If You'd Have Told Me...

...back in the Spring that in October of 2015 that I'd be playing Wildstar, I'd not have believed you.

But here I am, having just reached the Exile capital city of Thayd, and have just gotten the grand tour.

Yes, Wildstar does have an automated grand tour of Thayd in a similar fashion as the tour you receive when you reach Shattrath City in WoW.

In fact, there's a lot more in feel to WoW from Wildstar than I'd care to admit. The text based quests, for example, are far more of a throwback these days. The Exiles themselves are a heavy dose of WoW-esque nostalgia, with the Granok mimicking the Dwarves, the Aurin as the Night Elves, and the Mordesh as a faction-swapped Forsaken.*

The Aurin/Mordesh heavy starting zones (up to L15) of Everstar Grove + Celestion remind me a lot of Blood Elf starting areas, up through The Ghostlands. I don't think it an accident that at L15 or so you finish up the Celestion area and are given a quest to go to Thayd, the capital city of the Exiles; after all, a similar thing happens to Blood Elves at the end of the Ghostlands' main questline.

If I'd not have known ahead of time that some of the Wildstar devs are ex-Blizzard employees, I'd be speculating on that already.

All of these similarities are one thing, but if I don't find the story engaging, there's not a lot to really hold me as a player. But that's the surprise: there actually is enough of a story there that I want to follow it through and see where it leads.

And no, I'm not posting spoilers. It's F2P now, so the subscriber wall is no longer an obstacle.

***

Are there things that I find annoying?

Of course.

Like I said last post about Wildstar, a lot of the things that I grumbled about --the annoying Texas + SF mashup, the obnoxious level up graphic, and the women in refrigerators plot device, among others-- are still there. However, they kind of fade into the background after a while. In a way, it's akin to the scrolling alerts on Neverwinter and Star Trek Online: some people can handle them, others can't. Whether you can handle the annoying aspects of Wildstar is up to you, but I don't think there's any reason to not try the game out and give it a true multi-day test.

Now, if they could do something about the occasional lag when playing, particularly when getting quest info....





*Haven't run into the equivalent of the Apothecaries yet --at least in terms of that terrifyingly amoral approach to their studies, that is-- but I'd imagine that the Chua more fit that bill. Only with more explosions.