Wildstar: The Ugly

All that's left in my coverage of Wildstar is the stuff that really sucks some of which I'm certain pushed people away from an otherwise good game.  If you're a fan of the game (or heaven forbid, a fanboi) you would be well advised to look away.

Overtuned Encounters

My guns...they go here.

Every single dungeon has at least one overtuned encounter and not necessarily the last boss.  Stormtalon, Slavemaster Drokk, Deadringer Shallaos, and the dreaded mining run in Skullcano immediately come to mind.  Due to the way these encounters are set up, there are either very thin margins of success for adequately- but not over-geared folks, or a dance that is way too hard to get right consistently usually in the form of positioning and especially for medium to short ranged classes.

On Stormtalon, any early death in a knockback phase, DPS or otherwise, dooms your group to failure if one of you isn't terrifically over-geared.   If you're lucky enough that it wasn't your healer or tank who died, you'll either not be able to do enough DPS to down him before your healer runs out of focus or you'll not have enough interrupts after the knockback phase.  For Drokk it's usually either the homing bomb phase, particularly during the switches, or the tether + suppression wave phases.  I could go on but I'll spare you the details.  If you've played the game and done these encounters, you already know what I'm talking about.  I'd leave some fun youtube wipes here if you haven't played the game, but apparently Wildstar is too hardcore for that.

Some of these dances are so complicated with margins so thin that any early death for groups not stupidly overgeared ensures a wipe. It's hard on tanks and healers in particular but there are no unskilled positions in Wildstar.  I strongly suspect that if these had been loosened up early in the game's history that it would have prevented quite a large number of rage quits.  Most of the group I played with quit as a direct result of one or more of these overtuned encounters and that sucks more than might be obvious.  More in a bit!


Antisocial Design
At launch, a huge number of the game's designs were antisocial. What do I mean by that?  Any feature, encounter, reward structure, or otherwise confluence of mechanics in your design that causes players to actively screw other players out of anything (especially time!) is an antisocial design.  Wildstar had these in spades at launch and though they've fixified some of them, many still remain.

The first and most egregious example is "gold or bust".  Adventures and dungeons at launch had a guaranteed epic if you completed them well enough to score a gold medal.  Gold dungeons were and still are largely out of reach for most folks, but gold adventures are fairly routine.  For many of these, player deaths aren't a strict failure case but this wasn't well understood due to bad or malicious information. Spend 30 minutes in queue as a DPS, finally get a pop, then watch some chump quit at the first death with others sure to follow.  "Gold or bust."  Better yet, wait the same 30 minutes then watch one or more players quit because you're the same class and they'd have to roll on their epic.  Great.  Not everyone who played was like this for certain but enough were that it was a frustrating experience a lot of the time.  Carbine's fix was to make epics extremely rare even if you did get gold, so other than doing attunement runs for your pals and trying to avoid daily zones to cap elder gems, no one really runs these anymore.

This gets worse for dungeon runs.  Up until recently, there was no real reason to go back and try for a gold dungeon run once you were past the dungeon step of attunement.  Because of the difficulty of completing dungeons, a lot of folks swear them off altogether even when this means their friends are left in the cold. It's easy to say "find better friends" but in practice the rewards should be better to offset some of the frustrations of teaching the dance and wiping over and over (and over and over and over) to yet another set of folks.

One of the more controversial pieces of antisocial design is in PvP.  I did not do much PvP in Wildstar (odd for me) and I kind of dodged a bullet on that one.  All damage is basically halved for normal gear to get around the silly mudflation plaguing most games.  Instead you get PvP ratings from special PvP gear for offense and defense which can raise the effectiveness of both.  The results are almost comical.  Get into a PvP match with no PvP gear at 50 and you will eat dirt with alarming frequency.  The discrepancy between PvP geared folks and everyone else is night and day even though they've gone through and retuned it a bunch of times.

Rewarding the victors to an extent that hurts competition is what we used to call "Counterstrike Syndrome".  It's named after the game where in a multi-map rotation the winners can buy much better guns exaggerating skill differential between teams. Wildstar has this in spades where those who spend a lot of time in PvP who are already more experienced also get piles of PvP gear which puts them head and shoulders above folks testing the waters.  (An example of this idea well executed is  GW2's structured PvP for interested parties.) Earlier levels are less bad since the cap on PvP currency is small and gear is replaced often.  At level cap, however, the gear differential can be so high that there's no real way to obtain that gear for new players except by being worked over for days on end.  This is always bad but it's especially bad in a game bleeding players. Cannibalizing newcomers with awful introductory experiences ensures that the mode will die.


The Live Team
Most of the game's shortcomings were as obvious as a boss's telegraphs.  Yet it seems that the designers and live team either weren't aware of it, didn't want to do anything about it, or couldn't do anything about it.  Determining which of these is the most tragic is left as an exercise for the reader.  So far, we've barely scratched the surface of the brokenness, most of which should never have seen the light of day.

Solutions to bugs, especially balance issues, were very late and often arrived in giant batches.  Carbine's development cycle rolled small important fixes and tweaks into much larger drops with new content which unduly delayed them.  Content drops, when they arrived, came without time on the public test realm (PTR) sometimes completely unannounced and often very, very broken. Hotfixes have been fairly common after a big drop and often even the things that were known to be broken in whatever PTR versions were available were still patched to live regardless.  Sometimes the fixes (even the correct ones!) were worse than the issues they were trying to resolve.

The fabled "Drop 3" which comes with many (many) fixes some new content, and yet another serious rebalancing apparently dropped within the last few weeks.  (I've not been playing so I'm not entirely certain.)  We hadn't seen a reasonable set of fixes since August and even that one was both small and broken.  Gamma Rays anyone? Players are fickle and won't wait around forever for you to fix your broken game, especially when there's a sub attached and even more especially when your fixes come with even more brokenness.

Carbine's live development process has the trifecta, then.  Their changes are late, often "fixing" the wrong things, and often with serious game breaking bugs or further worse design.  A slate of firings and public figures quitting paint a dark picture of the remaining development effort which further reinforces the notion that the game is dying, true or otherwise.  This is no way to run a live team.


The Roster Boss
The roster boss is ultimately the winner in any game but Wildstar, through some combination of its foibles and its demographic, lost players at an alarming rate.  You usually see a fairly dramatic dropoff at the 1 month, 2 month, 3 month and 6 month billing cycles.  After that it plateaus for a while with upward spikes when new content is released.  By my estimation Wildstar halved by the end of the first month and halved again at the end of the second and third months.  I played on a low population server before the merges and by the end of that third month even the capital city was nearly a ghost town.

Eventually Carbine announced "megaservers" which basically rolled all the servers sharing a ruleset in a territory (except RP servers--sorry guys) onto the same server.  At the same time they opened up free transfers to a couple of the larger servers.  Many servers who were already on the ropes, mine included, crashed and crashed hard. People left in droves to the more populated servers which broke economies, guilds, and communities.  This is dicey at the best of times and I honestly think that free transfers plus the four-ish weeks that it took for megaservers to arrive (that's pretty close to forever in internet time) did more damage than good.

This brings us to one of the worst parts.  When you lose a member of your team, it's a big deal.  This is someone you probably learned those dances with who knows how your group operates and who, if you're reasonably successful, plays at a high level.  You cannot slot a rookie and expect to have the same success.  Gearing issues aside, the game is just plain too complicated and after a couple cycles of teaching new folks to dance it starts seeming more like work than it does play.  Once enough key people leave you stop being able to make any progress and after that, it's hard to keep playing.  This is what ultimately broke the game for me so I feel especially ranty about it.

What's worse is that this wasn't just my experience.  I spent months trying to coordinate a multi-guild alliance like we had in WoW almost a decade ago and every guild had the same experience: healthy numbers to start with a steep drop off after two or three months.  If you weren't inviting anyone who still drew breath, you were dying. Once guilds stopped being able to make progress they broke up with a large portion on of their members never to be seen again which further depleted the pool.

My best theory is that people bolted once they hit level cap and started banging their heads against attunement. At release in WoW, leveling to cap took months and there were very few brick walls.  In Wildstar, leveling to cap takes a tiny fraction of this and brick walls come early and often.  This is awfully similar to what I observed in SWTOR. I think that short solo content to cap with a de-emphasis on grouping hurts the longevity of these kinds of games because there isn't sufficient time or reason to build lasting relationships.  Without lasting relationships you can't have long-lived social games.  MMO design in this day and age is pushing toward more streamlined and casual experiences, Wildstar included, which effectively reduces their stickiness and may be a death knell for the genre. As a fan of these kinds of games, I have never wanted to be wrong more.

Postscript

It's as fun as it looks.

So that's Wildstar in a nutshell, at least from my perspective. I strongly suspect that NCSoft will not allow the game to limp along at its current subscriber base. I predict that it will either go free to play next year or their corporate overlords will pull the plug. That's a shame because for all their mis-steps, it is a fantastic game and one that I've enjoyed quite a lot for quite a while.

I'm reminded a lot of Vanguard which had a terrible launch but despite its flaws was actually a very good game. The industry and gamers alike desperately need more games like Wildstar.  As a fan of the genre and the biz, seeing a game with so much promise fail so quickly is very, very hard.

Wildstar: The Bad

As not-so-subtly alluded to in the previous post, not all is well in Nexus.  Big surprise, right?  Some of it is downright awful but we'll save those for last.  These are the bad things, not necessarily game breaking, but frustrating and a mar on an otherwise very good game.


Death Taunts
This one's easy:  every time you die, an announcer taunts you.  Every. Freaking.  Time.  If things are good and spirits are high these are sometimes amusing.  "If you like living so much, why do you keep dying, hmm?"  When things are down and you're frustrated, not so much.  You might wipe dozens of times trying to learn the dance for a particular encounter.  "You just be tired of dying over and over again.  Dead tired, heh.  Get it?  Ahahaha!  Dead tired."  The group I played with wiped for three weeks on the final boss of the first dungeon alone.  It got very old very quickly.

This is one of the few writing and style missteps in the game and it's a doozy.  "Aw, what a shame, I planned such a lovely funeral for you." This doesn't make the game better and poking an angry bear doesn't seem so smart.  "Do you have a death wish?  So do I!  I wish you'd stop coming here!"  I don't have any statistics to back this up (not like Carbine had a survey of why people quit for the first few months) but I suspect a nonzero number of people bailed because they got sick of hearing these.  "Maybe you should take the hint."  Don't kick your players when they're down.

I'll just just leave this here for the morbidly curious.  (I couldn't help myself!)

The UI

We interrupt this rant for a pretty picture.

Wildstar's UI isn't outstanding. It misses the mark about as much as Rift hit the mark so many years ago.  On top of being slow, it's also clunky and without much consistency.  As someone who's worked on MMO UIs in the past, I know that it's a high cost and low reward kind of thing but I can't help but feel that Carbine could have tried just a little harder.

One example that caused me great consternation was that mail isn't always available.  Mail in the game works in two basic ways:  you can read any of it and take cash from the little icon in the bottom left. Attachments have to be grabbed from a "physical" mailbox somewhere in the world.  Settlers even have an ability to plunk one of these down for a short duration--handy!  Unfortunately, if you log in, then log out, then log in again, your mail is not available, sometimes for quite a while.  I suspect this is either to reduce bandwidth costs or intended as a way to curb the botters that plagued the game's release.  Either way it is super, super annoying for people (like me) with a lot of alts.  I suppose it could also be a bug.

The guild roster display is another example.  Until many months in, there was no way to show just the folks who were logged in.  As we'll discuss later, the roster boss looms large and it isn't uncommon to have way more people offline than online.  There is a mod to fix this and to Carbine's credit they did eventually add it to the base UI but it should have been there at launch and probably wouldn't have taken all that much effort to add.

One of the more interesting examples is one of the myriad ways that crafting can fail.  Go to a crafting station, play the little mini game, click the make-shit-happen button, watch the bar fill up and then...nothing.  No failure, no messages, no nothing.  The bar fills up and that's it.  You have to cancel out, saving your items in most cases, and try again.

The problem?  You're mounted.  It is extremely uncommon to not run around in city and overworld zones mounted.  The game (for whatever particular reason) has decided that you shouldn't be hoverboarding and crafting at the same time and fails.  Months after launch, Carbine acknowledged how annoying this was and made it so that you'll be automagically dismounted if needed when you start crafting.

New problem:  start crafting and cancel out leaving your materials at the table.  Now you can't mount at all!  The game doesn't bother telling you this.  You click the mount button and it does nothing.  At best, it just looks broken.  Notice this when you're far away from a crafting station and you'll be very sad.  Luckily most of the time you'll be able to get to housing where you can hopefully access one or more tables.  Why is it like this?

The game is playable with the base UI but it isn't good a lot of the time.  Small frictions add up over time and UI is generally one of the safer places to make changes at launch.  While they did address issues, it was painfully slow which we'll talk about in more detail later.


Mudflation
Before we really talk about mudflation we have to talk about the game's tiered content and gear.  For those of you who played, this will be dull.  Sorry.  There are five (or so) basic tiers.  In relative order of difficulty and coordination these are:  overworld questing (usually solo), adventures (5 person instance), dungeons (5 person instance), small raids (20 person instance) and large raids (40 person instance).  There's other minor bits like group mobs and world bosses and whatnot as well but those are the basic ones.

Gear rewards generally follow the same kind of pattern:  greens and blues for overworld questing, blues and epics for adventures, better blues and epics for dungeons, etc.  Crafted gear rather breaks the mold since it can be tuned to specific builds/stats/whatever within some loose guidelines.  In fact, the tuning is so good that specific bits of crafted gear outperforms many small raid rewards.  Carbine has said in the past that they didn't really expect people to min max quite like we do. I don't know why they wouldn't expect that!

Of course there's more!  Up until recently, all reasonable gear had a sometimes wildly variable number of slots of completely random types. One to four slots on blues was not uncommon.  If you were lucky you got a piece you cared about with a bunch of slots.  If you were luckier than that they were the good slots where you could stack the things you cared about.  The amount of yield for sticking a rune into a slot scales with the tier of the gear being slotted.  This effectively compounds the differences between tiers three times: base stats, rune slot count, and rune slot yield.

Remember how housing harvesting plugs gave a limitless surplus of easily gathered resources?  Clever players did exactly what you'd expect:  they burned piles of crafting materials to make that one piece with exactly the right slots and the highest slot count, dumped the reasonable results on auction, and salvaged everything else. This is part of why crafting gear performed so much better than its intended tier. Crafting resources generally aren't scarce in Wildstar and I can only imagine how much more non-scarce they would be without people constantly draining supply trying to get that one perfect piece.

You can probably see where this is going.  The difference between questing greens and crafted blues is enormous.  It is not unheard of in the circle of folks I played with to almost instantly double their effectiveness upon hitting 50 and getting decked out with new gear. Also as expected, there's a jump between adventure/dungeon blues and 20 person raid purples which is just about as big and another similarly sized jump from 20 person raid purples to 40 person raid oranges.

The effect of wild differences in gear level on the game is disastrous given the relatively straightforward damage mechanics.  A DPSer in tuned and runed crafted blues can easily double the output of an equally skilled player of the same spec and class but in unruned and untuned questing gear.  While the skill cap is higher in Wildstar than it is in many games, it isn't high enough to offset the difference in gear tiers except in the most lopsided cases.

Large differences in effectiveness trivializes the majority of the encounters in sometimes non-obvious ways. Doubling group damage halves the time spent in any encounter stage which usually translates to half the time of the dance in that phase.  Recall that most of the difficulty of an encounter is in the dance and that some of those dances are goddamn hard.  I suspect that this was at least partially done so that older content becomes easier for those who have run it a lot but Wildstar takes it to an extreme level that effectively robs itself of one of its best aspects.

Time Gates

This is a normal 'slinger Gate, not a time gate.

And then we get to the time gates--tried and true methods of keeping players occupied until more content arrives. Wildstar has a lot of them and they were even more plentiful when the game was new. Want to raid? One of the first steps is buying your key which costs slightly more elder gems than you can get in a week. Level cap early in the week? Well, you're stuck waiting (but enjoy your increased income!) until scheduled maintenance. Think you'll be clever and get a headstart on the next parts of attunement? Don't bother, they're (mostly) not retroactive.

Then there's the rest of attunement.  The process is long and can seem convoluted and at launch had steps that were pretty freakin' difficult.  Some of those steps were even broken.  The first hurdle is usually attaining the highest level of reputation with your faction. Even doing every quest and every dungeon pre-50 you still wind up thousands short.  This means that you have to grind it, except that for most people there's nothing you can effectively grind outside of dailies.  At launch there was one daily zone which is usually crowded and you might get 750 rep for clearing.  I guess it's something to do while you wait for the week to reset your elder gem count but it gets dull very quickly. Content additions after launch including new zones help but it's still a pain.

The next big hurdle is to silver all four adventures, some of which are extremely buggy.  Tempest Refuge, anyone?  A couple bits and pieces after adventures and you needed to silver dungeons.  Silvering all four dungeons entails clearing all objectives within a very tight time window unless you massively outgear dungeons at which point you don't really ever need to go back.  They did eventually change this to only needing bronze (all objectives but not timed) but I suspect that half of the game's subs were already lost by that point but we'll rant more about that in a bit.

Once dungeons are complete there are more bobs and bits and then you need to kill a mess of world bosses which are on long spawn timers and often broken.  Now you can raid!  Prior to the change to only needing bronze dungeons there were very, very few people who were attuned and a great many of the raid encounters were broken too.  This never felt necessary--why hide your best content, the reason so many people tried your game, behind such a grind?

Crafting at 50 is also heavily time gated.  Upon hitting 50 you'll receive a trivial fed-ex daily quest from your trainer in the capital city.  Completing this quest gives you between one and four Eldan data fragments.  The vast majority of times it was one with a seemingly tiny chance of giving more.  I did these diligently for the better part of nine character months split between my two 50s and saw multi-fragment rewards exactly six times.  Other crafters I played with report similar results so I don't think I'm especially unlucky in this regard.

Why the beef with data fragments?  The first few recipes you get cost one.  Do your quest and get a new recipe, fine.  The next tier of recipes are typically 7-10  data fragments.  OK, so one week and a half of turning in a trivial quest and get a new recipe.  These were typically better than the first tier so that's OK.  The tier after?  That'll be 17.  The tier after that is 21 or 28.  Four weeks of drudgery for one recipe.  I hope it's a good one!  In a given tier there are two to six recipes so completionists in some crafts still can't have a fully unlocked tree outside of buy-a-lottery-ticket-right-now levels of luck and the game has been live for half a year.  This seems excessive and unnecessary especially given how incremental most of the top crafting tiers are.

Whew.  Rough.  Next time I'll really get my rant on.  See you then!

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.

They may be onto us...

Lots of truck commercials but none proclaiming it's truck month.  Are they onto us?!

It could be...

Not only is it Chevy truck month, but it's also Ram truck month!  It's a twofer!

I don't think they're trying anymore

"Fall Truck Month Season"?  Really?  Thanks for that, Ram.

edit>  that joke is funnier if I use the right words.  WurdsRHrd.

Truck Month?

Why yes, yes it is.  Ford truck month, as it turns out.  Thanks, football season!

I might have missed the last few months' "science" because I wasn't watching TV.  You might be able to figure out why.

Up too late again but not for the last time

I wanted to throw down some poorly-chosen words about WildStar since it starts in like an hour and the weight of months spent at its controls has not yet crushed my fanboi-ish love of it (don't worry, it will).  No, I am not staying up to play it at crack of 2am launch.  It may be because I'm still getting over a cold and not drunk--this time! 

Even if they didn't already have my money and I wasn't already looking forward to its insanely styled art, huge depth, and literally laugh out loud writing, I desperately want them to succeed.  It is rare in this day and age of 0.99$ throwaway apps and hugely-mcgrindy F2P timewasters to see anything with real complexity and legitimate challenge.  These are the kinds of games I like and I'm sure I've ranted about them here before.

I want to see WildStar succeed because those are the kinds of games I want to work on--ones that ooze style and can be fun and frustrating and funny and dark and serious all at the same time.  These are the kinds of games that I think the industry desperately needs:  ones that you can't throw together in a couple weeks and shovel out the door, ones that bring people (real people!) together, that you can spend real time with and later bore other people with your stories from.  Most of all I want to see WildStar succeed because these are the kinds of games that I like and there aren't nearly enough of them.

If that's all too sappy for you, I blame large doses of cold medicine...or sobriety.  Your regularly scheduled truck month posts will resume shortly.

Is it?

It's "Ram commercial truck season".  I think that's close enough :P

This is *WAY* too easy...

It's way too easy to make binge buys on Amazon.  I sometimes justify this partially because I pay for Prime...which means I'll have the stuff I ordered just now by Friday.  WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE!

It's that time again...

It took two weeks, but guess what--it's truck month!  This time it's Chevy truck month as detailed by a local dealership ad (Frisco, if you care) as delivered by Pandora.

On the one hand, I like Pandora (and who exactly was responsible for telling me about it, anyway?!?!).  On the other hand, I hate ads but not enough (yet) to pay them money.

WTF is up with truck month?

Apparently it's "Ford Truck Month".  Or, at least, that's what they keep telling me incessantly on TV.  I'm pretty sure that there was also a "Truck Month" last football season.  So that got me thinking:  how many months are actually a "Truck Month"?  Watch this space!

Line Art

Not too terribly long ago, I bought a Surface Pro 2.  Forget, for the moment, all your criticisms of Microsoft, its recent turmoil, and the travesty that is its latest Windows.  This machine is the culmination of the crossroads of everything I've ever wanted in a computer.  It's fast, it's hugely portable, it has good battery life, but critically, and most importantly, it has a built in pressure sensitive tablet.

As a lefty who mouses with my right hand, I haven't ever and never will art well with one.  I have owned many, many tablets over the last twenty years from extravagantly expensive to terrifically cheap and terrible.  Despite having used these to good effect and having practiced on them for untold thousands of hours it's never been as natural as pencil on paper.  Working digitally, for me anyway, has always been cleaner but it's never been as natural as meatspace efforts.  The Surface Pro 2 solves this neatly and it's no word of a lie that I've been waiting for decades for a proper solution--and now I have it.

This is Rhode from Divinity II which I'll write about more at a later date, most likely in my end of year recap.  Rhode was one of my favorite characters.  Sketched from reference on my Bamboo then cleaned up on the Surface with colors hopefully following at some point.

Yes, I could have purchased  Cintiq but they are hugely expensive especially for someone who doesn't honestly art all that much =and= the Surface came with all the laptop I'll need for hopefully quite a while.  Now, other than time, I don't really have any excuses.

As I was thinking of replacing my old laptop anyway, this really was a no-brainer.  Actually since my employer paid for most of it through a development bonus it was even-less-than-no-brainer.  I am enormously happy with it which I haven't been able to say about a laptop for a long, long time.

2013 In Review

The next installment in the infrequent "20XX In Review" "series" takes us through 2013. There wasn't much in the way of a work crunch last year (sadly, not the norm) so, naturally I spent more than half the year being unhappy with GW2 as you've probably already read.  BrickFiesta went pretty well with an SR2 that got some good press.  Last year also marks the return of my home brewing efforts now with all-grain goodness after a many year hiatus.  Mixed results so far but looking hopeful.  The only other notable non-gaming thing I can, er, note is that I purchased a smoker and am now churning out smokey BBQ roughly every two weeks.  Best $350 I ever spent.  If you have space, time, $350, and a love of slow smoked meats, you have to have to have to get a smoker.  On to gaming.

Guild Wars 2 Endgame (2012):  **
Given that I spent roughly half the year playing, I can't not put an entry here.  I'll stick to my previous comment that it's probably the best game I've played in a long, long while, but as with most MMOs, the more time you spend with it the more you notice the odd bits and shortcomings.  As a PvPer I have to say that the game is pretty rough as I've already documented and there is no reasonable PvE endgame.  Instead we get periodic Living Story releases which are interesting but can't hide the fact that there isn't really a lot of depth there.

Duke Nukem Forever (2011): *
Naturally I followed GW2, the best game I've played in a while, with the worst game I've played in a while.  DNF was awful in all the ways that the gaming press thrashed it for.  It's a game from another time in a very inapt Austin Powers-like way and despite the fancy window dressing ends up feeling dated in just about every way that counts.  There are some high points but IMO it wasn't worth slogging through the low points to find them.  The best thing I can say about it is that it was mercifully short.  If you're a hardcore Duke fan, you probably already have this.  If you're not, don't bother unless you like a good train wreck.

Serious Sam 3 (2011):  ****
As has been well documented, I am a sucker for the super Serious Sam series.  It's about as pure an oldskool shooter as you'll find and SS3 BFE takes it to the current generation.  The design is just about the same as the previous two with steadily increasing hordes of bads to carve up in steadily increasingly overkill ways culminating in an end boss that I just plain can't beat.  That barely dents my enthusiasm for the series, however.  Anyone interested in player progression and encounter design should take a run through any of the Serious Sam series.  Seriously.

Rogue Legacy (2013):  ***
This is a pretty interesting platformer with a couple interesting hooks.  First, it's rogue-like at its core which basically boils down to ridiculously difficult with random levels and a semblance of perma-death.  Second, it's generational (hence the Legacy part of the name) with the player taking the role of an increasingly long lineage of career adventurers.  Each new generation comes with its choice of a few of the available classes and their own set of interesting ads/disads.  Examples of such include "Congenital Insensitivity to Pain" which removes the health bar, and "no foot pulse" which prevents floor traps from springing.  These run the gamut from ridiculous like "Vertigo" which flips the screen upside down rendering it nearly unplayable to hilarious like "Dyslexia" which scrambles some of the dialog and rearranges some miscellaneous stuff.  I want terribly to like this game more because it oozes so much style but I don't have the skill or patience for it.

Portal 2 (2011):  ****
I finally got around to this one and it didn't disappoint.  It, like its predecessor, has some fun puzzles and doesn't outlast its welcome.  Also much like the first, its strength lies in its writing and often very dark humor. As I've ranted before, humor of all sorts, dark or otherwise, I find lacking in most games of this generation.

Divinity:  Dragon Commander (2013):  *****

Good name for a Fangbear, really.

Luckily, the folks at Larian Studios (in Belgium no less--home of some of my favorite beers) have seen fit to try to fill the gap.  D:DC is easy to overview as a Risk-like strategic game bolted to a very primitive RTS with Mass Effect-like dialogs between but that doesn't really do it justice.  The dialogs involve some very memorable characters including your cabinet with representatives of each race (Undead, Elf, Dwarf, Lizard, and Imp), your wizard confidant Maxos, one of the four available princesses, and a handful of generals and other support staff each with their own unique if exaggerated view of the world and their own agendas.  Your decisions affect the strategic map and the delicate balance of approval you'll need with each race to unite the realm.  Units on the strategic map are your starting units in each RTS combat or you can auto-resolve with the help of your generals who grow throughout each campaign.  Lots of otherwise innocent words sacrificed there, and this still does not do the game justice.  The writing is some of the best I've seen in any game and even though each character starts out as a caricature of an extreme viewpoint, they all have their endearing points and all seem very human.  This is complimented by a quirky sense of humor and some of the best voice acting in any game.  I have no idea if the folks at Larian are native English speakers but they deserve a medal for this gem either way--it is clearly a game that is more than the sum of its parts.

Divine Divinity (2002):  ****
When I find a gem of a game that I've missed from a studio I don't know, I typically want to see what else I've missed and Divine Divinity did not disappoint. It's an old-skool western RPG in the Diablo sense and despite the period-awful voice acting and not-well-aged graphics, it ends up being pretty entertaining nonetheless.  It's an excellent showing as one of Larian's first games and despite its somewhat troperrific plot it's still recommendable for anyone who can handle its dated-ness.

Beyond Divinity (2004):  ***
The follow up to Divine Divinity wasn't nearly as awesome as the original.  It's way more complicated in not good ways and while it does have a fun twist, it's easy to lose it in the grindy-ness.  I was most surprised that there wasn't really any epic loot (all the unique equipment was pedestrian) and there were way too many skills and way too few skill points to spend on them.  The tedium of its puzzles and mazes was mostly forgiven by the ending which tied it in very well to its predecessor--even if the last few encounters were ridiculously difficult.  Hopefully Divinity II will show improvement.

In Review...
So that was 2013 as a whirlwind--some good, some bad, and some fantastic gaming in between.