MMO Boot Camp

We could not be more excited or more ready for the big head start! I've been encouraged by the high quality of all Wildstar-centric blogs popping up.  Also, I've had a good time joining the world of Twitter (yeah, really late to the party) and interacting with some cool folks.  Luckily, we have found a guild that seems like it will be a really good fit for us. 

On top of that, I have instituted MMO Boot Camp. As excited as I am to play Wildstar, the idea of sitting on my ass all weekend is not so appealing... A while back Virika got her old mac set up with Windows through the use of Boot Camp in order to play SWTOR. It's not a great machine but it works. Since she upgraded it's been sitting on a shelf near our treadmill for playing vids and music while running.  Eventually, I built a desk for it and MMO Boot Camp was born. I found that I could still play decently well while going around 2.5-3 mph on the treadmill. I often ran instances and leveled in SWTOR while burning calories. I could even raid in WoW on non-progression nights. Diablo was fun too. 

Last weekend, I got Wildstar running on the Mac at a decent FPS, albeit at low graphic settings. I'm excited to try it out. It will be tougher I think, simply because Wildstar is a harder game than any of the other games I've played while on the move. It requires much more movement and coordination than WoW or SWTOR ever did. 

Also, we took Gracie's advice from Moonshine Mansion and got well stocked on provisions. A successful trip to Trader Joe's provided plenty of healthy vittles and decent wine. Tomorrow, we will get our chores done and get a good night's sleep. This weekend is going to be amazing! All that is left is to decide what class my first toon will be...

A Couple of Thorns

   I have one nagging worry about Wildstar. There was something slightly off. As I mentioned before we hit level 50 just before the last beta weekend came to a close. While Virika and I both enjoyed leveling, I kept thinking about what will make Wildstar a great and successful game. So what makes a great MMO? I've been thinking a lot about this and here is the list I came up with:

1. The experience of leveling and exploring the game world must be fun and feel rewarding.
2. End game must be filled with enough content that is challenging and rewarding enough to keep the players interested.
3. The game must be fun to replay. Leveling an alt character must be a unique experience that is just as fun as the experience a player had with their main.

   Obviously, there are certainly other factors behind successful games, like player base, community and several other factors. For now, I want to focus on the three above. 

   To the first item, Wildstar definitely has a great leveling experience. Nexus is a richly designed game world with lots of nooks and crannies to explore. The lore is fantastic and players log out wanting to experience more. At least to me, Wildstar has enough comedy to keep the player laughing and doesn't take itself too seriously. On the flip side, the conflict between the two factions is believable and the player feels heroic taking part in the struggle. A great sense of adventure dominated every zone I played through and I don't think it could have been much better.  

   As far as end game, I don't know yet. In terms of adventures and instances, Wildstar delivered heaps on the way up. Hopefully this upcoming beta weekend I can try out the level 50 veteran instances and cut my teeth on some serious PvP. Hopefully, I'll get the chance to experience the raiding situation before launch, but we'll see about that.  I am optimistic that Wildstar will deliver a fairly decent endgame with the launch.

   Replay. Alt characters... about this I am nervous. Although the leveling process was great, the zones were very linear.  I did the missions on the ship. I had a choice of two starting areas which were pretty good. I got to the main city and went to the next zone appropriate to my level. When I finished that one up or got to a point where the xp rewards were trivial I moved onto the next zone.  So on and so forth. There weren't options. My fear is that playing another character of the same faction will be an arduous chore on the way up to the end game. Everyone will be doing the same quests they did the first time through. That's just grind and not very fun.

   As I see it, there are two things a player can do to keep it interesting.  The first is make a toon on the other faction. While most long time players will want to do this anyway just for the experience, many will want their alt character to help support their main. Also, players want to keep playing with their friends. The other thing a player can do is choose a different path. This will provide some different content along the way. I don't know that it's enough though.

   Overall, Paths are a great idea. If you haven't seen it yet, check out this post by Tobold. He discusses some of the appeal of the paths system and why it works for players. Personally, I had fun doing the soldier missions and all that but I couldn't help but feel a little let down. I feel Carbine missed an opportunity with paths. Each path could have been a lead in to another unique story line. The objectives and rewards could have been a lot more thrilling. Some of those soldiers holdouts were difficult but most of them weren't. Throughout the game, doing path missions felt a lot like doing chores. Especially, the settler I played. There was way too much stuff to collect and it seemed never ending. The rewards for settler seemed a little better but at the end of the day I'm not good at doing chores at home and I don't really want to do them in the game. If a player could raise their character level by doing path missions, they could at least change up the leveling grind a bit.

   

   Obviously, I am still really excited about Wildstar. However, the linear questing model, I think is a serious flaw. It probably won't break the game but I hope that the designers think about this in the future.

Congratulations, Have A Cupcake

   Ding! Virika and I managed to hit level 50 before we signed out last night. Though we played quite a bit this weekend, we didn't devote as much time to Wildstar as we had planned. We decided to focus on leveling up the rest of the way to 50 and bypassed any adventures or dungeons this time. There was another awesome shiphand mission that I recorded (maybe I will upload that later). It had had us battling in a deadly game show and endorsing silly products. Nor did I get into any PvP like I had planned. Oh well, at least we have a plan for next Beta weekend. 
   

   Our toons had already quested their way though the Wilderrun zone before this weekend began.  Although it wasn't as novel as Farside, the lore and story was excellent. The major story line follows Tresayne Toria and her Torine sisterhood. These girls are the amazon warriors of Nexus and they would give Xena a run for her money. Completing the quests in this zone rewards the player with heaps of lore about the Eldan and how the Torine came to be. Toss in a couple of cut scenes and some gruesome monsters twisted by dangerous Eldan technology, Wildstar delivers several hours of immensely entertaining questing. Really, I am actually enjoying questing... a lot! And I only ever dabbled in RP very briefly on a WoW realm and I probably won't in Wildstar. But when I encounter a character like Tresayne Toria with such a rich back story, I feel like RP will be really amazing in the Wildstar setting.  We rushed through Malgrave.  Though this zone had it's merits, it was more bland than the zones that preceded and followed it. Grimvault came next and it was another truly epic zone. The southern portion of the zone was actually a bit buggy. There were lots of places where we'd freeze and get killed by mobs and certain mechanics seem to boot us from the game. After a rather frustrating hour or so, we made it to the north and all was right with the world. The zone had a truly epic quest line with a very satisfying conclusion. I found it challenging.

   Within Grimvault is a crashed Dominion ship called the Aziron that provides the setting for some of my favorite quests in the game. Players start out stumbling through the dark barely able see 10 meters in front of them. After some exploring and combat there is a short puzzle quest that upon completion, turns the power and lights back. It was quite a wow moment when I turned my toon around and looked over at the huge space I'd been running around in... there was so much more to go. The details and the vastness of it really blew me away.

  After completing Grimvault, we were both just a few bubbles from 50.  We headed to the Badlands but didn't take it in. We hit 50 and pretty much called it a night. Having made the journey all the way from wee level one, overall the leveling experience was much more fun than I thought it could be. Wildstar at it's heart is an MMO. In the end, players who like this type of game will find a lot that is familiar and expected.  However, the nuances of gameplay, the sci-fi comical setting, and the level and quality of detail provide a fresh experience. I do see one major flaw that could hurt the Wildstar's longevity, which I will discuss in my next post.  For now here is some video of my levelups.  I love the narrator!

Addons To Make This Beta Weekend Better For You!

Here are some addons that we reccomend you try this upcoming beta weekend. These should help you have a better game experience.

• Radar: We've already mentioned this one. I think it's great. It is easy to use. It will point out the direction of all lore objects once the player gets close (a range of about 300 meters I think). It points the way to all books, datacubes and Tales From Beyond the Fringe keys.  It will also show you to gathering nodes but I turned that feature off.
• JunkIt: The most useful feature of this addon is that it sells off the players grey items automatically. It can be set to also sell other items like weapons and armor below a certain quality threshold or always keep items that can be salvaged.
• Ern's Junk Repair: CORRECTION-this is the junk selling addon I currently use.
• NavMate: This is one we have not tried yet, but I installed it and plan on using it this weekend. It has several features but we are mostly interested in the coordinates display, in game clock, and the icons to MARK THE EVER ELUSIVE MAILBOX ON THE MINIMAP! 
• AuraMastery: This is another new one for us that I am very excited about. For former WoW players it seems to work a lot like PowerAuras did. What it does is put icons on your display to monitor things like cooldowns (awesome!), buffs, debuffs etc.

We hope you find this helpful.  Also, we'll be mostly trying to power our Dominion toons up to 50 this weekend but say hi in game.  On Nexus server: [Dominion] Dissko, VanessaRose.  Alizar server: [Exile] Gubjub, BettyKat

UPDATE: You can see the full list of addons Curse is hosting here: http://www.curse.com/ws-addons/wildstar.  Heal Buddy sounds incredible for healers.

Farside of the MMOon

   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.