Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion

Wildstar recent negative hype is IMO because now that almot everything is available for testing (minus 40man raiding) everyone and their grandmother can figure the game is basically a poor man's World of Warcraft. Features are the same (PvE raiding, PvP battlegrounds, arenas and Alterac-like instances) but when compared with WoW, combat gameplay is just off. Telegraphs and gimmicky momentums make the game boring and tedious because combat wise killing something is tedious. It's like a chore. Most skills don't interact with each other, there is no real depth, no tricks, as Pyros sais almost any skill is an AoE. 40 man content will require military-like organization, and there's no way you'll have 40 man groups sitting there waiting for some other 40 man group to tag in Warplot PvP.

Of course it's beta and many changes can still happen, but there are so many bad or amateur design choices there is no way this game won't flop after the first month. Wildstar lore is fun, graphics are okay, frankly I hate WoW lore and playing a Chua feels really awesome. But there's no way I'm gonna make myself suffer from this uninspired, bland, boring combat gameplay. The big lie was to hype 40man content as competitive when the game client goes into epileptic disco snail mode as soon ass there are more than 10 people swinging telegraphs in the same place.

Dunno i guess its just matter of opinion but in all the veterans dungeons and adventure i ve done, i never ever toughts for 1 sec ''damn this shit is soo boring''.

Solo levelling? yeah nodoubt, but only not boring game while solo levelling was tera so far.

Telegraphs i tend to agree tbh, ideally its a cool feature, cause it allows ya to stand right at the edge of the effect. Practically it become a spamm fest, and everything is covered on it. Works fine when u are alone, it become absurd when you are in group/pvp/raid. And its not fixable cause u can only disable other ppl atk really, cause you willl need boss effects one and friendly heal ones. Also game tend to become a watch the ground thing, and u lose sight of the aoe effect itself. like the miniboss that resemble sartharion, it has a identical mechanic, but u barely see the flames u only look at the red shape. Still have to see how this will translate in the raids. But well i am a bit skeptical. Its a problem really (at least for me) cause the bosses abilities become a sort of ''lets see what kind of shape this telegraph will have'' instead seeing cool animation/effects, and react to it.

Warplots? yeah i wrote before, doubt it will ever work, not the way its implemented now.

Performance are ok, considering game is not optimized, never had any bad fps problem even with 10+ ppl on screen fighting. Dunno.

Raids I don't think it will be a big deal, telegraph wise. Just turn off friendly detrimental telegraphs(or all of them if you don't need to see the healers also).

Pvp will be a different story. You can do the same as raid, but you will still see enemies. You can turn off enemy heals and then lower opacity of the rest to not make it so glaring, but yeah in a zerg vs zerg situation you will have a ton of telegraphs going on.

As for melee they had the same issue in Tera albeit a little less sever but if you got into a tussle with multiple players at once you were taking a lot of extra damage just because of a lot of moves being AE(especially from other melee), you just couldn't see the actual parameters of every attack.

Performance stuff I don't get or I am just lucky, I have had no issues when it comes to the events and having 20-30+ on screen.

They need to optimize the client asap.

Quite impressed really. I was expecting much much worse after all the negative talk about this game. It may not be no WoW killer, but there will never be a WoW killer, WoW killed itself and the genre. But it sure as shit aint no ESO disaster. I am having "fun" in this game, and want to keep playing, which is a good start for me.

Pyros_sl said:

You'd see a lot of telegraphs yeah, but they wouldn't be nearly as big or common. In this game, basically everything but a handful of skills are aoes. They're also fairly large aoes, unless you're a melee then you get fucked and get "melee" aoes, which are shit range. Like look at any stream where they play the pvp map where you have to capture points. Every point can be constantly covered by almost every single skill of say, engineers, espers, spellslingers and medics. Warriors can whirlwind the entire point too but the rest tends to only cover half of it(and spellslinger tends to not cover the entire point, only like half of it, but also covers parts on both sides of it due to being long range line/tight cones). If you want to fight on the spot, you get hit by everything all the time, regardless of aiming.

And I don't mean people slotting specific aoe LAS and spamming aoes on a point like you can see in other games, I mean basically EVERY skill being that. When you have a spell like rain of fire or meteors in other games, those are large ground targetted aoes that do this. However these are channeled static skills, they're easy to interupt and deal with. When every spell is instant and castable on the move and cover the same area is when you run into issues, imo. If you're a melee, it doesn't matter who you're attacking, you're getting hit by stuff that's not even targetted at you, regardless of what you do.

Small scale pvp is probably going to be fine but anything past 5players is such a fucking aoe mess.

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Most of the 'instant spammable' type skills are linear lines and the ones that really fuck people up are very narrow lines. Half the challenge is identifying who is doing what. If you're on a skinny straight line, get the fuck out. If you're in the engineers scattershot, who cares. All the big ticket skills have weird telegraphs and usually a cast/charge time giving you time to recognize and move. You're not going to dodge 100% of telegraphs. You're going to dodge the 'oh fuck it's this' telegraphs, which they've had in previous games where animations had precurors where you saw it happening and either ran out of the AE or took one tick before getting out.

I'm not sure what people want out of this. Do they want no telegraphs? Do they want shorter skills? Do they want limited # of skills that can hit you at once? It seems most people are just actually seeing what's been going on for a few years now and are now just reacting to it.

Stave_sl said:

Quite impressed really. I was expecting much much worse after all the negative talk about this game. It may not be no WoW killer, but there will never be a WoW killer, WoW killed itself and the genre. But it sure as shit aint no ESO disaster. I am having "fun" in this game, and want to keep playing, which is a good start for me.

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WoW 'killed' the genre? WoW grew the MMORPG player base from ~750,000 to 12million+... Blizzard responded to what their customers were telling them, and have sustained their product for nearly a decade. Nobody else can boast that. It wasn't WoW that killed the genre, it was the copycats.

Can you please elaborate on how you think Wildstar offers a superior play experience to TESO besides that you are having 'fun'? I'm very curious to hear something quantifiable, cuz as far as I'm concerned, this game is a Rift-level WoW clone that does almost everything worse than WoW does it. TESO is at least trying a few things different.

Quaid_sl said:

Can you please elaborate on how you think Wildstar offers a superior play experience to TESO besides that you are having 'fun'?

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Leaving out your usual comments,

I'll answer this for me, though both opinions are from limited play in both games(only 36 in wildstar and only 15 in the teso weekend). The only thing teso has that I want to play is the Faction vs Faction part, whereas Wildstar has everything else. I will most likely just end up playing both for just those reasons. This could obviously change once I experience both completely, but as of right now that is how it is. I had a lot more fun in wildstar so far then anything I played in teso outside of Cyro.

Also saying the "Fun" aspect isn't quantifiable is just downright dumb. The aspect of "I am having fun" vs "I am not having fun" is the most important part of any game.

it has nothing to do with the game but I thought wildstar had better "under the hood" tech:

- 64 bit client for wildstar, 32 bit for TESO (wildstar has a 32 bit version too I think for older PCs). pisses me off in TESO because there is so much goddamn zoning/screenloads in TESO, probably because of console limitations. the PC version shoulda been a totally seamless world, and you'd need a 64 bit client to do that with modern graphics

- the wildstar patcher is clean and sleek. The TESO patcher is like a frankenstein monster, during the beta weekends I'd have to run it twice to even start up and its never clear if its actually patching or just waiting for me, and I know people who have had it redownload the entire 15 gig client multiple times. It requires x2 space (download + install), although the wildstar patcher could be the same. Neither are as good as wow's streaming patcher, which lets you jump into the game with minimal assets downloaded and will stream the client download as you play. Plus I really like the wow patcher for letting you login once a month (optional of course)

- the UI itself is done in Wildstar with "mods" (LUA code I think?), which means we know mod support is going to be extensive and have a good API. Didn't see any TESO mods, dunno how shitty their APIs will be. Obviously some people hate the idea of mods, but imo a game that puts most of its UI in a scripting language tends to be much more robust, extendable, and faster to change/tweak than one that hardcodes all its UI in client binary code. Most of the wow Ui was done with LUA, which is how stuff like the initial raid layouts or user interfaces got so massively tweaked at launch. Compare that to Rift, which was very slow in supporting mods and barely exposed anything for years.

obviously none of this stuff has to do with how good each game is, but as a former coder, Wildstar feels like they put a lot of thought and elegance into their game systems showing a degree of foresight that can serve an MMO really well. TESO just feels like a giant hack job, with the foundation very shaky and I think its gonna bite them in the ass hard, especially with having to support old shitty consoles.

Cinge_sl said:

Also saying the "Fun" aspect isn't quantifiable is just downright dumb. The aspect of "I am having fun" vs "I am not having fun" is the most important part of any game.

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I think you need to look up the definitions of quantitative and qualitative. Especially since you responded to my post with 100% qualitative information.

Im perfectly aware of the importance of fun when playing a video game. Saying that 'fun' isn't quantifiable isn't an insult to the game, it's a fact. I want to know what features of the game that the person I was questioning finds positive about Wildstar, and negative about TESO. I'm genuinely curious, and 'it's more fun!' isn't gonna satisfy that curiosity.

Edit: see spronk's above example for how to make a post with quantitative opinions

Quaid_sl said:

... Blizzard responded to what their customers were telling them

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Yes and No. Also sometimes giving them "what they want" is not the best idea.

Quaid_sl said:

WoW 'killed' the genre? WoW grew the MMORPG player base from ~750,000 to 12million+... Blizzard responded to what their customers were telling them, and have sustained their product for nearly a decade. Nobody else can boast that. It wasn't WoW that killed the genre, it was the copycats.

Can you please elaborate on how you think Wildstar offers a superior play experience to TESO besides that you are having 'fun'? I'm very curious to hear something quantifiable, cuz as far as I'm concerned, this game is a Rift-level WoW clone that does almost everything worse than WoW does it. TESO is at least trying a few things different.

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I say WoW killed the genre as a loose saying, but I feel they did a lot of harm to the genre in regards to cornholing it into strictly a grind quests to max level, and then raid raid raid genre. But you are right, it's the copycats who aren't trying new things and just trying to cash in on a dollar that are killing the genre. It's just easier to blame WoW. In regards to Wildstar vs TESO. Keep in mind this is from the perspective of both games under level 15 and merely my initial opinion/observations. I could hate Wildstar and love TESO someday, who knows. I just assumed Wildstar was some piece of garbage from all the hate, and so far it seems like the total opposite to me. I know "cartoony" games get a lot of hate around here, but I love good art direction and don't give a shit if its cartoony as long as it's got character and style and doesn't feel clunky.

Wildstar has character, it has life, it has thousands of little items laying around everywhere making it feel like a world, it has reporters standing around with cameras, it has people in a world "doing" things, it feels alive and has tons of cool little things that draw you into the world. It has also has shitloads of customization on like everything. It has hoverboards, it has a lot of "oh thats badass I've never seen that done before" things. It's just got a freshness about it. And call it what you want, but housing just looks really sweet to me although it may just suck, who knows. And adventures sound pretty cool if done right, it could be tons of instance type content that isn't repetitive. Paths are cool, I am really enjoying the scavenger hunt type things. There are just tons of things to do in general besides just quest grind and raid. I really enjoy the combat, even though I haven't played enough and it may become a bitch during raiding/pvp whatnot, but I am just so tired of tab target auto attack. Tera was a breath of life in that direction, and any game going in that direction is good for me. Another thing I love is that it doesn't feel like I am constrained by an RPG engine. It's hard to explain but it feels more like an action engine. Everything from weird low gravity areas and double jumping around and sprinting, to riding hoverboards that feel like it has actual physics, to the way your characters slightly lean when you change directions suddenly. It's not just characters sliding around on a ground plane with a run animation, but rather feels like more "actiony". I played Rift to about level 10 and hated every second of it. It actually felt clunky and a lot shittier than WoW. I don't get this feeling from Wildstar, I get a "new" feeling, not a "worse" feeling. So it's nothing like Rift to me. And after watching the devspeak videos, it seems like the devs are making a game that they would enjoy playing as gamers, similar to what WoW did in the beginning.

Now in regards to TESO, I just cannot get into it. It does look better now than it did months ago, I'll give it that, but to me it just comes across as flat, lifeless, dull. The game just feels like there is no love put into it. It feels like it's just made for the sake of being enough of an MMO so that they can make some money off the Skyrim name. Buildings/cities are shells with a few copy paste boxes in them. Everything is empty with NPC's standing around. I don't care about the world. I don't care about the characters. It's just dull drab quest hubs disguised poorly as towns. It doesn't feel like a world, and it's not open at all. Its like each zone is it's own walled map. Hell, from what I saw, you couldn't even look through to see the next "zone", you just clicked on a giant door and boom you are now in the next big walled in map. I just have a hard time getting into these games anymore they are all the same empty worlds with empty buildings that you just run from one to the next following the quest chains. Combat seems okay in TESO but the animations are trash. Again I do enjoy action combat and I'm glad TESO went this way, but the poor animations just make it "feel" clunky, even if it isn't. Why these companies do not spend more on good artists is beyond me. I still firmly believe that was a big part of WoW's success. But what it boils down to me is the world seems boring, I do not feel like it is a place I can enjoy for years or even months and I do not feel drawn into it. I don't care about the loot, I don't care about the quests, I don't care about my character, and I don't care about the world. It feels like a shitty attempt at a knockoff of Skyrim by some highschool modder team, and they forgot to add the fun. But look! It's multiplayer Skyrim!....

Derpa_sl said:

Yes and No. Also sometimes giving them "what they want" is not the best idea.

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Everyone seems to be under the impression that retaining subscribers long term is the optimal business model.

I very highly doubt that is the case.

@Stave I totally agree. Wildstar has almost everything on the market beat in the 'flavour' department. That's probably why I'm having a hard time enjoying it. I really dislike the setting/flavour, and that's the thing they are implementing the most effectively.

Quaid_sl said:

@Stave I totally agree. Wildstar has almost everything on the market beat in the 'flavour' department. That's probably why I'm having a hard time enjoying it. I really dislike the setting/flavour, and that's the thing they are implementing the most effectively.

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I could see that. See I totally dig the "flavor" and the setting, which is maybe why it is drawing me in so much and I am really wanting more. Then again the flavor could be blinding me to more of the same, but it does feel like a pretty solid game all around. Obviously I don't see it pulling WoW numbers, but I am of the mindset that all these games are trying too hard to recreate WoW's peak success at launch their game, when in reality they need to have a good launch and keep adding in content to get enough to keep people playing who will then bring in their friends over time. All of these games don't push out any worthwhile content post launch for months and it kills them. Getting subs back after cancelling, especially when they have only been hooked on your brand of crack for a month, is almost impossible. Look at FFXIV as a prime example. It was a fun game and people enjoyed it, but ran out of shit to do in the first month and left. That and you could level so extremely fast in that game essentially burning through 90% of their content in a week. Good luck to them getting those people back.

At this point though I have pretty much given up on the next big MMO to bury myself away in. I'll stick to BF4, Titanfall, and hopefully Wildstar will be fun enough to keep a sub going til EQN hits, and who knows maybe it will be fun for longer than that.

Quaid_sl said:

I think you need to look up the definitions of quantitative and qualitative. Especially since you responded to my post with 100% qualitative information.

Im perfectly aware of the importance of fun when playing a video game. Saying that 'fun' isn't quantifiable isn't an insult to the game, it's a fact. I want to know what features of the game that the person I was questioning finds positive about Wildstar, and negative about TESO. I'm genuinely curious, and 'it's more fun!' isn't gonna satisfy that curiosity.

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I think the best thing I could tell you is play both games then form your own opinion. It's not like you can't read negative feedback in both threads about both games. You come off as a guy that would eat McDonalds burgers all time with a take-out steakhouse restaurant sitting just across the street.

I agree with everything Spronk said and then some. Most of his comparisons favoring Wildstar stem off of how ESO is hamstrung from being a shitty console port. I use the phrase console port pretty loosely, but the fact remains that it's still a multiplatform game that isn't "fun" to a majority of players that played during the weekends. Saying that a game is "fun" is sure as hell a lot faster than writing a wall of text about why it's fun or isn't fun. I could bore you with an essay about why Diablo 3 was a pile of shit and annotate it like a scholar, but why bother?

My main beef with ESO is that it has gotten worse with every beta weekend. Call it subjective if you want, but I have no faith in Zenimax, especially with how they are behaving about their game's release and what they choose to talk about to the media. Hell, even Wildstar's corny little Dev speaks show more effort than all of the garbage the ESO devs have put out. If the best coverage you are getting is from Shoddycast's Youtube channel and a completely bullshit article in PC Gamer, you obviously don't have a quality game to show to anybody. PC Gamer should give T.J. Hafer a bump in paygrade, because that was the most masterfully written fluff piece I've read in the past 12 months.

Wildstar, on the other hand, has some quality stuff that isn't broken or unavailable. They aren't holding their cards or hiding anything so far. I can respect that.

asfastasican_sl said:

... but the fact remains that it's still a multiplatform game that isn't "fun" to a majority of players that played during the weekends.

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To a majority of players that post on this forum maybe.


My main gripe with Wildstar is that I don't enjoy the combat. It has a grand facade of being "action oriented" but the hit and damage calculations are 99% World of Warcraft and 1% TERA.Anyone can watch this to get a summary of the difference. The same can be said of TESO to a point but at least the projectiles from ranged attacks function differently, and you can manually block and interrupt attacks; I'd put it at 80% WoW and 20% TERA. That's enough for me to choose the latter over the former.

mrmoneda_sl said:

To a majority of players that post on this forum maybe.


My main gripe with Wildstar is that I don't enjoy the combat. It has a grand facade of being "action oriented" but the hit and damage calculations are 99% World of Warcraft and 1% TERA.Anyone can watch this to get a summary of the difference. The same can be said of TESO to a point but at least the projectiles from ranged attacks function differently, and you can manually block and interrupt attacks; I'd put it at 80% WoW and 20% TERA. That's enough for me to choose the latter over the former.

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Makes you wonder why TERA had to go f2p.