Thursday, April 10, 2014

UI 2.0 PATCH NOTES (4/8/14) review

New patch notes were released yesterday, you can find them here: UI 2.0 PATCH NOTES (4/8/14)With only 2 more Beta Weekends scheduled before the launch, here are some big fixes to the game. This is a huge laundry list of changes, so if you really want to know it all, make yourself some popcorn and maybe some coffee, and just read it all for yourself.

This patch balanced a lot of class abilities and mechanics.  We haven't done nearly enough PvP or instances yet to fully understand the impact.  Mostly we were interested in changes related to quality of game play and player convenience.  Here are a few of our FAVORITE CHANGES for those of you who scrolled down hoping for a TL;DR.
  • New UI is out!
  • Fixed lots of mechanics so that they work as intended!
  • New character customization options have been added such as more hair options and body type. One can only assume this means that Nexus will be graced by lots of heavy set characters and females with larger boobs.
  • Many items such as potions, food, item specials, rune sets, and gadgets and AMPs have received a balance pass. We assume this means they have been balanced, but of course we shall have to wait and see.
  • Look to buy new AMPs at reputation vendors
  • "Completing the Thayd or Illium introductory tour quest now rewards the Player with a new recall spell to the capital city." This may seem trivial but it is a nice convenience. Anything that allows players to spend more time actually playing and less time getting ready to play is very good for the game.
  • Mailboxes have been added near Auctioneers in Capital Cities.  YES!!!
  • Telegraphs no longer get stuck being displayed after combat. When this happened it was very distracting especially when larger telegraphs overlapped with smaller ones and a player could not tell if an ability was going to hit.
  • The Group XP bonus has been increased for open world groups. Ungrouped players should no longer earn more per kill than players that are grouped. WTF? Were we getting jipped the whole way up to 50? Well, glad it's fixed.
  • Players in a Taxi will no longer hear someone else's Taxi Driver while on route. THANK YOU LORDS OF NEXUS. While I really enjoy the Taxi banter, it's very nice that Wildstar entertains you on those flights you have to take and are usually boring... but hearing overlapping voices telling different stories hurt my brain.
  • The player's cursor should now be visible on the zone map while mounted.We were constantly getting frustrated when we could not see each other on the map while questing together.
  • When we started reading about crowd control changes we were glad to see they are keeping the breakout mechanics. Basically, things like tether and disarm players have to do the mechanic to escape ill effects. Debuffs like blind, disorient without a breakout mechanic will be dispellable.
  • MOST IMPORTANT: Players can now enter the outhouse and sit on the toilet. Thank goodness the developers are concentrating on what's important.   I can hear the death narrator telling them, "Good job guys, we wouldn't want your player base having to go boom boom in the middle of a quest, now would we?"
Maybe we piqued your interest to read the whole post? Let us of know if you think there are any other must know points that we missed?

Unfortunately they announced on Twitter that there will not be another "bonus" Beta Weekend this weekend. The Wildstar Team will be at PAX East.  Have fun if you are going.

Thanks for reading!

4 comments:

  1. We still need an option to turn off the announcer's DOUBLE KILL. It gets old after a while... if there is already a way to do this, someone please tell me!

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  2. The capital city quest duplicates one of the perks of the Scientist path. I wonder if they will address that.

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    1. Hopefully they get a new perk! Perks might make an interesting blog post if I knew more about them. My settler perks included some really nice conveniences like mail bot and vendor bot. Soldier perks actually had tactical advantages like back to the fray which healed you to full when out of combat and a retreat (forget what it's called) that let you escape a losing battle and teleport to a safe point.

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