WildStar Previews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on September 1st, 2011

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The two Paths which weren't being demonstrated were the Scientist, which must catalog and analyze aspects of the environment to satisfy quest demands, and the Settler, which has the ability to build ... things that weren't really specified. Their inspirations were explained, though: The Scientist Path is tooled for folks who obsessively collect items and lore when they play MMOs, while the Settler is for folks who prefer their massively multiplayer experience to be a social one.

Each of these four Paths are available to each of the game's races and classes, a scant three of each were shown off in this early demo. There was the Granuk Warrior, a stony, hulking brute-type; the Aurin Esper, a rabbit-eared, magic-focused expert; and the Human Spellslinger, a rakish, Nathan Fillion-esque rogue with guns that shoot magic out of them. (The latter of the three was, for obvious reasons, the most popular choice among demo runners.)

Path quests only make up around one third of the missions your Fillion clone will encounter, as Wildstar also has a heavy load of story-based quests, dynamic "Discovery" quests and challenges that you can receive and accept over the phone (which makes sense, as it's the future). Zones have their own ecology which informs the quests therein -- a hunting ground can be drastically changed by limiting the number of predators, prey or poachers therein, for example.

I'm very interested in how smoothly pathed content will flow in a group setting, but in this demo there was simply no opportunity to find out, so I settled for heading off to explore on my own. My explorer task was to venture up a mountain while dodging an ongoing avalanche, another task that took some getting used to. There are several methods of doing so, be they running to the side to get out of the way or simply jumping over it. Double-tapping the space bar gives you an extra-high jump with a snazzy little flip in the middle, so you can use that to jump over the oncoming snow. Unfortunately, I didn't get to proceed much beyond the avalanche thanks to a bug that crashed the entire computer. The game is in pre-alpha and that sort of thing is to be expected, so it wasn't a huge deal. (I heard the following day that Carbine had tracked down the problem and was working on eliminating it.) I saw enough to give me an idea of how things worked, and for the most part I liked what I saw.

I managed to get back the next day to snag a second hands-on and check out a new race, path, and class. This time I chose a Human character with the Spellslinger profession and Soldier path. I would have loved to try the Scientist path, but it and the Settler were locked for this demo. The Soldier path really gave me a chance to try out some more fast-paced gameplay by setting up a holdout beacon. The beacon brings waves of creatures -- Yetis in this case -- that swarm you, and you've got to take them out as fast as possible. Eventually a big guy spawns and you've got a boss fight on your hands.

This part of the game was fun and challenging because the enemies, particularly the boss at the end, were throwing down a lot of AoE. I needed to pay close attention to playing both defensively and offensively, dodging around a lot as I tried to keep out of incoming AoE and fend off swarms of enemies at the same time. It was a fairly brief challenge and not ridiculously difficult, but I assume the challenge and strategy will increase as players gain levels. For those players who love a good knock-down-drag-out, I can see this path being a blast, pardon the pun.

It's the theory behind the paths system that Wildstar is really counting on. If you are the type of player who lives for combat, picking this path allows you to essentially activate combat nodes at your own convenience, without the need for grinding, providing you with xp and of course.the thrill of unleashing constant waves of death. If, however, you love exploring and discovering the lore of the world then picking exploration as a path gives you sites to survey, mountains to climb, places to see! It's an interesting concept and if Carbine can develop it further then they might have created a breathing space for themselves in the MMO closet. This is what Wildstar needs to do to prove itself a contender in an increasingly engorged MMO market, one that's soon to see the release of Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, TERA and of course the existing competition of World of Warcraft. For all Carbine's efforts in a unique visual style, a new universe, engaging combat and a new spin on character creation I can't help the sneaking suspicion that the game simply isn't different enough to achieve Carbine's goal of creating (the next great MMO).

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