WildStar is a textbook example of how really hard it is to make an MMO in the age of autists. The base gameplay was great and it had plenty of built in humor with the art style and general insanity of the premise but they went full-bore into making the endgame for the folk that would otherwise only ever do an 8+ Mythic Key and everyone just gave up after they hit max level. I had a blast with the game and would have come back to it again and again but it was euthanized as a failure because they completely blew their entire live-service model.
In my experience the game was nearly un-puggable. I recall having a lot of trouble finding people that wouldn't just chain die in the level 30ish dungeon. The game went all in on DDR gameplay and it wasn't very fun imo.
If mouth breathers can't at least hang the game is probably not going to do well
Because the current generation of games is made by raid leaders, led on by groups of very vocal autists. EQ raiding was an accident, and WoW Classic was made by EQ raiders, and in turn the current WoW is made by WoW Classic raiders. WildStar was made by Ex-Blizzard that thought they "could do better".
Then on the other hand you have a lot of people not really understanding what the appeal of an MMO really is. Ex-Blizzard that didn't believe in WoW started Guild Wars, which was boiled down to a lobby-based game. Trion Worlds suffered a similar fate: Lars Buttler (who came from Origin/UO) and Jon Van Caneghem founded Trion. The latter had founded New World Computing and made Might and Magic. I think both had no real grasp what to do with this MMO thing, except WoW was printing money and was similar to this "RPG" thing. Rift had a bunch of separate systems jumbled together without overall direction until Scott Hartsman came in.
Exactly: It was the pre-twitter/social media effect, where these people are influencers and effectively wanting to play their own game (Raids) that differed from what most people are playing. You also see/saw the same thing in the PvP space, where the UO crowd would come in, Devs would try to balance PvE for PvP, and in the end make no one happy. But if those folks weren't happy, they would leave, the guilds would leave and since 2004, people would go back to WoW, and then games would tank.
I wonder what could have happened if there was any actual competition in the MMO space, rather than these burn-outs and semi/suicide runs like WildStar, KOTOR, Rift, WAR, etc. Lots of those games were good, and there were lots of games I enjoyed, I definitely played most if not all of the MMOs that came out, including all of those, and ESO and LOTRO, etc. I think GW2 may have been and probably still is my favorite post-EQ mmo, seeing how its my only real MMO currently patched up on my PC.
Eh, what thread are we in? Oh, yeah, this looks really good and way different than the last time I saw it. When last I saw it, it was going to have player built towns and be survival? It may been years ago. I will definitely play this at launch if that video and the patchnotes are any indication of where it is headed.
