120678-so-i-went-back-and-played-prius-onlinewildstar-related

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Years ago game named Prius Online was released under a F2P model that was very much classic MMORPG design. Very oldschool with many short comings, but what it lacked in variety there was something it had that has yet to be matched by any other MMORPG.(how is this WildStar related fran? gimme a sec and ill get to that)
 
I played Prius a lot, on 2 different versions of the game. The Taiwanese and US release.
I've played the same leveling paths, at least 15~even 20+times by now, and even then, I never once found myself bored, rather I found that I didn't want to stop playing.
 
So last night I decided to play on the last remaining prius server, the Prius Anima Server.
And again A new character, same path as before, as I've done 15~20 times before, and the same thing happened. 6 7 8 12 hours passed, long after I was suppose to be asleep. I had to make myself stop, It was just like old times.
 
And then I realized what it was about WildStar that it lacked.
 
Prius feels like an immersive adventure, it feels like a world untouched by us and a world not like our own.
WildStar does not.
WildStar almost feels like a joke that was told too many times.
Prius's questing, and fluidity as well as Questing system is absolutely fluid and tweaked to an incredibly impressive degree. The quest tracker, quest log, map and minimap system are all so well designed and work so well together, that it blows away every other MMORPG's questing experience. All of these little systems, everything related to you being part of an adventure feels like each element was carefully crafted to match one another. Like clockwork, the quests come quickly, they lead you flawlessly to each location you want to be, and the transport system guides you everywhere you want to be. There's no feel of being lost or lack of a direction to follow.
I also have to say, Prius made amazingly good usage of its zones, by the time you left them it felt like your work there was done, that it was your time to move along, and that your time there was well spent.
 
In contrast, WildStar is so clunky and annoying with it's questing that I absolutely understand why people say it's boring, uninspired and they'd rather do everything they can to avoid it.
 
In WildStar you get Exp penalized for being overleveled of a quest, How did such a ridiculously stupid design limitation get placed into the game?
the questing areas feel scattered and seem to have next to no real flow. It's really hard to really get into a flow for questing in WildStar
Celestian was alright but Algoroc was just awful.
It feel like running around like you were someone's secretary.
 
The map and minimap system just don't flow well together, and the ghost map is unfortunately bound to the world map location.
the pointers for the quest tracker don't appear on the minimap and the pointer above your head is nearly pointless.
 
The quest descriptions are fairly bland and it's not even worth the bother to look at them.
Also why is the Quest item inventory hidden in a random drop down semi window that isn't obvious?
 
And the zone utilization, Galeras and below were meh, and left something to be desired. Whitevale was way way too overdone and was probably the most annoying and irritating leveling zone I had ever seen in my entire 11+ years of MMORPGs. Seriously whitevale sucks, please for the love of nexus, fix this freaking zone.
Then there's Farside/biomes and above that felt under utilized. Especially Landing site bravo, what a fun zone that was simply over too quickly. After getting out of Landing Site bravo I was literally thinking "Wait that's it? No way..." the Biomes, so horribly under utilized. Really what a waste of your time carbine to make these areas and we blazed through them in no time.
 
Then there's Wilderrun, One of the most beautiful areas if any MMORPG, and it was pretty ok, but again it was blazed past like nothing.
 
Malgrave felt fairly well utilized, but I think that's only because a good part of the zone is dedicated to end game sorts of things(R12).
 
The grimvault areas were very cool and it was the 2nd part of the game that felt more like an adventure to be played, When Drusera got involved and those quests inside the ship, that was phenomenal, then for me at least, I hit level 50 in the room with Drusera(with the black backdrop, was flawless for me). then the post max level areas that openned up afterwards felt repetative of the past and uninspired.
 
But through out the entire game, zones felt under utilized, went by too fast and were bland.
 
It's probably far too late to give feed back or hope for any changes to questing, it's already said and done and too far ingrained of a problem that can't be fixed.
WoW's questing would have been nice, if not for having to look up half the damned quests up in WowHead and it while I never refered to Jabbithole for any of WildStar's quests, there's some quests that I felt "who the hell would even think of that?"
 
Not to mention the party based problems with WildStar's questing, where some items/pick ups/kills/drops count for only one player, or all players or maybe even instanced per player oor.... It's completely clunky and it's not at all user friendly or consistent.
 
In the end going back to a classic MMO I realized the thing that felt most "wrong" in WildStar, and that is it doesn't feel like an adventure.
 
 
the one real positive of WildStar that I can attribute is the Dungeons and Raids.
Whom ever worked on these dungeons and raids, These are by far the most fun and interesting dungeons I've ever seen. Prius's dungeons are a plausable 2nd, but they hardly required the skill and coordination that wildstar does.
(note: The adventures are freaking annoying and not fun at all, except maybe the first one)
The dungeons are fun enough and interesting enough to play over and over again, just for shits and giggles. Even if there's little reward for doing so, it's still quite enjoyable to repeat.
 
Genetic Archives, what a fantastic and fun experience that was. From X89 to Ohmna, it was such a pleasure to play through. Ohmna was easily my favorite fight by far. X89 was cool, Phageborn convergance was really impressive.
 
But really Genetic Archives was a blast.
And unlike most of the rest of WildStar, GA and the dungeons actually feel like I'm taking part of an adventure.
 
Defile, Blighthaven were really disappointing, Crimson wasn't to bad for being a daily exclusive zone, but holy crap Northern wastes is so bad that actively avoid it as much as I can.
 
Omnicore would be nice except Bell walker talks to much, and there's no way to skip it, and it really feels forced.
 
 
I've had a really hard time staying really interested in working on an Alt in WildStar through leveling. It doesn't seem to draw me in enough to let me pay attention for more than an hour before I get back on my main. Yet with prius I had run the 1~25 paths so many times I could do those quests in my sleep.
 
In the end, WildStar doesn't feel at all like an adventure until Veteran dungeons.
 
If there's anything that said that I hope gets taken into account, I really hope that if WildStar ever gets new level cap expanding content that Carbine takes great care an diligence to make sure it's not something that's consumed in a day or 2 and is a waste of effort on their end.
 
There was so much more You(Carbine) could have done with your leveling content, but in the end it ended being no better than just a prequel to the game we are all playing now.	
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			I just googled Prius Online and it does seem like a very nice game, at least graphics wise. I'd give it a go if I didn't play so many different games already. And yeah questing in WS is boring and I think we need a very dark, dim coloured zone to spice things up because there's too any bright, colourful zones already. Imho swtor has the most enjoyable questing, WS questing, in my opinion, is like what WoWs questing was in BC	
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In WildStar you get Exp penalized for being overleveled of a quest, How did such a ridiculously stupid design limitation get placed into the game?
the questing areas feel scattered and seem to have next to no real flow. It's really hard to really get into a flow for questing in WildStar
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I just googled Prius Online and it does seem like a very nice game, at least graphics wise. I'd give it a go if I didn't play so many different games already. And yeah questing in WS is boring and I think we need a very dark, dim coloured zone to spice things up because there's too any bright, colourful zones already. Imho swtor has the most enjoyable questing, WS questing, in my opinion, is like what WoWs questing was in BC
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So your compairing a game with graphics from the 90s, animations that look poorly done, bascilly a standard "WoW clone" to a game that its only real issue with now is the devs are playing catch up?
 
I honestly dont understand the point of this post. Wildstar is leaps and bounds a head of that game....Sure it has issues but compairing the 2 is like trying to compare a car to a airplane.	
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So your compairing a game with graphics from the 90s, animations that look poorly done, bascilly a standard "WoW clone" to a game that its only real issue with now is the devs are playing catch up?
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Precisely. The questing in the "graphics from the 90s" game has a noticeably superior experience than the arguably contemporary Wildstar. Somebody at Carbine grabbed an encyclopedia to do their book report and came up with a C-.
 
 
A BMW i8 is a nice looking car with tons of tech, but is apparently a very poor EV.  IMO, sacrificing story and storytelling to focus on super flashy graphics has done a grave disservice to the CRPG genre.
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I will say that Wildstar needs tweaking in regards to quests. As individual quests they're pretty nice for what they are, but as mentioned they don't flow very well. In the games current state you often end up with people that fall into two categories:
 
1)PEople do everything and become over leveled for the content which slows them down further due to the experience penalties of doing such.
2) You do the faster route of focusing on world/region/zone story and many people will actually run out of quests and "running out" at 48.
 
For people who are new  they tend to fall into the first category and easily get bored as normal dungeons/adventures are much more rare and PvP almost never happens sub 50 to break up questing. Also new players or people that don't know how to do the faster route effectively often I myself will have to sit down with them and go "did you do X episode?" because they often miss quite a bit along the way if they don't know what to look for.
 
The level 48 thing happens quite a bit to people doing the faster route and then the hurdle becomes 48 to 49 as dailies start at 49 and one zone can get you through to 50.
 
In a way I'd summarize questing as "clunky" right now.
 
With that said my understanding is that in drop 4 they're revisiting the questing experience for leveling players, but I'll honestly admit I'm quite hard pressed(I will be in my free time) to want to level to 50 on the PTR to see what has been done to this experience exactly. I've noticed some small changes in drop 3 that will help leveling players, but I think it needs more.	
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			Quests are your only choice, unless you manage to get 4 consistent people on at the same time as you to do dungeons	
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Quests are your only choice, unless you manage to get 4 consistent people on at the same time as you to do dungeons
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So your compairing a game with graphics from the 90s, animations that look poorly done, bascilly a standard "WoW clone" to a game that its only real issue with now is the devs are playing catch up?
 
I honestly dont understand the point of this post. Wildstar is leaps and bounds a head of that game....Sure it has issues but compairing the 2 is like trying to compare a car to a airplane.
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			i think the goal of most posters on this forum theses days is to see how close they can get to word cap in every post,	
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i think the goal of most posters on this forum theses days is to see how close they can get to word cap in every post,
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The last time I payed attention to quest was when I first started to play. I stopped after that.
I can't say that much about quest since I never really focus on them but I do agree about the map not snapping back to you and the quest tracker.  The only reason I am able to level my alts is cause of the Drusera instances and some of the quest starting in Wilderun.	
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+1 can we get a TL;DR
 
there is no way all those words are needed to explain your point (Crosses Fingers*).
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@OP
 
you are probably right when you said it is too late to make changes to leveling areas. however i did notice you mentioned some of the UI designs and how they break immersion.
 
one of the big things that separates wildstar from that old mmo (or atleast i think, havent played it) is that wildstars ui is terrible and un-creative. absolutely no time was spent on it. it looks clunky, it takes up massvie potions or unneeded space whenever you open a window and the style is just terrible. what is the worst atrocity of all? the map. never in a game have i felt like it was just was just seperate dimensions divided by a loadscreen. i have no idea what this damn planet looks like or how all these land masses fit. its ugly and unwieldy i dont even know where zone are in relation to other zones. when i want to check i have to go through all 4 of those dumb hexagon things checking to see which one has the zone i was looking for. when i did questing in farside i didnt even know i was on a moon, i literally thought it was just a testing zone on the planet because the map is so horrid.
 
i feel like wildstar got real lazy with their game and used addon support as a scapegoat for their laziness. does anyone even go vinalla in wildstar and have no addons? nope. questing blows without addons, ui blows, party frames blow, everything that is base wildstar blows and has been replaced by addons. i know im bashing wildstar pretty hard here but this is just one of those things i just dont like when games forgo effort because of the existence of player generated stuff.
 
TL;DR: wildstars stuff blows because they got lazy when they realized players would make addons to fix it for them	
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@OP
 
you are probably right when you said it is too late to make changes to leveling areas. however i did notice you mentioned some of the UI designs and how they break immersion.
 
one of the big things that separates wildstar from that old mmo (or atleast i think, havent played it) is that wildstars ui is terrible and un-creative. absolutely no time was spent on it. it looks clunky, it takes up massvie potions or unneeded space whenever you open a window and the style is just terrible. what is the worst atrocity of all? the map. never in a game have i felt like it was just was just seperate dimensions divided by a loadscreen. i have no idea what this damn planet looks like or how all these land masses fit. its ugly and unwieldy i dont even know where zone are in relation to other zones. when i want to check i have to go through all 4 of those dumb hexagon things checking to see which one has the zone i was looking for. when i did questing in farside i didnt even know i was on a moon, i literally thought it was just a testing zone on the planet because the map is so horrid.
 
i feel like wildstar got real lazy with their game and used addon support as a scapegoat for their laziness. does anyone even go vinalla in wildstar and have no addons? nope. questing blows without addons, ui blows, party frames blow, everything that is base wildstar blows and has been replaced by addons. i know im bashing wildstar pretty hard here but this is just one of those things i just dont like when games forgo effort because of the existence of player generated stuff.
 
TL;DR: wildstars stuff blows because they got lazy when they realized players would make addons to fix it for them
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+1 can we get a TL;DR
 
there is no way all those words are needed to explain your point (Crosses Fingers*).
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@ Fran
 
This isn't meant as an attack to our OP, so my apologies if it comes across as that. I am just curious regarding your thoughts.
 
If you like WS so much as stated above, then why do you attack it in your original post? Or is it that you hated the lvling process, but love the end game content? 
 
If that is so then I would need to say that this is just your personal opinion of the lvling content. Myself personally, I love it. Algoroc is one of my favorite zone out of all the mmo's , but as with yourself, this is just my opinion.
 
Again apologies if it seems like i'm attacking your thought. I promise i'm not, just after some clarification.
 
Curiosity killed the cat and all that jazz...........or even better, the Chua *evil grin*
 
Cheers
Kory	
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If you like WS so much as stated above, then why do you attack it in your original post? Or is it that you hated the lvling process, but love the end game content?
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From another thread
 
 
Liking/loving/Having enthusiasm for something does not automatically mean you agree with everything so short sightedly and single as if it is all flawless.
I'm critical of WildStar because it is important.
Without criticism, nothing can improve and all problems will remain left in the dark.
 
 
What I see in WildStar is sort of how someone see's a child wasting their own potential.
It has the capability to be something great, something fantastic, but it will never get there if never give out what our concerns are.
 
WildStar could easily have been a potentially powerful eSports platform, WildStar is a VERY strong PVE platform, but a lot of it's PVE suffers in favor of making raids and dungeons more interesting.
 
WildStar made mistakes, but it doesn't make it a bad game, it just gives it potential to fix them, and improve.
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			Wildstar is missing places to farm for valuable signs etc at a reasonable drop rate	
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I just think of...
 	
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I just think of...
 
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			pretty sure wildstar's goal is to trace the steps of vanilla WoW including every horrible mistake a century later.At least that's how it feels, so many things that should just be a given are completely lacking.It's very odd and watching the defenders of it quoting "WoW took X amount of time to get it right" is so out of place.WoW was pioneering a new way to do MMO's, of course it took them time to figure things out.Wildstar is just stumbling through the things WoW had to learn firsthand like it was completely unable or unwilling to learn from it's predecessor	
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So your compairing a game with graphics from the 90s, animations that look poorly done, bascilly a standard "WoW clone" to a game that its only real issue with now is the devs are playing catch up?
 
I honestly dont understand the point of this post. Wildstar is leaps and bounds a head of that game....Sure it has issues but compairing the 2 is like trying to compare a car to a airplane.
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