Talking of the Town: Wildstar Impressions

I was lucky enough to finally receive a Wildstar Beta code I signed up for months ago.  I’ve been tracking the game for some time, and could not wait to get home from work on Friday to finally start my adventure deep within the Legendary Planet Nexus.

As soon as I saw the original announcement trailer I was pumped.  It seemed like a Borderlands inspired MMO with similar humour, as well as a similar art style to one of my favourite games.  I wish I was more versed in the MMORPG world, however I never really liked the idea of monthly subscriptions, nor do I ever have the time to sink as many hours in as I’d like.

The missions follow suit with the MMORPG genre, kill this, fetch that, talk to this person, but Wildstar had a way on making it feel new. The Kill missions so far don’t require you to kill an insane amount of enemies to complete and the enemies, even mobs seem to be a bit smarter, and the fetch and dialogue missions are just fun in general to learn a bit of back story, or talk to characters that are down right hilarious.  Though the base of the game is pretty familiar, the humour and atmosphere keep you intrigue.  I feel like game developers have been beating a dead horse for awhile now with Fantasy based MMOs such as World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and now with Elder Scrolls Online.  This game immerses you in space and on a mysterious planet called Nexus, a newly discovered planet that two Factions are fighting for control.  The Exiles, were driven from their home planet by the second faction The Dominion.  The Exiles want to assume control of Nexus for a planet they can call home, while The Dominion fight to rule the galaxy and will destroy anyone who stands in their path to take over Nexus.

Final Fantasy XIV was the latest MMO I spend a lot of time with, and my one complaint is the excruciating amount of reading for story development, and then even more reading for things that didn’t progress the story.  It felt like I was spending more time reading than actually playing. A simple fetch quest required about 2-5 mins of reading for very little development.  I enjoyed the game play, but quickly started skipping the dialogue just so I could continue levelling.  Wildstar is to the point, with small descriptions of what you have to do, why you have to do it, and it’s entertaining.  I had multiple laugh out loud moments with funny things NPCs said or some of the mission descriptions.

The combat was fun, very similar to all other games of the same genre I’ve played with one exception, dodging and manual aiming.  It kept me interested in the fights, rather than just spamming attacks I found myself trying to dodge attacks even when I know I could spam kill an enemy within seconds. It was fun, exciting, and necessary to get good at it for later, tougher opponents.  I loved the idea of the “loot vacuum” I hate going over to a corpse, right clicking, selecting loot all, its just annoying. Wildstar gets that, so when you kill a huge group of baddies rather than looting them individually, you just press “V” and it sucks all the loot to you, amazing! It was extremely rewarding to level up too, bold and flashy LEVEL UP pops up on the screen, and the narrator says some funny catch line like “OOOOOH $#!@! you levelled up” or “OH SNAP. that was $#%@ing awesome”.