WildStar Previews

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Written by WorstUsernameEver on August 18th, 2011

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WildStar is a game about controlling a fantasy character (though actually, the troubled world of Nexus is one of both magic and high technology, its former rulers the Eldan having departed in mysterious circumstances) from a third-person perspective in an online world full of other players, fighting angry monsters in the hope of experience points and loot, and pressing number keys to activate special attacks.

Yep, tropes are tropes. It's also a game that offers you a theoretically profoundly different experience and even a different vision of itself, depending if you gravitate towards fighting, exploring, collecting or socialising.

You pick one of these four play styles in addition to picking a race - humans, fey, bunny-eared Aurin or towering, glowering mercenaries the Granok - and a class. Maybe you're a blade-wielding Warrior, maybe you're the weapon-enchanting gunman known as a Spellsinger, maybe you're one of the psychic support class called Espers, maybe you're one of the archetypes we don't know about yet. While hopefully these classes will all offer a crazy torrent of monster-bashing in their own right, they're not really why the game hopes to stand apart from its many peers. The play styles are the point.

If you're the kind of MMO player who couldn't give a hoot for world lore, nosing around distant caves or building communities, WildStar reckons you'll want to tread the path of Combat. Pick this one and your character, no matter their race or class, will be able to activate Horde Holdouts scattered across the world.

The Player Path I choose for my Aurin Esper is Explorer. This means that as the game goes along she'll find quests that let her discover things high and hidden on mountains or right at the bottom of murky valleys and dark caves. This ties in to the setting of Nexus, a planet that was once home to Eldon, the galaxy's most powerful race who at some point mysteriously disappeared. Exploring the world means finding out more about the Eldon and the truth of the planet. It may sound like a tiny but neat little feature for a character, but in practice it combines with the other layers within the game to keep the play dynamic.

That becomes apparent to me as I guide my Aurin through a newbie area, an icy plain sprinkled with the wreckage of a space ship. Immediately, I get a quest to place a beacon on top of a hill, but blocking my way to the hilltop are intermittent tides of an avalanche. But traversing the avalanche isn't just a game hindrance. If I do it quickly and skillfully enough, I can complete a Challenge. These Challenges pop up throughout the game, spawned by actions like investigating certain areas or killing creatures prolifically. They can be like the avalanche one or more combat-orientated, like having to kill a certain number of creatures in a certain amount of time or with only so much ammo. Completing the challenges brings rewards and further challenges, and even in my short play through, they prove a fun distraction away from the thrust of the main quest.

Before reaching the hilltop (and it's not a tall hill), I've completed a Challenge and another quest by helping to find a survivor on the way. When I do reach the top, I place a beacon there. Again, doing so provides me with rewards and XP, but it also serves to change the game world by clearing the sky and opening a new line of quests. Not too dramatic, but as the game goes on these Player Path quests and other quests too can have more palpable and obvious changes upon a landscape, like completely clearing an area of enemies or attracting a whole new kind of enemy to the area.

The path system is definitely a step in the right direction. I played Explorer first, and enjoyed tracking down the points of interest. I also liked that placing a beacon sometimes ties into the plot in one warzone, the beacon provides targeting data on an enemy position, and a team of snipers move into position next to it to attack the enemies below.

But I didn't feel like it changed the experience enough: I still had to slaughter a lot of indigenous creatures in the main quests, and at one point even set fire to their homes after they'd turned non-hostile to me. It's sort of a conquistador's take on .xplorer'.

The Soldier path did a better job of catering to its audience, since the main quest is largely combat anyway. The defence sections are more enjoyable than they sound, largely since they're not too gruelling and it's not a huge deal if you fail one. It's more of a fun recurring challenge, and if people join in, all the better.

Combat is reasonably fun as all classes: they each have finishing moves that destroy weakened enemies in spectacular style. But the real appeal for me was the beautifully depicted world. None of this landscape feels generated: it has the easy curves of handdrawn illustration, but you can explore it all.

Exploring, meanwhile, is totally my '˜type' wandering the land over, striving to reach inaccessible places, obsessively scouring every last cavern, getting to somewhere with an epic view just for the pure pleasure of it. In Wildstar, wanderlust has tangible rewards. A Locator device, available only to characters with that playstyle, gives hints of nearby secret areas and objects, and making your way to them will result in xp, cash and/or gear.

Again, it's a chance to go off-piste, to do your own thing rather than stick slavishly to the quest run. Nosing at it, following leads, I stumbled into bonus quests such as a chasing a floating spatial anomaly, which granted me mega-jump powers that enabled me to reach the top of towering spire. For doing this, the game gifted me some gloves and experience. I hadn't had to kill 10 rats to do this. I'd instead wandered away from the mobs, to the edges of the map, and I'd found things to do. Another asked me to plant a locator beacon on the top of a high pile of boulders inaccessible, of course. But Explorers can see/activate paths that other playstyles can't tracking my way to a subtly-marked point on my minimap, I found the requisite hotspot, right-clicked and a series of platforms appeared on the side of rocky tower. Up .m I went, and my beacon was safely planted. Ding! Gifts for me. Again, you'll see and be able to interact with routes and challenges as an explorer that the other playstyles won't. The game will be different for you. Tailored for you.

I'm in two minds about this. Exploring's what I most want to do in an MMO my best times in WoW were simply seeing how much of the world I could get to without being killed or hunting for secret spots such as the airport near Ironforge and the idea of actually getting tangible rewards for being nosy and random is incredibly appealing. On the other hand, having it to some extent be signposted, the game gently coaxing me to certain places rather than stumbling across them from a haphazard mix of investigation and unfocused meandering, could take some of the thrill out of it. Again, it depends how it plays out across the length of the game, and in its later stages. Will I be joining throngs of other explorers placing identical beacons in identical places, or hauling myself to wind-swept ledges in the middle of nowhere, not a soul in sight? Will I be chasing predetermined map points or uncovering new territory? It's too hard to call it for now. I'm completely onboard with the ethos behind it let me play how I want to play, not tie my progress solely to how many monsters I kill but I need to see how it works outside of the starting zones, once I'm free to wander Wildstar's wider world.

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