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.
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Another thing worth mentioning is this addon Virika found from curse. Radar helps you find those lore objects you might otherwise miss. It doesn't lead you right to them on a map or anything but it does point you in the right direction once you get close. It will also track gathering nodes but these are so easy to find anyway, I disabled that feature. Thanks to Radar I was able to increase my collection of Tales from the Beyond the Fringe. I realize that to some this feels like cheating or taking away the fun, but I've been ending most zones missing one or two of each book.
So another old WoW friend was asking me a few questions before he pre-ordered and probably the most interesting was, "What don't you like about Wildstar?" So far there is not much but a here's the negatives and desired improvements I came up with:
- When questing with a group, some objectives are shared, others or not and often without rhyme or reason. This causes some quests twice as long to accomplish because you are leveling with someone else.
- The auction house has some neat features but is very confusing at first. The way you search and how some things are a commodity and on a separate exchange doesn't always make sense.
- Starting zones can be very long. This isn't inherently negative, it can be frustrating when you want to play in a group. On the exile side, Virika and I ended up in different areas of Nexus when we first got down to the planet and for all practical purposes would not have been able to meet back up until level 12-13ish.
- The crafting looks like it will be fun for those who enjoy that aspect of an MMO. For me it felt overbearing and something I will not really bother with until there are more guides readily available. The tech trees and how you acquire new patterns by crafting earlier ones is a very good system however.
- The mechanics of playing Simon (the color matching game) and clicking F at the right times or spamming it quickly is a neat idea. Players feel like they have to do something in order to hack into that computer or work that special device when in another MMO you would just click. Great idea... a little over used in my opinion.
- For the love of all that is holy, please add an icon to the mini-map to show where the mailboxes are!
More positives are:
- The abundance of challenges with cool rewards. They are mostly doable and force the players to act quickly. It adds a momentum to leveling that feels exciting.
- Great NPC's that really carry the story. Awesome voice acting and narration
- A friendly and helpful player base so far. Great online community.
- Easy to get back and forth to locations. I've hated other MMOs that force you to spend lots of time traveling before you get to play.
- Gear and stats are easy to figure out.
- Switching up specs and abilities is easy to do. Re-equipping is a pain but I am sure addons will allow you to do that.
- Costumes. Controlling how your character appears and not always mismatched is a nice touch.
That's all for now... we hit level 40 tonight! Next post will be fun to write about Tersayne Toria and the Torine- key players in another awesome zone. Have fun!
As always, thanks for reading.
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ReplyDeleteWe were only running into that questing problem when we were trying to complete everything... it's just hard to know which quests you can skip and which ones lead to other major quests upon completion. Our rest bonus was making us level very quickly too, which we probably won't have in such abundance after launch.
DeleteDid you do shiphand solo? I was wondering what that would be like. V and I had tried one and failed hard. I don't remember what level we were? Did that one have you going into a mine?