Wildstar: Raids and A Recap

Maybe you missed all the juicy info on the Wildstar MMO when it was first announced at gamescom last year. Maybe you missed the trailers we’ve been posting. That’s okay, Carbine Studios have now produced a lovely recap video. It lack the humour of the earlier videos and (IMO) bangs on a bit but t’ll definitely give you a good overview of the classes, factions, combat, player housing, elder game and PVP, all in one handy 4-minute package.

Is “elder game” the common term now? I always thought it was “endgame” even though that’s obviously a silly name since, if it exists, the game hasn’t ended. Regardless of what you call it, they’re definitely planning lots of content, including group raids, solo stuff and PvP.

In a post on the Wildstar blog today executive producer Jeremy Gaffney talked about the principles behind the raids.

“So we’re a bit old-school. Big ass raids. Tough raids. Raids you have to earn your way into beating, and raids that aren’t made so your grandma can make it through. Sure, we can make things easier over time – but only if there are new challenges to give a tough time to the hardest of the hardcore.

And we want to be new-school, and then graduate from that and use the learning to design a yet newer school. Dynamic content. Competitive weekly challenges based on the dynamic changes during the week. Epic rewards weekly for being the best or the fastest on your server or worldwide.

But here’s the trick: as we’re prototyping and doing final implementation on all this, we need you the player in there telling us when we’ve nailed it and what doesn’t work.”

I can’t make any promises but I’ll see if I can get any beta keys for you guys to give feedback and help shape the raids into what you want.

Brett Schienert, the “Dungeons Lead” (imagine giving that card out at business meetings) talked a little more about the raids themselves:

“Raids are never intended to be one-shot content. Our goal, and the goal of most raid content, is provide extremely challenging repeatable content for players to enjoy and battle against over an extended period of days, weeks, or months. One of the design goals we’ve had since the beginning, which Jeremy and Mike Donatelli have both talked about in interviews, is to work our hardest to keep that content fresh.

The zone and encounters should remain familiar from week to week but also offer enough variance to feel fresh as well. We’ve worked hard to incorporate that in many ways within our instances, from 5-man dungeons all the way up through the biggest 40-man raids.

We want players to look forward to the instance each week, not dread a slog through ‘repetitive’ content just to improve their +2 Sword of Boss-slaying to +3.”

Perhaps most reassuring for me was the closing paragraph of the post. I love exploring new worlds but simply don’t have the time to commit to a serious guild, nor the inclination to stand outside doors shouting “Ranger LFG” every 30 seconds.

The last point on this topic, is to not assume that raids will be “the endgame” as is the case in many MMOs. It is simply “an endgame.” For players who don’t love this sort of content, there will be many other avenues and heaps of other Elder game content that will not require a player to set a foot inside a 20- or 40-man instance.

Is there anything in particular you want to know about Wildstar?