Wildstar: The Good

Most of you probably already know that I've been playing Wildstar. Those who don't, well, big surprise, right?  As my time there is up, I figured I'd give it the usual treatment for fun and (zero) profit.

Parts of Wildstar are very, very good and Carbine has tackled two of the hardest things in the field:  releasing a new MMO and creating a new IP.  Even in a genre that's fairly mature at this point and with a staff that's got nonzero experience in the field, it's still no small feat to release a title with so many compelling features.  They were in development for a billionty Internet years but in this day and age I think we can forgive that.  Here then, are some of the good things.

The Good

Style

That's a big tower.

Wildstar oozes style in a way that not a lot of games even attempt. It's very cartoony with classic saturday morning animation tweening. While some people find this off-putting, I think it's fantastic.  The colors are vibrant and the characters are expressive.  The world seems more alive for all of this even given the sometimes whimsical architecture.

Style also comes through in the writing.  On the one hand, parts of it are dark--very dark.  On the other hand, it keeps a humor about it that's missing in many titles.  It manages to be serious a lot of the time without taking itself too seriously.  As a for instance, at the start of one of the later zones, there's a rabbit-like Lopp trying to convince a hamster-like Chua to take it in its flying machine but the Chua is clearly not wanting any of it.  "This Chua make suggestion.   Lopp jump off cliff."  It's as if the game just wants us to have a good laugh every once in a while.

I especially like the way each race is portrayed and how they fit into the overarching narrative, Aurin and Granok in particular (I only played Exile, sorry).  While there are tropes being played, they're interesting in their approach.  While I'd love to talk in detail about these, I can't think of any way to do so that isn't spoileriffic so you're safe....this time.  I've said in the past that style will always set titles apart in a crowded space and Wildstar is a prime example.  It's a tricky business but the game comes through with consistency and character and is a heck of a lot better for it.

edit>  Found these things in the 'tubes.  You don't have to watch them all the way through (but it couldn't hurt).

Housing
I generally don't get too involved in player housing in MMOs. Sometimes they come with utility which is cool but a lot of times the utility is small or at extreme cost (or both).  Wildstar's housing is pretty expensive ultimately but it's also full of win.

First, you can build stuff pretty generically.  You can (should you be so bold) build your shanty from a pile of boards and other decor objects individually placed.  You can also buy the prefabs that sit in the various plugs and stick your crafted/bought/dropped decor inside and outside.  Some of these can give a bonus to rested experience which is pretty sweet.  There are also plugs for vending machines, crafting stations, banks, harvesting plots, and some interesting gameplay challenges.  There's also decor for useful things like mailboxes which adds nice utility.  There are also collectibles like plushies of many of the monsters, and now trophies from many of the bosses among other things if you've gotta-catch-em-all.

One thing that deserves extra mention is that your harvesting plugs basically mean that you never have to venture out in the world to gather resources for crafting.  I'm a big fan of that, especially since resource nodes in Wildstar are shared like they are in most games. GW2 may have ruined me on this one.  The value of excess crafting materials is also high so even vendoring stacks of stuff (unheard of in most games) pays off pretty well.  Intended or otherwise, some tradeskills can turn a small profit over vendor cashouts so there ends up being a pretty robust market for many of the tradeskill materials.

But there's more!  You can invite other folks to your housing plot to see your awesome creations and those folks can harvest your plot if you let them and you can set the harvest splits (50/50 being the most common) so that others harvesting your plot aren't leaving empty handed.  The upshot of this is that if you've got friends who are a) not lazy, and b) not rich, that they can happily harvest your plots and taking half the profits for their efforts.  Clever folks organized into game supported circles of such plots where you can easily farm many stacks of just about whatever you're looking for (save herbs, sorry alchies) for fun and profit.  It isn't clear if this scale of harvesting was ever intended but it worked out well and served to build social bonds that otherwise wouldn't have occurred--something that every MMO needs.

It's pretty dang cool truth be told and a lot of the people I played with spent an awful lot of time building some pretty cool things on their housing plot.  Sadly I have no screenies to share but I'm sure your google-fu is up to the task if you're curious.  Carbine hit this one out of the park--it's got utility and can serve as a creative outlet for folks.  Housing in Wildstar is very well done and this, I think, is the new bar.


Elder Gems

I disavow any knowledge of what's going on here.

So you're level capped, great! In the bad old days in DAOC we'd compare how far along we were in the fast exp line denoting how far in the current bubble we were. These bars moved ever so slowly and otherwise had no utility at cap. In GW2 you could still "clock" a skillpoint when you got enough experience to level but unfortunately skill points were mostly worthless.  In Wildstar these points are not only not worthless but you can get some pretty neat stuff for them (one of these things is your attunement key which you'll need to get into raids).  As an added bonus, they make the experience needed to grant an elder gem a lot smaller than it was for 49 to 50, a nice touch.

It gets better, though.  If you cap your elder gems for the week (Tuesday to Tuesday) all the experience you would be getting toward elder gems is converted to cash.  This can be a very large amount of money which is great if, like me, you don't really want to play the day trader mini-game on the auction house.  Many people, myself included, tried to get elder gem capped as fast as possible so that the rest of the week we could watch those sweet sweet coins roll in.

What does this mean?  Playing the game at 50 outside of instances and raids still has meaning even if you're doing the same things you had been doing to get there.  Killing mobs never stopped being fun across any of my characters (the same was not true doing the same daily zones hundreds of times especially after I stopped "needing" elder gems).  Rewarding the player in meaningful ways for playing even when capped is good design and one that I wish more games would adopt.


Combat

Sweet hat, yo.

I raved about the combat in GW2 on at least a couple occasions. Wildstar shares some of the same ideas from GW2 but cranks them up to 11.  GW2 had combat telegraphs in the form of animations and visual tells and you could dodge out of just about any damage if you timed it correctly.  This led to (IMO) some very lazy design.  No trinity in that game means that death is just a missed dodge away and most of their encounters revolved around this single mechanic. Wildstar's dashes are like GW2 dodges in that they move your character in a chosen direction quickly but they do not avoid damage if you're in the wrong place. Telegraphs in Wildstar usually have an animated tell but are also painted on the ground in increasingly interesting patterns.  So if you're fighting a bad that puts down a red ring, you're pretty well served to not stand in it.  These two ideas are then combined in many (many) different ways to make for some very interesting encounters.

ButWaitThere'sMore!  Interrupting a bad with a casting bar (most telegraphs) will put them in a special state called a Moment of Opportunity which lasts longer than a normal stun and causes the target to take 150% of normal damage.  Interesting bads have a thing called interrupt armor which requires more stuns to get a MoO.  Since most classes can spec for multiple stuns, it effectively means that players with careful timing and situational awareness can handle some pretty big bads. This is the foundation of bosses and dungeon clears as we'll discuss shortly.


Encounter Design
So now we can get to the biggest strength of Wildstar: exceptionally well designed encounters.  I don't think I've played a game whose encounters are so well built but just saying that doesn't really paint the full picture.  As an example, this is the first boss in the first dungeon instance, one that I've run and taught dozens of times which will hopefully illustrate better than a bunch of flowery superlatives.

So, the setup.  The boss (Blade Wind the Invoker for all your pedants out there) is in the middle and pretty obviously the boss since he's like 12 feet tall.  There are four normal sized dudes standing near totems of some sort that don't bother you yet.  Phase 1 is pretty easy:  the boss will mostly focus the tank so there's that.  He will also put a giant X on the ground which will do a pile of damage.  Luckily this can be interrupted for a MoO.  He will also alternate sticking a big circular telegraph over the four normal sized dudes.  Don't stand in it.  Standing near the middle makes avoiding those big telegraphs much easier.

After some amount of damage he'll go to phase 2 and disarm players unlucky enough to not have interrupt armor.  You can go try to find it on the floor or stand there like a chump until it comes back to you--your choice.  The boss will still put his big X on the ground but he's invulnerable now so you kind of just have to deal with it.  The normal sized dudes will start attacking one at a time starting from the near left and going clockwise.  These guys have a shield on them which takes a while to chew through.  To make matters worse, the boss will throw a telegraphed lighting strike on a random member of the group which will do a pile of damage.  This telegraph will follow you until the last moment at which point you should dash out of it to avoid getting messed up.

That's fine and good but it's also not quite that simple.  The real fun of this phase is that if you put your telegraph on the one active normal dude, it will do a pile of damage and then put a MoO on him.   Lining up these strikes is crucial to doing this phase quickly so your healer doesn't run out of focus (mana).  For each normal dude that dies, a wisp is spawned that will orbit the boss.  If the wisp hits you, you are stunned, probably where the X is going to spawn and you're going to take a pile of damage and likely be killed when the X hits. Great. They move a differing speeds and differing directions which will become way more important in phase 3.

Phase 3 happens when all the normal dudes are dead.  There's another disarm and he'll start attacking a single target again, hopefully the tank.  So far so good.  He'll still also do the telegraphed lightning from phase 2 and the wisps are still there.  Okay.  In this phase he'll also fill the entire room (!) with a telegraph with a few safeish keyholes that you can stand in.  He will do this three times in a row and you can't stand still to hit the keyholes (sorry).  Remember those wisps?  The ones that do a pile of damage then stun you?  Yeah, their orbits are right where some of the keyholes are.  And the stun? You can't get out of that if you don't have a stun break and get to the next keyhole in time which is often fatal.  You can interrupt the boss when he's doing those telegraphs but I don't think he always gives a MoO if you do.  You can, however, interrupt the telegraphed lightning for a MoO which is nice.  Phase 3 finishes when all the bodies on one side hit the floor.

Sound fun?  It is!  And remember that this is the first boss in the first dungeon, a relative pushover--once you learn the dance.  In fact, many of the bosses are pushovers once you learn the dance but that makes the learn-dance-for-fun-and-profit ...err... dance all that much more rewarding.  No game I've played comes close to doing this as well as Wildstar, at least in its earlier instances. It's also worth noting that when you wipe on an encounter in Wildstar it's blazingly obvious why and pretty clear what you have to do to get past it--most of the time.  There are exceptions and they can be very, very frustrating but that's for next time.