Wildstar

This is going to be a much tamer post than normal.

Wildstar. I got into the beta weekend, figured I'd try it out. I was anticipating this game since it was first announced, I followed the news and information with bated breath, and I was incredibly excited to jump into it as soon as I could.

Prior to my entry to beta weekend, I had been hearing some unsettling rumors of it being "WoW-lite", and the game being overall pretty generic. This was concerning because of how much Wildstar promised to change from your average MMO, and.. it made me nervous. I was even more eager to jump into a beta any chance I could, just to dispel these rumors, and experience the game first hand.

I finally got a beta key, and made my way into the beta. Created a character, a spellslinger.

I will give the game this; it has a lot of charm, and the art style is love it or hate it; it's very humorous, and it's certainly a different flavor of mmo than I'm used to... but.. well.

The game falls short on many aspects. Their views of dynamic combat basically boils down to, "every attack is an AOE". I was expecting something completely wild, very reminiscent of an action-RPG, and instead I got.. WoW. WoW where every attack is a AOE. It was INCREDBILY disheartening, as one of the major pulls of the game essentially amounted to nothing.

Alright, I could forgive that. It's an MMO, you can't have incredibly dextrous play because you have to account for the lowest common denominator and latency. Fine, fine.

Atleast there's the unique job system, where it completely transforms the boring MMO grindfest into an interesting system where it encourages you to explore, etc, etc.!

Aaaanddd... that fell flat too. If you've ever played Guild Wars 2, imagine jump puzzles or hidden chests being completable by anyone, but the reward can only be gained by specific job. I was hoping to find dynamic events, and be encouraged to go and do soldier-y things, while still being rewarded for exploration! I was expecting to be told to be called at random to defend a base, or to be given a BFG and told to clean house! Instead, as a soldier, I get kill quests. Go to area, find quest, kill X amount of enemy, or defeat X amount of waves, turn in. I enjoy that aspect of games, I love slaughtering hordes of enemies, but why bother putting in a job system to begin with? Why not just let EVERYONE have access to everything? There's no diversity, and nothing unique about what they're doing; alternatively, it DISCOURAGES exploration. I climbed to the top of a high tower, and found a checkpoint, only to discover I didn't gain any reward or experience because I was a soldier, not an explorer. It was frustrating.

They took exploration aspects from other MMO's, and gated them behind "job classes". Wonderful.

I didn't make it far enough in the game to see what the end-game was like, but I imagine it'll follow the same tired "raid for gear -> do higher raid for higher gear -> wait for new raids at max tier gear/PVP".

So, meh. Whatever. It's a game that promised to do so much different, and I had so much hope for, but in the end it's just another boring MMO. I long for the day we get a truly action-packed, dynamic experience (PSO2, where the hell are you?!) instead of WoW clones. I know WoW is stupidly successful, but even that is starting to fall off in popularity, slowly but surely. People are getting burned out on fetch quests, and static events. We want living, breathing worlds.. we want modern combat, something new and exciting.. but we keep getting the same 'ol same 'ol.

I'm just going to give FFXIV a shot, since it's on the PS4. Atleast I know going into it that it's going to be a generic MMO with pretty characters; and all of my friends play it, so the social aspect has SOME appeal to me.

I will say, avoid Wildstar while it's a sub-based MMO. If it goes Free-to-play? Jump on it. It's definitely an amazing F2P, but for $15 a month? Ehhh.. you can definitely find something better.