I was sitting at work on Friday when I saw a post from JS Rowe about the surprise Beta Weekend. Needless to say, I was very excited and immediately regretted an earlier decision to work the whole day. It turned to out to be a horribly rainy weekend so riding bikes was definitely out. Virika and I ended up investing most of our weekend questing on Nexus.
Wildstar continues to impress me every time we play. There is so much I want to write about from the beta this weekend I will probably have to break it up into two posts. Most important is just how entertaining the game is. Every aspect of the game displays a fantastic sense of humor and never takes itself too seriously. However, the story lines, lore and zones still suck you in. We started off this weekend in Farside and so far this was my favorite zone. It was fun to explore and the questing was fun. I mean really fun. In other MMOs I have played, questing and leveling can often feel like a chore. Wildstar makes every bit of it exciting even when it's not really challenging. Sure, like any MMO there are the kill [x] number of these baddies kind of quests, but the zones themselves are so compelling that exploring and questing is even more fun. And there is ALWAYS something to make me laugh. So far, every zone is very unique and has it's own sort of character. One neat aspect of Farside was that being on the moon, there was lower gravity. Jumping and floating made the whole area feel different. The missions were fun and there were some really awesome Eldan caverns to explore. We got to fly a bomber, slap around a bad guy prisoner and oh man are the shiphand missions AWESOME (I'll come back to these later). The soldier missions were challenging enough and we had a good time doing them.
The active style of combat is another thing that keeps me going through long play sessions. In games like WoW and SWToR, I often felt as though any player could face roll on the keyboard and still win most fights while leveling. Because of the dash and telegraph mechanics, Wildstar mobs will kill you if aren't paying attention. I'm not saying that its difficult but players have to be on their toes and take a very active role in every encounter. Spamming buttons while standing still will only cause the snarky narrator to make fun of you after you inevitably die.