148378-wildstar-first-impressionsshould-you-play-it

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So after playing this game since free to play and hovering around the forums, I think it's time that I put my opinion out there. These are not facts, mind you, just what I think the game does great, and where it fall slightly short. Let's just hop right in.
 
 
How I heard about this game: I actually first saw it as an ad on Youtube, and I had never heard of the game prior. Not sure if some benevolent force or Google tracking are to blame, but it marks the very first time I've ever actually been swayed by advertisement on Youtube. The ad caught my attention, and kept it long enough to let me see until the end. I ALMOST skipped it because I thought it was going to be another MOBA, a genre I really dislike (Save for Smite). I was thrilled to see it was an MMORPG. Of course, I couldn't help but look it up, and Wildstar has, within a few months, climbed to my #1 spot for favorite game.
 
 
My Experience with MMOs: I have a small amount of experience with other MMOs, but I simply never got into them. I'm not going to mention which one I played here, but it's one that I'm sure everyone here has played or at least heard of. The reason I disliked this previous MMO is because of the combat, mainly. It felt so boring. Sure, I got to click a rabbit and press 1 on my keyboard and man, that arbitrary cast time and unassuming sound effect really brought upon a special kind of despair. I HATE games in which I feel like I'm issuing orders, rather than controlling the character myself.
 
What I mean is, games where I have minimal control over the characters are not going to be spelling a good time to me. I don't want to press a button and have my character automatically lock on and shoot the enemy, never actually missing the attack unless a STAT decides it should.
 
 
The Combat System: The combat in this game is amazing. I love the freedom to aim how I want and do things how I please. If I want to shoot a wall, I'm totally allowed to. It makes me feel like I'm CONTROLLING my character, rather than telling him to "shoot this enemy". It feels free, and it feels fun. It also feels more skill-based than relying on stats. In Wildstar, if you miss your attack, it's your fault. Not your 95% hit rate and RNG deciding on whether the attack connected or not. Overall, the game feels fast-paced, very streamlined, and a whole heck of a lot of fun.
 
TLDR: Wildstar spells a good time to me, with M-U-R-D, E-R-N-O-N-S-T-O-P.
 
 
The Questing System: In short, I like it. It does suffer from a lack of variety sometimes, but so does this previous MMO I keep bringing up. While quests can be a bit tedious at times, Carbine did something that amazed me. These little minigames combined with questing make it a whole lot more fun. My personal favorite is the "Simon Says"-esque light game. This little thing is a whole hell of a lot more fun than "press F to decrypt" and waiting 7 seconds while a bar fills. If you fail, once again, it's your fault. I definitely like this system, and I kinda want to see more minigame-esque things like this.
 
 
The Game World: It's great. It looks nice, its fun to roam around, and it just looks so nicely made. Whoever at Carbine was responsible for the map design, you're my hero. The game looks and feels great. It feels new, and I love the environments. Not much to be said here, but there's a lot to see.
 
However, there are so many secrets in the game world it blows my mind. I love the sense of discovery when I find that glowing crack in the ground with the magnifying glass icon. Sometimes it pays out with a boring buff machine thingy, but sometimes you get to go to a fancy little mini-dungeon thing, which is so cool. My heart skips a beat whenever I see one, and I love the little mini boss fights you can find occasionally.
 
Occasionally you find some floating chest with a special item or dye or something. Overall, it encourages exploration of the game world, and I want to see MOAR.
 
 
Optimization: This is where Wildstar falls a little bit short. Some areas are a little choppy and some AMD users have issues running the game. Overall, however, the game is FAR from unplayable. While a few things here and there cause a dip in frames, nothing outright makes the game unenjoyable. I've seen games in my time with absolutely ABHORRENT optimization. Wildstar does have a few kinks, but if you have a decent computer, it should be alright.
 
I am running a NVidia GT 640 from 2012. I will be upping to a NVidia GTX 960 soon, so we'll have to see how things change.
 
 
IS IT DEAD?!: As far as I can see, the game is FAR from dead, guys. This is coming from someone who has a huge amount of hours in Spiral Knights, a game that has a peak player count of around 600. In fact, just in the past 48 hours, I've met a good 20+ new players that I've talked to and even done a few quests with. Some of which who have not played an MMO before. You guys expect the game to have millions of players in the first week or something. Wildstar, for all intents and purposes, is a NEW game. And it just RECENTLY went free-to-play. Give it time, let it come streamline. I've seen an increase in players, personally. Carbine isn't like Valve or something, which already have a massive established audience. If anything, they're starting to dig their way in. Some of you guys are basically poking a sleeping baby and wondering "why it's dead". Dawg, it's not dead. Give it time to live before you call it dead.
 
 
The Free to Play Element: Having not played the game previous to the FTP release, I can't speak for what it was like before. However, I can easily say that this is the MOST free-to-play game I've ever played. Seriously. People flip out over dyes being 10$, dawg, the game is so free, you can even get a signature account for free, just by playing the game and farming the platinum to buy a C.R.E.D.D.. Basically everything is buyable in-game with Omnibits, a FREE currency earned by playing the game. I hate to break it to you, but Carbine and NCSoft need to make money somehow. Don't flip out when they make a dye a high price. 
 
Honestly, sometimes I feel BAD for being a FTP in this game. You can get so much for free just by playing the game, honestly I feel like the game is a little TOO free-to-play, but I'm not a marketing specialist, so if it works, it works.
 
 
The Housing: Oh man. It's amazing. It's everything I could ever want in a player-housing feature. It works, it's nice, and it functions. It has so much freedom it's crazy. If I want to live inside a giant cardboard box on top of a pine tree, I'm allowed to. Freedom is huge when it comes to housing, and Carbine hit the nail right on the head. 
 
 
What I like:
-The Auction House
-The Combat
-The Exploration Aspect
-The Races
-The love that went into this game
 
 
What I feel needs to be fixed/changed:
-Needs a tad more optimization
-Maybe a few new animations here and there
-The forums need to be less toxic, seriously.
-Maybe some love on the Dominion side, Carbine? <3
 
 
TLDR: Play it, it's freaking great.
 
 
 
There it be, M8. That's what I think of Wildstar. I'm sure I'm only 20 minutes away from 10 people telling me I'm wrong and I should stop playing, which is a shame. The forums are so toxic, it seems.
 
Sorry dawg, I like games, and I like Wildstar. 
 
#drakenmasterrace
			
				
	Edited December 21, 2015 by Worrox	
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Ah cmon man! Its not that we think your opinion is wrong.. its just that we don't give a crap about it!
 
Like seriously, not even slightly :D
			
				
	Edited December 21, 2015 by Kebs	
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IS IT DEAD?!: As far as I can see, the game is FAR from dead, guys. This is coming from someone who has a huge amount of hours in Spiral Knights, a game that has a peak player count of around 600. 
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Nice post with good comments =) I'm following the trend with my experiences, and let more people follow?:)
 
How I heard about this game: I have spent many years on the forums of mmo-champion. First it was mainly for wow, but during Cata it went weeks before blue posts came, and content draught deluxe... so I slowly started reading about other games in that forum. That led to me leaving wow and start exploring other games. So last years I have spent most time in that forum reading about other games rather than following wow. So that's where I first got information about the upcoming mmo Wildstar. I also think that's where I found out info about other game sites giving away keys for beta event. I got a key for at least one beta weekend, might have been in two... don't remember. I got a bit hyped during the beta weekend, actually started considering preordering. However, I didn't like the game being p2p... I understood why it went p2p but I was sceptical. However, hype passed, I ended up in other games and the urge to preorder changed into: I wait until it goes f2p if the f2p-model will be good (I knew that the game would eventually become f2p from the first time I laid eyes on it). 
 
I eventually ended up buying physical box one month before f2p-launch, because of the benefits owning the game and also the chance on snarflelynx mount. And I've played since then :)
 
My Experience with MMO's: I started playing wow end of tbc. It was my first mmo, and my first game really. I played wow so much from end tbc to mid-cata. After that I've been mmo-jumping around Rift, Swtor, GW2, neverwinter, skyforge, planetside2, and some short returns to wow. 
 
The Combat System:  For a long time the combat in wow seemed unbeatable by any other mmo. Combat in wow is extremly fluent and responsive. Combat is far from the same in mmos like Rift and Swtor. However, when I first tried GW2 it was the first time I experienced an mmo that had as fluent and as responsive combat system as wow... but it was even better than wow. I was impressed. So when I tried out Wildstar and noticed that combat system there was pretty close to GW2 combat, I was really happy! It was probably one of the biggest reasons for my intitial hype when I played during beta weekend.
 
The Questing System: In all honesty I haven't been questing much in this game except for at lowlvl. But it's standard questing, however I felt that there are many quests to do. So questing is very active and not so far between quest hubs which means you don't have to travel long between quests. I don't know if the same goes for higher levels, but on lowlvl it's good. 
 
The Game World: Since I haven't been questing much I also haven't been exploring much. However, what I've seen has been amazing. I have spent quite some time in capital cities though. For some reason, ever since I first laid eyes on it in beta... I simply do not like Thayd. For some reason it doesn't give me the capital feeling... I don't know how to describe it but that capital is not my cup of tea at all. I do love Illium though, it's simply beautiful and also give me that true feeling of being in a capital city. 
 
PvP (addition): I love pvp in this game, it's very action focused and I personally think all the battlegrounds are very fun. However, I'm of the opinion that the more battlegrounds the merrier. So I wouldn't mind a new battleground. I deam about a battleground inspired of huttball in swtor.. but pretty much anything is fun for me =) The biggest issue atm though is bots. Bots makes battlegrounding so not fun, and if they manage to solve that issue sooner rather than later, so it's back to where it was it's very fun. I also think that gear progress is complicated enough and balanced in terms of time to grind. 
 
Optimization: My computer is good enough, even though my graphics card could use a renewal... had it for too many years now. But I haven't had any troubles with the game, not seen much lag or anything like that. Runs well for me. 
 
IS IT DEAD?: Atm, no it's not dead in general. The pvp servers are pretty much to be considered dead though. At peak hours yesterday, dominion in luminai had 20 people on in capital and exile 40. Usually the numbers are at best half of that on each side. It's too low and it's continuing to shrink since people pay to change to pve server. That's the biggest issue for Carbine atm, to decide if they want or do not want pvp servers, and they need to act accordingly to that decision.
Pve servers seem populated enough, however there is a need of reaching out the game through marketing. 
How the game's financial health is we currently don't know. Next quarter report from NCSoft will tell us how good the f2p conversion was in terms of money. Carbine has done some testing of water, the random boxes, the limited events, the decent cost to the extremely high cost. Did it work? I'm really hoping so, I threw some money at them as well this quarter. It's more the money than the number that at the end of the day determines the longlivity of the game. 
 
The Free to play element: Wildstar f2p-model is extremely generous and very good. They could increase incentive to subscribe, best done by adding some NCcoins to subscribers. This event was very expensive when looking at some items in the store. I guess Carbine is testing the waters in terms of how much money they can ask for and still get enough people to buy. We will probably find out what cost items will have later on when they have enough data. In terms of money, it didn't look well before f2p. Hopefully Carbine will find a way to still get enough money to keep the game afloat and still be able to keep their generous f2p-model.
 
The Housing: The housing is extremely well done, a huge selling point to what is done extremely well in this game that they should use for marketing. I haven't seen any other mmo do housing this good yet. It opens up for a lot of creativity, pretty much anything is possible to build. I'm loving it :)
 
What I like:
F2p-model
Pvp (without bots)
Housing
AH
Customization (wardrobe, dyes, costumes, mount customization)
Chuas and aurins
Events
Music
 
 
What I feel needs to be fixed/changed:
First priority is to remove bots
Carbine needs to act upon it's servers, pvp servers staying or going?
Fix bugs that might still be around in game
Communicate upcoming content
Get the game on steam, people need to know the game exists.
 
Play it or not?: Yes, according to me it's the most fun mmo out there atm. 
There are some things that needs to be done with the game, and that hopefully will be done. 
But try housing out for example, very fun :)	
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Welcome to the game :D  Hope you stick around :)
 
But please don't dog on us about the dye issue.  It's a lot deeper than the price and is a legitimate gripe :)	
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Welcome to the game :D  Hope you stick around :)
 
But please don't DAWG on us about the dye issue.  It's a lot deeper than the price and is a legitimate gripe :)
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If you are brand new to MMO's you would love wildstar and it would be a great place to start gaming but
If you are a long time MMO player you will find it very niche
The housing community would love this .The only other MMO that would match it would be Everquest next as well one Korean MMO out there whose name i can't spell here XD	
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I had a chuckle over this. I agree Worrox, if I were playing a game with only 600 active people, Wildstar might not seem dead to me either.  ;)
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			OP I like you and +1 for the positivity especially in the chain of Wildstar's detractors following suit.	
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OP I like you and +1 for the positivity especially in the chain of Wildstar's detractors following suit.
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			For what it's worth, I agree with you, OP! I love this game - there's a reason I've been following this thing since 2011 and never stopped subbing. :D The game is a blast. Not perfect, but more fun than any other MMO out there.	
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