was IMO a great name – got the whole concept of the game across in 3 words.

 

Gaffney likes Reddit.. he also chimed in on a thread discussing some of the customization choices (character body wise):

Too many points to respond individually! But a few notes:
No body sliders at the moment because of the skeletal variance we have – you’ll note few games with very different racial silhouettes have sliders of note; clipping and armor stretching and weirdnesses abound. You can get away with it with a few humanoid skeletons (see: City of Heroes, etc.).
Not that we might not solve the tech hurdles eventually but for instance metal armor needs to not “breathe” with the character and if you allowed body sliders it’s approx the same tech that keeps it from “breathing” that keeps it from turning into a potbelly.
That might not be English but you get the thought.
Not all classes can be done by all races in part because as a tech issue not all the animations necessarily exist; we went the route of “lots of class animations” as an aesthetic choice (vs a cast and swing animation then used with particle combos for almost everything else like Some Games). On the flavor side, IMO class variance per race is one of the things that gives races flavor and affects the lore. One can like the variation or not, but as with anything it’s a tradeoff made during dev.
Sit-in-able chairs etc. exist (there are some vids floating around).
Huh, not familiar with MRP, I learn something new every day. Don’t see why a similar addon couldn’t exist, we don’t have anything quite like that in-game now but finding things to help RPers is a plus for us (they are VERY hard to systemize for IMO since many RPers like different rulesets to support RP!)
Numbers exist in names in part because Mechari names often contain them.
Interesting thought on RP instances, never considered that.
Characters of one faction only on PVP enabled servers.  Not much RMT at launch (server transfers perhaps) but more will likely follow (recustomization is a natural, especially if we add more character options at some point after launch)

The tidbits about single faction only on PvP servers, and the minimal RMT are nice.  I know a lot of PvPers who will be very happy about the single faction thing, since they feel that makes your faction identity ‘stronger’ than if you can switch between factions.

 

MMORPG.com ran an interview with Philip Chan (Carbine’s crafting guru).  Read the whole article if you’re into crafting, lots of good information in there.. my favorite tidbit came from near the end:

Even more promising is the news that we’ll be able to craft incredible, competitive items for raiding, using materials collected from those raids. “For those of you that are interested, I am fighting very hard for crafting to mean something.” That could even mean being able to sell those items to others. “In my mind, even in elder game crafting, I want players to engage in the elder game, whether that’s PvP or raids, I want them to get crafting specific materials from those elder games, and I want them to be able to craft things that they can sell. “

“I would like for everything that your raid earns to be up to them to decide what to do with it.”

Yeah.. that’s right.. crafted gear might be viable for raiding!  Woo-hoo!  Can’t wait!

 

That pretty much wraps up the last two weeks of news drops for WildStar.. but, the Carbine crew did tease us about a new flick coming next week:

The W* Flicks are always entertaining, and this one will obviously give us some insight into the W* Adventure system (5 man group content with a variety of gameplay types).  So, stay tuned on Tuesday!