103670-10-days-on-nexus-a-review

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Well, almost ten days of /played. (unlike the rating. huehueheuehe) I wrote most of this a month earlier (28th of June) at 2 am when I was still actively playing and haven't done much in the game since. Sorry for any inaccuracies.So, WildStar is out for almost a month now and I feel like sharing my thoughts on the game after this arbitrary amount of time. This "review" will include story spoilers and criticism, so hold on to your butts.Since the game launched just after I graduated, I packed my bags and jumped on the first spaceship heading to Nexus. Full no-life ahead! Equipped with knowledge from the beta, my plan was to rush to level 50 as fast as possible and possibly score some realm first achievment along the way. Besides not being hardcore enough, my dreams of a realm first engineer were crushed because of entrance exams to a university to become an actual (network) engineer.LaunchAs far as MMO launches go, WildStar was one of the smoother ones. It took about 2 hours to get into the game and I didn't experience a single crash for the following 20 hours I spent glued to the screen.LevelingWell, it's certainly a leveling system of sorts. There is quests, and killing and gathering and killing and oh please make it stop. I'll be completely honest, I didn't read the quest texts. I didn't search for all the lore and only listened to the Datacubes.The leveling is one of the worst things in the game. It is repetitive, boring, grindy and not very enjoyable. Why?Because the context is missing. I don't know why I want to help some random schmuck who just got me out of Cryo. Why do I not have a choice not to help him? I'm a slowly dying zombie and a necessary evil of my faction. Before being zombified, I recall belonging to a pretty advanced society full of cocky assholes. This is totally something my character would do.I hear these Exiles talking about the Dominion as the cancer of the galaxy, but they have to be pretty awful at their job, if they - a self-proclaimed star-spanning empire, have a problem vanquishing a ragtag group of refugees & Co. Just sayin'.My character is just another face in the crowd for a very, very long time. Until it gets personal. Well, I got to 35 on the second day of head start, but the point still stands. The difference between standard quests and personal story is night and day. At level 35 my curiosity got the better of me and instead of grinding my balls off some more, I decided to visit this mysterious, sexy apparition. No regrets.Even though there is a lot of cheese, I liked Drusera when she didn't bail out on me just before a fight or told me how only I (and thousands of other adventurers going through that instance which she conveniently forgot to mention) can save the world. Building my own village was great! Also, wasn't the world story supposed to also be at Elder game? Best type of quests in the game and there's only like 8 of them. So far. Please do something about that.
And I know it is much more demanding to implement such content, but adding a more personal feel and possibly player choice to the questing would make a world of difference. Hell, the choice doesn't even have to affect the world for everyone!
 
Also, the last fight of the story quest so far (in the Technocore) is an extreme letdown and should be changed. That said, please make it replayable. The entire thing. Drusera can just zap your brain and dose you with massive amount of LSD so you relive the past in a hallucination or something.
 
Here's an idea for a quest hub (that I haven't thought through too much):
Exile perspectiveWhen you enter the zone, you are greeted by an NPC, let's call him Lucas. Lucas is an exile/human/medic/soldier and tells you about Dominion bombarding their camp. You get a quest to kill some Dominion scum on the way.As you move towards the exile camp, Yalea [exile/aurin/spellslinger/explorer] calls you, that she needs help getting a unit to safety. If you accept the quest and start the event, you make a run for your base. It is entirely up to you what route you will take. Will you try to stay out of sight? Go through a minefield? Fight the Dominion?The amount of soldiers surviving will affect the amount of XP you get and subsequently how many soldiers you will see at the camp. Those soldiers aren't really important so there ain't that much phasing involved.Now you get to camp. You get a quest to help the Exiles push the Dominion forces back. You have 3 options (have to choose 1):
Sabotage their supply routes (Gathering and planting mines)
Destroy the air support (Hacking/repairing cannons)
Weaken their troops (Good old fashioned killing? Poison? Cannons? Mines? Show your creativity for more XP!)
You finish the quest and return to base. Now Lucas got intel on the location of Dominion commander Ranfus while Yalea found an Eldan lab. You can only go with one or the other.If you choose to go with Lucas, you kill Ranfus in an epic battle and return to camp with the news that Dominion is making a run for it. You also found some Exiles prisoners that you freed. Remeber that quest with the 3 options? Now you do one of the 2 quests left - only the context changes. You are pushing them back instead of being on the verge of annihilation. Small cosmetic changes can be made to accomodate for such change.After you push them back, you come back to the camp. A horrified explorer dashes into the camp and tells you Yalea got captured by the Eldan constructs and you need to save her.You and Lucas get to the Exolab and find Yalea locked up in an Eldan cage. After killing the constructs and vanquishing the evil caretaker, Yalea is free... or dead. Depending on how well you did with the puzzle. You probably tripped some security alarms on the way, so you gotta do a little jumping puzzle and mess with some crystals to get out fo the lab.You do the final quest of those 3 mentioned above to deal the final blow to the dominion and move on to the next quest hub.If you go with Yalea, you pay a friendly visit to an ancient Exo lab. First, you must figure out on how to open the entrance. After a few jumping puzzles and messing around with some crystals, you get in. There is some old Eldan equipment and the very friendly caretaker who is ONLY TRYING TO MAKE YOUR DEATH AS PAINFUL AS POSSIBLE. You kill all the robots and find this sweet eldan weapon nobody knows how to use. On the way out, you discover a secret door and some caged exiles prisoners you can set free.After returning to the camp, a horrified soldier asks for help - Lucas was captured! You and Yalea, who just figured out how to use that Eldan piece of junk gather some troops and go on a suicidal rescue mission. You find Lucas, who is imprisoned and tortured. If you don't free him soon - or at least find a way to kill his torturer, he will die.You kill Ranfus with Yalea's help and possibly save Lucas.You do the final quest of those 3 mentioned above to deal the final blow to the dominion and move on to the next quest hub.So. There is player choice. Each choice makes a subtle change and none of the content is wasted by it. You don't just mindlessly kill shit with no visible change, you can see how many troops you have saved. You can see if there's only Yalea or only Lucas in the camp. Or possibly both? You can also see the notably higher XP gain when you do it right.You made some decisions and those decisions affected the world/your character.There is a problem, however - what if you're in a party? And what if we make different choices? Well, for each stage you can always get the quest reward only once, regardless of the choices.But, if you really want to, you can assist the other person with doing their part because phasing. Now if we wanted to get really fancy, we could have things like systems that recognizes that you helped your friend out prevoiusly so you don't have to do as much once you get to that quest choice later.Or other stuff. Hell, I'm not even a game designer yet. Somebody could figure it out!
And if quests like these are too much to ask for, maybe do something like that in the personal story? Or choices in daily quests slowly affecting a zone? *wink wink nudge nudge* One more problem with questing.. is that it feels lonely, unless you have a guild/friends. My suggestion would be to add mob tagging to the game. Yes, there would be a LOT of griefing, but it would encourage people to actually group up and do stuff with strangers. And it's less hardcore than removing the dungeon finder (which I would also greatly appreciate for many reasons). AdventuresI hate these things with a burning passion. Not because the idea of adventures is bad - it is quite intriguing. Though I find the execution - lacking. You get a Bronze medal, Carbine. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)In the Adventures flick, there are mentioned choices and the necessity to utilize more than just combat skills. Well yes, then there's the googling skill you need so you don't spend hours in Malgrave trail royally pissed off at that one cupcaking caravan member got bugged again and you have to restart the damn thing all over to get a gold medal.Hey, that's just the loot. Now with the recent changes, this loot problem is going away. But wait, there's more!The second problem is, that the adventures don't really offer interesting choices. The stories aren't that well presented either. Most of the time, the choices really just come down to what shit you kill on what route. The only remotely interesting thing in Adventures is Area 77 in Malgrave Trail.I don't care if the meatbags anywhere survive, all I care about is the loot. Now, there is justification for the lack of engaging story - it is an Eldan test. But the choices... more interesting ones would be very appreciated.Here's my take on actually no, I'm far too lazy to write an example adventure. Even the quest hub was a pretty big surprise considering it's almost 3 in the morning. I might come up with something later, though.DungeonsYes, they are hard. Much more challenging than in any other MMO I've encountered so far. I often got a feeling that the trash was far more of a challenge than the actual bosses, especially at Veteran Difficulty. And don't get me wrong, banging my head against the wall after the neverending grindfest of Adventures was still a welcome change. However I would greatly appreciate getting more gold than I have to spend on repairing my gear afterwards, among other things.I am completely capable of doing a dungeon on Vet. It is not that hard for me and I'm used to wiping. I enjoy hardcore content and hardcore encounters. I will be completely honest here - I think the dungeons are badly designed. Why?Because from the 200+ member guild I'm in, most of which are former WoW raiders, there is about 20% of the guild willing to do the attunement quest in a reasonable time purely because of the dungeon part.And It's not that it's hard. It's just tedious. Trash is called trash for a reason. The base population, aside from lore reasons, serves as something that the players can relax on between boss battles. But when you make the trash require extreme caution and 100% focus, it becomes like additional bossfights. You can't relax until you've beaten the final boss. Or during runbacks to the boss after the wipe. And you absolutely cannot relax while aiming for a silver run. You gotta haul ass. But I'm kind of fine with that part.In my opinion, the feeling of tediousness is what makes the PvE less attractive, not the difficulty. The other part of that is sub-par rewards. There should be a clear distinction between adventure and dungeon gear. A suggestion for future dungeons - make the trash easier and the bosses harder.My favorite boss encounters so far are Spiritmother Selene, Aethros and Mordecai Redmoon.Considering my expectations, I find the dungeons - satisfactory. Silver medal.PvPI never really did PvP in any MMO... until WildStar. And I have to say, I did not expect to enjoy myself that much. Running around in a Battleground as a Medic and laughing while you engage in the little battles erupting all over the map is the best thing ever.I'm not gonna go too deep on PvP, because I only got to level 17 on my Medic so far.The PvP certainly impressed me - the thing I didn't even expect to do or enjoy. Although watching some of Zybak's videos, it is pretty broken at endgame.Housingtl;dr version: I like it. Would like to see some interactivity be possible, though. For example: Lamps you can turn off. A set of items: switch + forcefield. Instanced playground to make your own dungeon out of- Okay this is getting out of hand, let's move on.CommunityMost of the players I came across were generally friendly. Being in a guild also helped quite a bit, so I didn't have to deal with PUGs too much. As far as the ingame community goes, I'm completely happy.Now we come to the worst part... which actually isn't that bad anymore. However, if you still want to read about my past frustrations, here:
Forums. I remember being in the beta. Almost everyone was nice to each other. People were friendly and civilised. Nobody mislabeled criticism (however emotionally charged) as trolling.Here's a PSA to all the people who dismiss criticism as trolling or complain about complainers etc.:Please continue to do so. I feed on your tears and I'm greatly amused by your vain attempts.When people complain and point out problems, it's because they care about the game and WANT TO ENJOY IT.And if they're just trolls or negative nancies, the only thing you'll do when you respond with your complaints about complainers, kitten pictures and other bulls**t is give them the attention they crave. Bravo! You lose either way.Being butthurt over criticism, even if it's blunt, badly written or emotionally charged - that doesn't help anyone.The only thing you're doing is trying to put out a fire by igniting your own ass. Your illogical approach to solving the problem of general negativity brings me great amount of malicious joy.Yes, I am trying to make some of you angry. Mostly because I probably won't change the way most people think, so I might as well put a little trolling in here for good measure. Apparently I'm still 10 years old, mentally. Yay for spite.Seriously though - if somebody posts something that has no value, nothing changes by adding more stuff of no value. Please don't be that guy.
Warlords of NexusSo, there is an expansion coming for this game called World of Warcraft. I'm sure you've heard of it. I have never really understood cheerleading for companies and hating on the other product. It's better to see them go after each other's necks and pick the side that offers you more stuff. Just sayin'. (Edit: And WildStar is currently far ahead, at least for me.)
 
tl;dr - In my opinion...
Player choice and mob tagging would make questing much more fun and less isolating experience.
Adventures need to offer more interesting choices.
The difficulty of dungeons is fine, but variation and balance tuning is required to make them feel less tedious.
Personal story doesn't really continue or expand at endgame much and should start at earlier levels.
PvP is fun, but has issues at endgame
Housing could use some additional interactivity
WildStar is currently looking better than WoD
So I hope you got something out of this overly long "review" of WildStar. English is not my first language and I ain't even sorry for the grammar. See ya on Nexus, cupcakes!-Pyrhos, 50 Mordesh Engineer on Eko (EU)	
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A suggestion for future dungeons - make the trash easier and the bosses harder.
 
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there are mini dungeons you can have on your home plot already .. they are fabkits called  : EXPEDITIONS   .. they begin at level 35 i believe. 
 
alot of them are super fun and scale to number of people in group and level.	
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			Completely agreed with the last spoiler... right on and rock on... couldn't have said it better myself. B)	
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*runs down checklist* *gives A*  Good critique.   You should give lessons.  Good luck in University!
 
(You would have had an A+, but that last spoiler.. a little trolling the anti-troll.  I got a kick out of it.. but.. rules are rules. :) )	
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there are mini dungeons you can have on your home plot already .. they are fabkits called : EXPEDITIONS .. they begin at level 35 i believe. 
 
alot of them are super fun and scale to number of people in group and level.
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Everything that you dislike about the game is an MMO standard.  You've just changed the context so that you "hate" it that much more because you don't understand your protagonist role in the story.  What MMO doesn't put you in this position?  Why are ALL Horde members fighting for some dude they never met?  Why are Alliance ALL doing the same?  You make a choice at the beginning of the game that dictates the main 'story' objectives and how you're going to apply yourself to them.  It's not required of you to do anything whatsoever if you just want to go sit in a corner and sulk.  
 
Can the next person who writes one of these "reviews" be a little objective?  If you hate the genre going into the game, you're not going to like it coming out.  Though I'm inclined to believe you went into this one already hating it because the next WoW expansion won't drop for three months...	
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Everything that you dislike about the game is an MMO standard.  You've just changed the context so that you "hate" it that much more because you don't understand your protagonist role in the story.
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I would actually like to see less trash in future dungeons and more challenges. Like doing something that doesn't involve tanking and spanking.
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Just because....
 	
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Could you give an example of what that would be ? :)
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I wish I could, but I can't think of stuff. Maybe something like Puzzles and problem solving stuff in Dungeons.
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GW2 had an entertaining maze with deadly cannons and lazers, and players had to pick up mirror shields to reflect lasers into specific targets in their recent Thaumanova(sp?) Reactor one-time story fractal. Quite nice.
 
I'd like to see more jumping puzzles, especially group oriented ones where paths branch and a lone player has to sit on a switch/hold a bridge open for another, etc. and paths eventually reconverge.
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TL:DR?
 
All i saw was an advert about WoD at the bottom where a TL:DR should be :(	
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TL:DR?
 
All i saw was an advert about WoD at the bottom where a TL:DR should be :(
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TL;DR section added.
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I'd like to see more jumping puzzles, especially group oriented ones where paths branch and a lone player has to sit on a switch/hold a bridge open for another, etc. and paths eventually reconverge.
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			How about the second part only? "paths branch and a lone player has to sit on a switch/hold a bridge open for another, etc. and paths eventually reconverge."	
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How about the second part only? "paths branch and a lone player has to sit on a switch/hold a bridge open for another, etc. and paths eventually reconverge."
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No. No no no no no no no no NO.
 
Tuck all the jump puzzles you want into Explorer, the path for people who like jump puzzles.
 
Do not use them to gate actual relevant content.
 
I've seen half an hour wasted on the petty little jumps in Blackfathom Deeps.
 
Given the monstrous latency detection issues with telegraphs, let's not add that to Wildstar.
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"The leveling is one of the worst things in the game. It is repetitive, boring, grindy and not very enjoyable."
 
Totally dis-agree.	
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"The leveling is one of the worst things in the game. It is repetitive, boring, grindy and not very enjoyable."
 
Totally dis-agree.
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Everything that you dislike about the game is an MMO standard. 
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"I didn't read the quest texts. I didn't search for all the lore and only listened to the datacubes"
 
"The leveling is one of the worst things in the game...why? because the context is missing"
 
Ugh seriously? Wildstar doesn't have a set lore like Warcraft or Star wars, its up to you to immerse yourself in the story. The dominion is a massive empire, correct, but they are spread thin. They have to devote resources to blockading planets, and generally manage the entire galaxy under their boot heel.
 
The graph does indeed show solo instances as elder game. But there is something odd about that as shiphand missions are also solo instances and do not have an elder game component. Since early beta we were made aware that the Drusera stuff would start at level 35.
 
As a Mordesh you owe a lot to the Exiles, If not for them you'd still be a insane zombie ravaging your homeworld. Not to mention the Dominion's betrayal.
 
Their are plenty of zone story quests for you to do where you are the hero. Nevermind those other players, that is an old MMO trope. Ten years ago my friends and I made those lame jokes "ha everyone is a chosen one".
 
More quests are being added. In fact, drop 3 is said to centre around the Entity.
 	
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It's not gating. Anybody that can avoid boss telegraphs should have the basic hand-eye co-ordination for jumping puzzles. In fact, it's been a well-known, decade-old fact that you can walk around the Blackfathom Deeps jumps by hugging the cave wall, in the original and revamped versions. No joke.
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