111501-zone-count-and-story-problems

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Hey everyone,
 
So I've been doing some thinking when I read this reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/WildStar/comments/2f0bt8/what_could_have_been_done_differently/
 
Basically, it's about what Carbine could've done differently. Now, I still think it's a great game, but I always felt it had some underlying problem I could never put a finger on. After some thought, I came to a few conclusions, but two of those I actually never thought of before untill now, and that's the world size and the story (the other problems won't be discussed here). Now, I am going to give a comparison to WoW, as this game uses that model and Carbine are mostly Ex-WoW devs.
 
First I'm going to adress the world size. I never really had much thought about it, but I came to the realization that the Wildstar world is tiny. For comparison:
 
Vanilla WoW started with 40 zones, giving players different choise on where to quest.
Wildstar had 18 zones on release (if you count Farside as three zones and also count the arkships, it's 22 zones. With Blighthaven it's 23)
 
That's not even half the number of zones WoW had. And you could say the zones might be bigger, but I really don't believe that, as the starting zones are very small and everything feels bigger because mounts aren't fast. Another comparison could be made with GW2, which has 26 zones. 
Now, I know not all the WoW zones were very good (heck, some were terrible, like Silithus), but at least it gave you the idea that the world is huge and it gave you options. In this game, leveling is not being seen as one of it's strong points, and I think that's partly because it's so liniar. This also made leveling alts less fun, as there isn't anything new to explore. In a game like WoW, you could level through a certain path, and then when you rolled an alt you could level through a different path. Sure you would sometimes still get the same quests and visit same areas, but it's far less so than in this game. That was one of the appeals of WoW when it got released. It also gave an incentive to go into the world and explore, even after you hit the level cap. In Wildstar, there is no incentive. Most people just either sit in their housing plot or stand around Thayd or Illum. 
 
Another problem is the story. Now, I'm not saying the story is bad, as it's actually really good, but the way they brought it just made it far less interesting in my opinion. For instance, Vanilla WoW started with you being in the world of Azeroth, exploring, seeing things and discovering dangers in the world that weren't immediate. The only thing you really knew was that the Horde and Alliance don't like eachother, but this wasn't really important. It let you get used to the world. In Wildstar, you start of with the war between the Exiles and the Dominion (a war that makes far more sense than the Horde versus Alliance), which is a great start. You get to this new world and you have to explore all the things on this world, while being caught in this war. From the start, you are told 'Those guys are bad for this reason, getting rid of them is the most important thing, however, we must also explore the planet and it's secrets', which is a great point to start at, as the goals are clear, but as everyone knows, the war will last for a long time, so you don't feel it's immediate and are given room to explore the world. But once you're done with Whitevale, the war part is gone. All of a sudden, all the quests are about exploring Nexus and it's secrets and the war part takes a backburner. Heck, the factions even start to get shared questing hubs. Ok, this isn't the biggest of deals, as exploring Nexus might be as important as fighting the war. But then you get to the Strain and that's where the biggest problem starts.
 
The Strain starts off as a mystery in Wilderrun. But quickly after that, you get the solo story missions which explain to you why the strain is actually bad and that it needs to be stopped. You get to Malgrave, no real strain activity there, but after that it all becomes about the strain. Now, the strain as a concept is great. And I like the whole Drusera storyline. But the problem is that it went too quickly from 'there's something mysterious on this planet that might be a danger' to 'OMG, STAHP THIS THING NOW!!!!!!!!'. They went too quick with the whole 'the world is in peril' story and that took away the mystery. Heck, the two new zones (Blighthaven and the upcoming Defile) are about the strain. Upcoming somewhat spoiler for those who haven't done the solo stories yet:
 
 
You end the story with "You beaten the big baddy! It's not over yet, but for now, it's subdued", but then drop 1 hit with 'Ow, you thought you were done for now? No, we're continuing right now!'
 
 
And yes, Blighthaven was a great zone and I think the Defile zone will also be great, but I'd rather they put the strain on a backburner after that story quest and focus on something new, so the strain actually feels refreshing and mysterious again. We instantly get told "Here's the biggest enemy right now, go defeat it". Again, in WoW it took untill TBC for a common enemy to arise. 
 
So I feel it would've been better if they let people get used to the world first and then introduce a greater enemy than the other faction. Having hints at something bigger coming is great, that gives suspense, but now they revealed it way too soon.
 
Ofcourse these are my thoughts, and I'm not omnipotent and probably could be totally wrong. So what do you guys think about these two points?	
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Quest Giver: 'I need you to take this rock to the other zone, fair adventurer.'
Adventurer: ' You mean across the road to that guy?'
Quest Giver: *cough* 'No to the OTHER zone!'
 
 
 
If numbers is all that matters there's nothing stopping them by sub-dividing all the zones into 4 to claim 72 zones on release.
 
 
Supposedly there were alternate questing zones, but they were cut and will be brought back in some future drop/x-pack.
 
 
As for size of zones, do we really need more Whitevales? :(
 
 
 
 
 
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And yes, Blighthaven was a great zone and I think the Defile zone will also be great, but I'd rather they put the strain on a backburner after that story quest and focus on something new, so the strain actually feels refreshing and mysterious again. We instantly get told "Here's the biggest enemy right now, go defeat it". Again, in WoW it took untill TBC for a common enemy to arise. 
 
So I feel it would've been better if they let people get used to the world first and then introduce a greater enemy than the other faction. Having hints at something bigger coming is great, that gives suspense, but now they revealed it way too soon.
 
Ofcourse these are my thoughts, and I'm not omnipotent and probably could be totally wrong. So what do you guys think about these two points?
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Quest Giver: 'I need you to take this rock to the other zone, fair adventurer.'
Adventurer: ' You mean across the road to that guy?'
Quest Giver: *cough* 'No to the OTHER zone!'
 
 
 
If numbers is all that matters there's nothing stopping them by sub-dividing all the zones into 4 to claim 72 zones on release.
 
 
Supposedly there were alternate questing zones, but they were cut and will be brought back in some future drop/x-pack.
 
 
As for size of zones, do we really need more Whitevales? :(
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
As for this bit, i think the players need a focus point in the story for what they are doing. (since you refer to Wow let's use it. Everyone is dealing with Garrosh, not his butler or some farmer who needs help, Garrosh himself.)
 
No one wants to get to max level and still feel like they are doing bs side quests.
 
The Strain/Entity/Drusera are the core of this game's story, so each drop has to expand on that, otherwise it would become a story-wall.
 
 
Can you imagine the uproar of the lore buffs if instead of finding out more about the Entity, we instead had 12 drops about Ickythickians and Kangaroo Captains?
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WoW's '40' zones at launch is quite a bit of an overstatement in this context. While there may very well have been 40 areas seperatly considered 'zones'; the actual size of the areas was quite small compared to the ones in W*. Consider the vastness of some of W*'s zones plus the Exolabs and things get big quick; especially compared to 3 month old Vanilla WoW.
 
 
As a bit of a tangent; you can physically walk between all the area's on Nexus (those actually on nexus) with the current sole exceptions of the intro zones and their redux versions (Crimson Isle / northern wilds and Crimson badlands & Northern Wastes). Granted not all of that walking can be along deffined roads; the exploring types have found ways between the seemingly disparate continents. 
 
 
As for the comment that the strain goes from oh this sucks to OMG stop it NAO.... that's literally what happens in contagion outbreaks... Look at Ebola in Africa right now. It went from, oh that sucks to OMG stop this NAO pretty darn quick.... SWTOR HAD the great threat: the rekindled war between the Republic and the Empire... That was present through out all the stories. 	
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			More isn't better. Most of those WoW zones you mention were nearly empty, or if they weren't, weren't particularly full of what you'd call engaging quest content. Wildstar isn't the greatest in that department either, but at the very least there's a solid amount of it with decent variety in each zone.	
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WoW's '40' zones at launch is quite a bit of an overstatement in this context. While there may very well have been 40 areas seperatly considered 'zones'; the actual size of the areas was quite small compared to the ones in W*. Consider the vastness of some of W*'s zones plus the Exolabs and things get big quick; especially compared to 3 month old Vanilla WoW.
 
 
As a bit of a tangent; you can physically walk between all the area's on Nexus (those actually on nexus) with the current sole exceptions of the intro zones and their redux versions (Crimson Isle / northern wilds and Crimson badlands & Northern Wastes). Granted not all of that walking can be along deffined roads; the exploring types have found ways between the seemingly disparate continents. 
 
 
As for the comment that the strain goes from oh this sucks to OMG stop it NAO.... that's literally what happens in contagion outbreaks... Look at Ebola in Africa right now. It went from, oh that sucks to OMG stop this NAO pretty darn quick.... SWTOR HAD the great threat: the rekindled war between the Republic and the Empire... That was present through out all the stories. 
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As for the comment that the strain goes from oh this sucks to OMG stop it NAO.... that's literally what happens in contagion outbreaks... Look at Ebola in Africa right now. It went from, oh that sucks to OMG stop this NAO pretty darn quick.... SWTOR HAD the great threat: the rekindled war between the Republic and the Empire... That was present through out all the stories. 
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You can compare the Exolabs as some of the caves and such in WoW, which evens it out. And Wildstar zones aren't big, they just feel big. That's again because of the mount speed. Heck, one of the zones is even cut in half (southern Grimvault)
 
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Oh also, i hope that the next major drop after The Defile is a drop about something else than the Strain. We have lots of other enemies in Wildstar. There are the Osun, Freebots, Dreg, elementals, Falkrin, Moodies, Giants, Pell, Ikthians, Skeech among many others. Perhaps there could even be some long lost Eldan civilization that comes back to Nexus to try and take it back? Perhaps there is some evil coporation branch between the Exiles and Dominion (Think Blackrock Clan meets Dark Iron Dwarves) that finds some technology and threatens to destroy Nexus and we need to stop them?There are loooooooooaaaaads of possible enemies. It doesnt have to be only the Strain.
 
Edit: Perhaps there could even be multiple threats at the same time? This wouldnt make the game feel so linear... Right now its;
Major enemies: The strain
While leveling you go in a path from zone A -> B -> C -> D -> E -> F -> G -> max level.
Around max level you go: Fight Strain -> 50 -> Fight Strain -> Do adventures / dungeons (yay diversity and options) -> Fight the Strain -> Fight the Strain -> Continue and fight the Strain.
Everything is pretty much the same and in a single path no matter how you do it.	
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Oh also, i hope that the next major drop after The Defile is a drop about something else than the Strain. We have lots of other enemies in Wildstar. There are the Osun, Freebots, Dreg, elementals, Falkrin, Moodies, Giants, Pell, Ikthians, Skeech among many others. Perhaps there could even be some long lost Eldan civilization that comes back to Nexus to try and take it back? Perhaps there is some evil coporation branch between the Exiles and Dominion (Think Blackrock Clan meets Dark Iron Dwarves) that finds some technology and threatens to destroy Nexus and we need to stop them?
 
There are loooooooooaaaaads of possible enemies. It doesnt have to be only the Strain.
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Already saved Nexus from the Ikthians on Farside; There already is an evil corporation between the Exiles and Dom (protostar), Osun could be a cool ex-pac, freebots aren't really evil.... dreg are over used in dailies, but could be cool with a good story.
 
I'm sure we will get more protostar stories; and more ikthians eventually. Probably some with the Lopp and the Ekos as well. 
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Damn even my tl;dr is getting long... i hate you vanilla wow. I hate you because of how *cupcake*ing brilliant you were.
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Am I the only one who likes Silithus? ^_^
 
Another Whitevale wouldn't be bad if we could pick and choose what quests we wanted to do in each zone. "Oh I don't like this quest line in Whitevale so I'm gonna hop over to Other Zone and work on this quest line instead."
 
Wildstar seems like it's smaller because once you get to your main city you have a choice of one zone per level area to quest in. We need more optional zones to quest in, this game doesn't have SWTOR multi class storylines to pull off the one zone per levels off right. There is so much lore in this game (including the two faction war) that we could explore on, and would make very interesting alternative zones to level in.
 
People tend to forget that the core of an mmo is based on a multifaceted story idea (ye ol' rpg). There is a lot of things going on and lots of stories about many people. Somewhere down the line we got the idea that it should be all about the one main storyline, in the old days we called that an adventure game or sometimes a side scroller.
 
An mmo is not a side scroller nor an adventure game. (Though it can have these elements in them, it's not about them.)
 
 
 
The problem with the empty zones has nothing to do with the zone size or how many zones there are. 
 
The reason: Once you are done with the zone area, you have little to no reason to travel back there.
 
 
We need fishing, mini-games, daily world wide scavenger hunts, a weekly rotating bounty list, something to want the players to regularly revisit to old zones.  	
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			Plenty of space on the maps for alternate leveling zones after reaching Thayd/Ilium at 16 I guess. I do hope some get added though. Also, Galeras/Whitevale are much worse to level through over again than Auroria/Wilderrun. Auroria in particular is actually still kind of fun on alts. Galeras is not. But maybe it`s just me.	
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The strain isnt an ebola outbreak tho. The strain has been active since even before the eldan were extinct. Its just only now that the Exiles and the Dominion notice their existance.
 
 
I dont think the WoW world is that much larger. If you remove 1/3rd of the starting zones. If there were 3 different starting areas with 2 zones and a capital per area for exiles and dominions... the Wildstar world would probably be the same size as the vanilla wow world. This is btw something i've been missing from an MMORPG for years (since vanilla wow basicly). Why dont different races in a faction have different starting zones?
 
About the story.. in vanilla Wow there were plenty of small stories, no major story except that its post-war and the horde and alliance are still enemies. But you know there are the Dark Iron Dwarves, the Black Dragonflight, The Defias Brotherhood, the Hakkari Troll Tribe and much much more. Some of these are later made into bigger stories with raid or patch themes. Like the Blackrock Clan in BWL, the Old Gods and Silithid in AQ (which also made the previously dead zone Silithus into one of the most populated zones in the game) and ofcourse the Naxxramas patch which brought the elemental invasion.
 
Also there were huge areas in mid-lvl zones that were designated for lvl 60 world bosses. For example, in Duskwood there was this huge valley in the mountains where there were lvl 58-60 elite mobs and a world boss.... in the middle of a lvl 22-28 zone. Which was quite epic for newer players to find. Many games these days avoid this kind of thing because its discouraging for new players to walk into lvl 60 elites and die at lvl 20... and i understand that. But for me it was so *cupcake*ing cool seeing the lvl ?? elite mobs walking around. It made me excited to hit the max level and get to know what was in that place.
 
Vanilla wow was and still is an amazing game (i've played for 2 years on an instant 60 server and 2 years on a blizzlike 1x rates server... and before that i played vanilla from release to finish). Something else that developers these days think is tedious is something that made the vanilla WoW world feel huge. You didnt grind lvl 1-10 in one zone, lvl 11-15 in the next zone etc. For lvl 1-10 you could chose between different zones, lvl 11-20 you had to go to multiple zones over the world because just one of those zones wasnt enough to gain all those levels etc. Sure sometimes it sucked, for example when you rolled Night Elf and had to leave Ashenvale at around lvl 19 and take the boat to Menethil Harbour in Wetlands and then run to Loch Modan to get to your next quest hub. But this is also one of those things that made the world *cupcake*ing epic. A guy at a dock halfacross the worlds gave you a quest to go to the other half of the world and deliver something and there you found new quests and later on you notice "yay i've gained enough lvls to go back to that zone i was in before and continue the other half of the quests". You even picked up a few quests on the road, maybe met a few players to group with or saw some awesome high level player ride past you. 
 
This also included lots of travel through contested zones (neither horde nor alliance zone, aka pvp zone) so you might run into someone of the opposite faction and fight them.
 
I dont know why i started writing all that, i had something wise and constructive to say but i totally forgot it when i got my vanilla *cupcake* going... sorry.
 
Oh well, sadly gone are the days of low-mid level raids to enemy questhubs. Gone are the days exploring the world to get to a questhub rather than exploring the world to get free items or titles. Gone are the days where you actually had stuff to look forward to while leveling other than hitting 50. Example: Oh i cant wait untill i get 40 so i can buy myself a mount.
 
These days its all about making the game linear so any dumbass with the attentionspan like a goldfish on a shugar rush can follow the storyline and where to go next. And everything you do need to give you rewards that are upgrades. Every class has one type of weapon. Completing a quest gives you a choice between 4 different pieces of gear per class so no matter what spec or class you are you can get something that is an item upgrade for your class.
 
Oh yeah thats what i was going to write. So, i've played around 7+ years of vanilla wow over retail + private servers and i can still find quests that i had no idea existed. And still i've leveled 20+ characters to max levels over all races and classes.
 
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Tl;dr - Vanilla wow was awesome from 1-60 eventho you had to do lots of running, had no mounts and the questpath was split into 40 branches. Not just one huge line of quests. You completed a long quest... got some XP and god and a caster staff eventho you played warrior, but didnt care because each quest didnt have to be an upgrade to your gear. Shit wasnt designed to reward everyone equally for everything.... but that was part of the charm. Instead of having 1 quest where the reward is 12 different kinds of boots. You had 7 different quests with different rewards (perhaps not all boots, perhaps not all at the same levels... perhaps not even in the same zone).
 
Damn even my tl;dr is getting long... i hate you vanilla wow. I hate you because of how *cupcake*ing brilliant you were.
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The strain isnt an ebola outbreak tho. The strain has been active since even before the eldan were extinct. Its just only now that the Exiles and the Dominion notice their existance.
 
 
I dont think the WoW world is that much larger. If you remove 1/3rd of the starting zones. If there were 3 different starting areas with 2 zones and a capital per area for exiles and dominions... the Wildstar world would probably be the same size as the vanilla wow world. This is btw something i've been missing from an MMORPG for years (since vanilla wow basicly). Why dont different races in a faction have different starting zones?
 
About the story.. in vanilla Wow there were plenty of small stories, no major story except that its post-war and the horde and alliance are still enemies. But you know there are the Dark Iron Dwarves, the Black Dragonflight, The Defias Brotherhood, the Hakkari Troll Tribe and much much more. Some of these are later made into bigger stories with raid or patch themes. Like the Blackrock Clan in BWL, the Old Gods and Silithid in AQ (which also made the previously dead zone Silithus into one of the most populated zones in the game) and ofcourse the Naxxramas patch which brought the elemental invasion.
 
Also there were huge areas in mid-lvl zones that were designated for lvl 60 world bosses. For example, in Duskwood there was this huge valley in the mountains where there were lvl 58-60 elite mobs and a world boss.... in the middle of a lvl 22-28 zone. Which was quite epic for newer players to find. Many games these days avoid this kind of thing because its discouraging for new players to walk into lvl 60 elites and die at lvl 20... and i understand that. But for me it was so *cupcake*ing cool seeing the lvl ?? elite mobs walking around. It made me excited to hit the max level and get to know what was in that place.
 
Vanilla wow was and still is an amazing game (i've played for 2 years on an instant 60 server and 2 years on a blizzlike 1x rates server... and before that i played vanilla from release to finish). Something else that developers these days think is tedious is something that made the vanilla WoW world feel huge. You didnt grind lvl 1-10 in one zone, lvl 11-15 in the next zone etc. For lvl 1-10 you could chose between different zones, lvl 11-20 you had to go to multiple zones over the world because just one of those zones wasnt enough to gain all those levels etc. Sure sometimes it sucked, for example when you rolled Night Elf and had to leave Ashenvale at around lvl 19 and take the boat to Menethil Harbour in Wetlands and then run to Loch Modan to get to your next quest hub. But this is also one of those things that made the world *cupcake*ing epic. A guy at a dock halfacross the worlds gave you a quest to go to the other half of the world and deliver something and there you found new quests and later on you notice "yay i've gained enough lvls to go back to that zone i was in before and continue the other half of the quests". You even picked up a few quests on the road, maybe met a few players to group with or saw some awesome high level player ride past you. 
 
This also included lots of travel through contested zones (neither horde nor alliance zone, aka pvp zone) so you might run into someone of the opposite faction and fight them.
 
I dont know why i started writing all that, i had something wise and constructive to say but i totally forgot it when i got my vanilla *cupcake* going... sorry.
 
Oh well, sadly gone are the days of low-mid level raids to enemy questhubs. Gone are the days exploring the world to get to a questhub rather than exploring the world to get free items or titles. Gone are the days where you actually had stuff to look forward to while leveling other than hitting 50. Example: Oh i cant wait untill i get 40 so i can buy myself a mount.
 
These days its all about making the game linear so any dumbass with the attentionspan like a goldfish on a shugar rush can follow the storyline and where to go next. And everything you do need to give you rewards that are upgrades. Every class has one type of weapon. Completing a quest gives you a choice between 4 different pieces of gear per class so no matter what spec or class you are you can get something that is an item upgrade for your class.
 
Oh yeah thats what i was going to write. So, i've played around 7+ years of vanilla wow over retail + private servers and i can still find quests that i had no idea existed. And still i've leveled 20+ characters to max levels over all races and classes.
 
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Tl;dr - Vanilla wow was awesome from 1-60 eventho you had to do lots of running, had no mounts and the questpath was split into 40 branches. Not just one huge line of quests. You completed a long quest... got some XP and god and a caster staff eventho you played warrior, but didnt care because each quest didnt have to be an upgrade to your gear. Shit wasnt designed to reward everyone equally for everything.... but that was part of the charm. Instead of having 1 quest where the reward is 12 different kinds of boots. You had 7 different quests with different rewards (perhaps not all boots, perhaps not all at the same levels... perhaps not even in the same zone).
 
Damn even my tl;dr is getting long... i hate you vanilla wow. I hate you because of how *cupcake*ing brilliant you were.
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The only MMO that succeeded into making me enthralled into the story was SWTOR, and the class stories weren't even main stories, but more side stuff you happen to do in the world (plus the main complaint of that game was that it was a very good single player game, rather than a MMO).
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Uhh, as a Jedi Knight you end up killing the Emperor at the end... as a Sith you become a Council member from what i recall. That sounds pretty main story to me (and the big boss was your commander who goes rogue once the Emperor gets knocked out) :P
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I would like to marry this post and have its babies! But it`s not just Wildstar that`s a little too linear with the leveling process. Just look at the difference in freedom of exploration between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 3. It`s like they`re not even the same genre anymore at all. Maybe it`s just easier to design linear games or something.
Anyway, I think you actually agree a bit with the OP. Whether it was bigger or not isn`t so important. What is important is that after finishing noob central in WoW Classic you had like three to five different zones at any point from which to choose. Sick and tired of Redridge/Duskwood? Go to Ashenvale for a bit. Can`t stand one more second of Barrens chat? Take the zep and quest in Silverpine instead. And WoW actually managed to be more or less like that all the way to cap, with a few slow points along the way.
 
But yeah, I miss quest givers sending you to the ass end of space with a map that`s entirely grey. Some of it was a bit...esoteric,  like the Gnomeregan quest you get in the middle of Stonetalon. But great fun anyway. I am starting to think that MMORPGs actually need this sort of thing to integrate the game world and make it feel real. Racing from quest hub to quest hub gets a bit stale sometimes, although that`s all you get in WoW too these days. And the story was there in WoW, but it was hidden away in dialogues a little, but mainly in endless books only the biggest nerds every found and read. So the WoW story was entirely optional, and also hard to find, and spread out in the weirdest places. WS on the other hand tells you the story, whether you want to hear it or not.
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Well vanilla WoW didnt have a central story other than "the war between the alliance and the horde is over and the world is rebuilding itself, but they still hate eachother". But almost every *cupcake*ing character you met in vanilla wow had their own story. Like the rivalry between the farms in Elwynn Forest or Mankirk and his dead wife. Where is the "Mankirk's Wife" quest of Wildstar? :P
 
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But yea i still love Wildstar, there are few things about this game i dislike... but i see so many things that could have made this game even better. I still play this game, mostly because i can play it by using credd rather than have a subscription. I just hope some of the future drops will bring something that i've felt the game is missing :P
 
And about the Strain, in itself the Strain isnt a bad enemy or a bad story. I just think that they should've let us level to 50 without knowing about it. Have all the first dungeons and raids be Strain-free. Then drop a Strain patch and have it be kinda like the AQ opening event: 
Blighthaven is released as the new zone with new quests and rep grinds.
The combined forces of both factions on each server need to gather stuff to prepare for the war against the Strain.
Players at 50 can take a quest that starts a huge questline where we are introduces to the background of the strain and everything (pretty much the Drusera world story). The questline would also include the GA attunement thingy.
When all resources are gathered on a server (or when a certain timelimit runs out) players who have completed the questchain will be able to turn it in for a reward. When the first person turns it in Blighthaven is flooded with Strain monsters, when all those monsters are killed GA is made available for attuned players (perhaps the monsters even give some kind of rep reward to encourage non-raiding players to help kill them). The first player and every other player who turns in the quest within 8 hours gain a title + some item reward. Players who turn it in after 8+ hours only get the item reward.
BAM mega uber awesome stuff that involves the Strain and makes it feel like an actual "ebola outbreak thingy" and the biggest "Mystery" of Nexus is kept a mystery untill later on in the games life and is not explored at lvl 40.
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Uhh, as a Jedi Knight you end up killing the Emperor at the end... as a Sith you become a Council member from what i recall. That sounds pretty main story to me (and the big boss was your commander who goes rogue once the Emperor gets knocked out) :P
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I totally agree, except for the AQ event part, as that event was just horrible :P (it made the whole zone lag to where you couldn't do anything and some servers only finally got the event done after months while other servers had done it in a week) But some other kind of event would've been neat ;)
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If numbers is all that matters there's nothing stopping them by sub-dividing all the zones into 4 to claim 72 zones on release.
 
 
Supposedly there were alternate questing zones, but they were cut and will be brought back in some future drop/x-pack.
 
 
As for size of zones, do we really need more Whitevales?
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I totally agree, except for the AQ event part, as that event was just horrible :P (it made the whole zone lag to where you couldn't do anything and some servers only finally got the event done after months while other servers had done it in a week) But some other kind of event would've been neat ;)
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To be honest, I'd put all of the Strain and Drusera areas right there with "Silithus" in the "bad zones" department. They are all purple! Then all gold! Also, lots of enemies! It reminds me to Burning Steppes. Also inscribed in my memory as "Forever grey-land. Also lava."
 
It's also common with a lot of MMOs, though. The first Big Bad is just an homogenic form that transforms all territories into the most boring type of landscape the artists can think of. At least they are not plains, but seriously monotonous and boring. The fact that the strain is just a reskin of the Zerg/Tyranids manages to make it boring on the conceptual level, too, not just the design choices. The Entity as an enemy is pretty bad.
 
I wish MMOs moved away from the "All our players are the Chosen Ones are they will do Great Things" plot archetype.Can you do nice things with that? Interesting stories? Or at least fun ones? Of course you can. But not here. The Strain and all the variants of the "corruption" trope are just a shortcut to have a bad guy. "Here's a monster. It's bad because it spreads! Now kill it because it's bad!"
 
As for the lack of zones, yes, that's a huge problem. Wildstar is not very alt friendly already, and the lack of levelling paths just make it more obvious, more boring and... more "hardcore" I guess?	
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It's not just numbers - don't be silly. You can't deny that WS is short on zones and extremely short on leveling variety - in fact, it's practically nonexistent. Leveling paths really should not merge so quickly, if they even merge at all (would be nice if they didn't), and this goes both for between faction leveling paths and within. It is a huge pain for us altaholics. 
 
As for your last question - by all means, yes! Whitevale is quite varied aesthetically, which kept me from tiring of it the first time through, even though I was in the same zone for forever. Doesn't change the extreme linearity of leveling paths, though.
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See... I'm not sure Wildstar is "Short on zones" as it is LASER FOCUSED on efficiency.  There is very little back tracking or wasted space.  If you're not in a space with quest givers, you're in a space that's supposed to be overflowing with the corpses of NPCs.  You blow through zones with amazing, and somewhat alarming, speed. 
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In FFXI there was one levelling path.... Then the first expansion came out, and there was a few new levelling zones... then the next expansion came out, and there were a few more....
 
 
I suspect in some of the major drops over the next year some new levelling zones will be introduced to diversify the levelling paths.	
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 in some of the major drops over the next year
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