It's only natural that I, having come lately to Wildstar, am the last person on the planet to find out about its impending doom.
I'd just run smack into the attunement wall which requires you to run instances to progress further in the story, so I was wondering what to do about Wildstar when Syl posted this that referenced layoffs at Carbine.
Off on an article chase I went. Which lead me to this article from Polygon.
Which is ironic, to say the least, because I think that in the end Wildstar got more right than not.
I know that when I initially checked out Wildstar I wasn't so sure about the sexy female designs/armor as well as the heavy dose of Texas in the attitude of the game, but I eventually came around.* The story sputtered at first, but eventually got going around L20 or so. It's unfortunate, however, that a significant part of the storyline doesn't end when attunement begins.
I don't mind raiding being behind an attunement wall, because that's part of Vanilla and BC that I wish was still around to an extent. But there's a caveat there: having a decent portion of the storyline behind that attunement wall leaves a lot of players hanging. SWTOR fixed that problem by two methods: a class storyline that ended in a solo mode, and an overarching storyline (in the expacs and KotFE) that had a solo mode, even for the group content. WoW fixed the problem by leaving as much of the story as possible outside of the raid content itself.**
While I do realize that Carbine's focus was old school hardcore raiding, I do think that the story and game would have been a big hit as a standalone game. Or as an MMO that embraced a newer design for endgame, aka not falling into the MMO trap of "the game begins at endgame".
There will always be one nagging thing at the back of my head regarding Wildstar: why didn't the Dominion simply use all of its available resources across many worlds to simply crush the Exiles? It's a bit different when you're trying to play whack-a-mole across a galaxy, but on one planet? It should have been clobbering time.
*Or got used to ignoring it. Your choice.
**It also create LFR, which has been either a boon or a bust depending on who you talk to.
I'd just run smack into the attunement wall which requires you to run instances to progress further in the story, so I was wondering what to do about Wildstar when Syl posted this that referenced layoffs at Carbine.
Off on an article chase I went. Which lead me to this article from Polygon.
Which is ironic, to say the least, because I think that in the end Wildstar got more right than not.
I know that when I initially checked out Wildstar I wasn't so sure about the sexy female designs/armor as well as the heavy dose of Texas in the attitude of the game, but I eventually came around.* The story sputtered at first, but eventually got going around L20 or so. It's unfortunate, however, that a significant part of the storyline doesn't end when attunement begins.
I don't mind raiding being behind an attunement wall, because that's part of Vanilla and BC that I wish was still around to an extent. But there's a caveat there: having a decent portion of the storyline behind that attunement wall leaves a lot of players hanging. SWTOR fixed that problem by two methods: a class storyline that ended in a solo mode, and an overarching storyline (in the expacs and KotFE) that had a solo mode, even for the group content. WoW fixed the problem by leaving as much of the story as possible outside of the raid content itself.**
While I do realize that Carbine's focus was old school hardcore raiding, I do think that the story and game would have been a big hit as a standalone game. Or as an MMO that embraced a newer design for endgame, aka not falling into the MMO trap of "the game begins at endgame".
There will always be one nagging thing at the back of my head regarding Wildstar: why didn't the Dominion simply use all of its available resources across many worlds to simply crush the Exiles? It's a bit different when you're trying to play whack-a-mole across a galaxy, but on one planet? It should have been clobbering time.
*Or got used to ignoring it. Your choice.
**It also create LFR, which has been either a boon or a bust depending on who you talk to.
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