Newcomer to wildstar, only found out about the game these past few months. Played the final beta weekend and open beta only, that is, played the game for the first time this month. Just have some thoughts about it.
The major question for me when I first started to play the game was the combat system and, in particular, the telegraph combat mechanic. After playing just a few days I found the telegraph mechanic had not only an easy learning curve (the early pve leveling parts "ease" you into it), but it actually worked well and ultimately I found it to be fun and challenging. It was not a turnoff like I had expected coming in.
But I did have a distaste for another part of the combat system: I found there was lack of depth when it came to available abilities and ability usage during combat. Unlike world of warcraft and swtor and lord of the rings, games that allow you to bombard your hotbar and user interface with all sort of cc, cc breaks, healing, dps, shield, tank, mitigation, defense abilities and items on your screen (because these items and abilities are readily available to the player), wildstar on the other hand extremely limits the number of abilities you can "equip" and therefore activate. Think of the secret world and guildwars 2 hotbars, then subtract the ability to duel wield. Bleh. You're left with a minuscule amount of available abilities at any given time. This part feels and plays way too much like an arcade game. This is an MMO. Players, whether pve or pvp oriented, imo want and require depth in this area. I know I do.
Addionally, other things I enjoyed were: the planets, lore, quests, music, sounds and graphics.
But dissapointed with: the crafting system, minimap, quest log, default quest tracker, system performance, minimum/recommend computer requirements and the default user interface.
And I have the following major concerns because they raise red flags for me:
- We know how the MMO population rushes to try essentially every new MMO (we're still waiting for that WoW killer!) that hits the market, especially when they're free! Yet...Look here. wildstar only had 6 or 7 north american servers for open beta and the majority of them were not reaching even "medium" capacity (i.e. they were "low" most of the time). This has to be scary for carbine and ncsoft. Here you have an MMO that is fresh and spanking brand new and essentially finished (because it's only weeks from released) and it's being given away for free for ten days with no credit card required and available digitally, yet you have low populated servers. There's reddit thread about it, and a carbine response.
(Huh? You purposefully label your servers as low population servers because you want more people to log in to said server? Since when do people in MMOs flock to low pop servers?)
- Their community manager and lead combat designer have already left the game. They both left in April of this year. Hmm. Fleeing a sinking ship? Or they pwned their jobs so much that they need a new challenge and need to move on to conquer new things?
- The amount of threads, posts and user participation in their forums is underwhelming for a new game. Likewise the amount of articles written about the game on the internet and the amount of "views" on youtube videos, twitch, etc.
I went from looking to pre-order to definitely not preordering. Also went from sub to non-sub for swtor. But looking forward to swtor 2.8 tho when it hits, and looking for carbine to add more polish to wildstar.
