Wildstar Launch Thread - Server: Stormtalon | Faction: Dominion

Cinge

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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2) Quest thing levelling found it really detached from the game. Hard to explain, maybe is cause of swtor levelling experience, but , as i read in this thread before, it's hard to really care bout whats going on, or even read the quest itself. Not sure if its a matter of fonts used on the quest's text, no voice over or its just me (could be). That aside tho, i rly dont care too much bout that, as i had way more fun doing challenges, killing stuff to see how big kill chain i could get, exploring and folllowing paths's quest.
I found in part this feeling is helped by being a brand new IP. There is no name, universe, etc, recognition. When a game has a attached already established IP, you automatically feel a connection to the world and recognize who is who and you want to know what happens to them or to that world. With a brand new IP, you are introduced to people/places and you just go "Who, What?" and move on for most of them.

Will be interesting to see the legs of this game, if it sticks around and if people connect to the universe/lore/world , which should translate into more attached feeling in future content.
 

Voldeth

Trakanon Raider
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yeah it just says beta all arond, nothing like winter beta cbt3 etc.
Winter Beta is the term they use to reference that permanent beta has returned (or at least tues-sun). They used to have beta 'phases' which were divided by weeks of downtime with large patches. If you have a Winter Beta key, it's a permanent key. It's plausible (although unlikely) that they decide to scratch the beta and bring it down again (like they did previously) but in a situation like that they'd just mail you a new key once beta would resume.
 

Byr

Potato del Grande
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I found in part this feeling is helped by being a brand new IP. There is no name, universe, etc, recognition. When a game has a attached already established IP, you automatically feel a connection to the world and recognize who is who and you want to know what happens to them or to that world. With a brand new IP, you are introduced to people/places and you just go "Who, What?" and move on for most of them.

Will be interesting to see the legs of this game, if it sticks around and if people connect to the universe/lore/world , which should translate into more attached feeling in future content.
brand new IP cant explain the shitty storytelling. Plenty of examples of games out there with brand new IPs who did much better jobs than Wildstar.
 

Voldeth

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brand new IP cant explain the shitty storytelling. Plenty of examples of games out there with brand new IPs who did much better jobs than Wildstar.
Can you name a better MMO? Can you name ANY MMO that you gave a shit about the story? Even a game like SWTOR that went all in for the story, I still can't tell you much of anything that happened story wise during the game.

Edit: typos
 

Pyros

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Can you name a better MMO? Can you name ANY MMO that you gave a shit about the story? Even I game like SWTOR that went all in for the story, I still can't you much of anything that happened story wise during the game.
Well the storyline of wow, I remember a lot of that stuff. SWTOR I remember some of the planets storyline. GW2 overall story arcs but not much about the inzone stuff, wasn't quest driven though so that's does that, I do remember the events and each zone generall having a theme(human zones fighting against centaur invasions, charr fighting against fire worshippers charr and ghosts of ascalon because they burned that shit etc). Granted it's more general memories than specific stuff, I can't tell you every quest in a single zone or stuff like that, and a lot of the leveling content is just fillers anyway so it's not supposed to.

Wildstar does things a bit differently. While I understand that most people don't read quest text, their "solution" was to simply remove the quest text. You get like 3lines from NPCs telling you something you have to do, so obviously you don't bother reading it cause there's no need to. With that said, there are some pretty good quests too that are fairly well told even with no quest text or voice overs, just from the action and a bit of chat bubbles dialogue. A large amount is forgettable shit though but that's usual with mmos. There also seems to be a lot of lore but it's like shit you click on the ground that adds a page of text to your Lore tab or whatever, pretty boring but if you do bother reading those it seems there's quite a deep lore background to the whole situation on Nexus, the various alien races and all that shit. It's just a matter of being willing to sit there and read the lore texts you loot. There's also Datacubes that explain why the area you're in is the way it is, with voice overs.

Overall I'd say it's doing it ok. If you don't put any effort into learning the lore then they don't feed you much at all, just general guidelines if that, but there's still fairly memorable events/quests that shape an idea of the world you're living in without having to tell you about the story much. It differs wildly zone by zone though, like the starting zone of the aurins/mordesh is a fuckton more interesting than the one for the rock guys and humans imo.
 

TecKnoe

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the last time i read a quest was vanilla WoW when you had to read to figure out where the fuck to go, once they implemented those nice little circles on the map of where to go and addons that did the same i never read another quest ever again.

its pretty sad that on twitch, wildstar is only getting like 700 viewers i realize others are in the stress test but still thats pretty shitty.

youd think for how much these keys are going for on ebay and shit whenever and whoever was streaming this game people would be watching.
 

Delly

Trakanon Raider
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its pretty sad that on twitch, wildstar is only getting like 700 viewers i realize others are in the stress test but still thats pretty shitty.
Well watching the level 1-15 content is pretty boring if you've seen it once or twice. Plus some of the streamers they got to stream are not all that fun to watch.
 

Pyros

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the last time i read a quest was vanilla WoW when you had to read to figure out where the fuck to go, once they implemented those nice little circles on the map of where to go and addons that did the same i never read another quest ever again.

its pretty sad that on twitch, wildstar is only getting like 700 viewers i realize others are in the stress test but still thats pretty shitty.

youd think for how much these keys are going for on ebay and shit whenever and whoever was streaming this game people would be watching.
Well I only played wow until wotlk, and for vanilla/BC the quest guide addon was not done/shitty/slow to update, so I did the quests the intended way. For Wotlk it was updated and nice right at the release, but I was in F&F beta so I played the game before that and read the quest text then too, but did use the addon so I wouldn't need to think about where to go when lvling on live. I also kinda liked reading up on the stories and shit, it was new at the time after all. Obviously only read them once but it was something.

As for streams yeah as mentionned, it's only low level content, no one really wants to watch the newbie levels in a mmo and I don't think they've invited any of the big streamers either other than Kungen, who already streamed 1-15 and probably won't bother doing it again, it's fairly pointless. RoS was the same, people wanted to watch act 5/Crusader so early on the streams had a lot of viewers, but like 3days later everyone had seen most of what needed to be seen and so numbers dropped heavily, plus the big streamers went back to playing whatever(Hearthstone a lot).
 

Byr

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Can you name a better MMO? Can you name ANY MMO that you gave a shit about the story? Even I game like SWTOR that went all in for the story, I still can't you much of anything that happened story wise during the game.
its not about giving a shit about the story, its learning enough about it even when you dont give a shit about it that you still have a connection to whats going on. i can tell you the basics of the story from just about any mmo ive played in the last 5 years even though i rushed to max level in every one. as for naming a better mmo, wildstar is still only level 36 max. this exercise is pointless.

MMOs are never big on twitch, they just arnt a lot of fun to watch someone else play. The viewers that do exist for mmos tend to follow a single streamer as he goes from mmo to mmo. Thats why when Towelliee streams, wildstar will have 3k viewers but has none when hes not. If they invited more big streamers, maybe they would be able to equalize that a bit but they invited smaller folks like zyback or whatever his name is and pocket.
 

Cinge

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Plenty of examples of games out there with brand new IPs who did much better jobs than Wildstar.
Who? In a quest based MMO, that is a brand new IP?

Compare that to MMOs with a established IP and you can remember quite a lot because you already know the characters and that world before playing.
 

Byr

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Who? In a quest based MMO, that is a brand new IP?

Compare that to MMOs with a established IP and you can remember quite a lot because you already know the characters and that world before playing.
rift, the secret world, hell, try naming a game that has done it worse.

games with established IPs dont change the way they tell the story. You have to assume your players dont know what happened in the previous game, you still have to introduce them to whats going on and who the characters are. as a returning player, i will know more about that history but even a new player learns enough about it to have a reason to care.
 

Cinge

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Lol@ Rift. Rift is not even close and was only saved because you could just do rifts instead. There was nothing memorable about that quest experience or connection/attachment.

TSW was fun I will give that, but story or connection? Lol. It had a lot of fun quest but those were a minority compared to the usual quest, just like with most MMOs. It was also episodic iirc like wildstar, where you had a bunch of "stories" instead of 1 overall arc, where each "zone" was its own story, with wildstar taking this even further then that.

I'd actually say TSW and wildstar are pretty close, just different "settings"(undead apocalypse vs general fantasy/sci-fi). Rift doesn't even come close.
 

Byr

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Lol@ Rift. Rift is not even close and was only saved because you could just do rifts instead. There was nothing memorable about that quest experience or connection/attachment.

TSW was fun I will give that, but story or connection? Lol. It had a lot of fun quest but those were a minority compared to the usual quest, just like with most MMOs. It was also episodic iirc like wildstar, where you had a bunch of "stories" instead of 1 overall arc, where each "zone" was its own story, with wildstar taking this even further then that.

I'd actually say TSW and wildstar are pretty close, just different "settings"(undead apocalypse vs general fantasy/sci-fi). Rift doesn't even come close.
youd have to be drunk to consider wildstar and TSW pretty close. TSW was among the best leveling experiences ive ever had, wildstar so far is the worst. Nothing is as bad as wildstar...and ive played retarded asian grind games like aion, the perfect world, lineage 2, etc.
 

Cinge

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Well I will just say I think your opinion is complete shit :p Though if I thought a game was the "worst" I sure as hell would not be playing it, people like you are weird.
 

Byr

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Well I will just say I think your opinion is complete shit :p Though if I thought a game was the "worst" I sure as hell would not be playing it, people like you are weird.
where have i ever said the game was the worst? were talking about leveling experience here and i dont mind calling out the fanboy bullshit when i see it.
Ill enjoy wildstar in the same fashion i enjoyed rift. good dungeons, good raids, ignore everything else.
 

Voldeth

Trakanon Raider
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Well the storyline of wow,
That was kind of the point. WoW had Warcraft 3 that had launched not very long before it's release and had an established story that allowed you to give a shit about what was going on.

I have enjoyed listening to the datacubes in Wildstar and I feel that they're doing an 'ok' job with the lore --- you have the ability to listen to the them to review what's going on in an area whenever you want. I can honestly say that I'm a little curious over what happened to the Eldan and some of the minor lore elements that have been introduced. Do I think it's a riveting story? No. I also don't play MMOs for the story element of the game.
 

Pyros

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That was kind of the point. WoW had Warcraft 3 that had launched not very long before it's release and had an established story that allowed you to give a shit about what was going on.

I have enjoyed listening to the datacubes in Wildstar and I feel that they're doing an 'ok' job with the lore --- you have the ability to listen to the them to review what's going on in an area whenever you want. I can honestly say that I'm a little curious over what happened to the Eldan and some of the minor lore elements that have been introduced. Do I think it's a riveting story? No. I also don't play MMOs for the story element of the game.
Yeah didn't see you mentionned specifically new IPs mmos. That said, there's just not many new IP mmos, at least if we looked post wow. Rift, TSW, Defiance, Shadowbane(that was before or after wow?), korean mmos. I think that's about it? TSW is great in that regard, Rift was ok in telling you about the world and the story(both of which kinda sucked, but that's another issue). Rift for example had the tutorial area where you start in the future/past and straight away you're thrown into the conflict, the plane of death invading and all that shit. Then basically every quest from then on is about the planes invading, you learn about each planes, which aspect governs them and all that stuff. This is done extremely seamlessly. You also learn about the other side right away again, and the PvP zone starts at what was it, 10? 15?

Wildstar tutorial areas are a lot more vague, especially the Exile one. Like the Exile one is awful as fuck, you run around doing random pointless shit and you barely hear anything about either the Exiles or the Dominion. At least the Dominion tutorial has you killing Exiles and you talk with the Emperor and shit like that, you see right away how the Dominion operates(propaganda, rigorous civilian control, military training, forced faith). Exile you help some space marshal guy and help some living vegetables around. Like wtf. If you do look in the lore clickies though you learn about Nexus, why people are here, why they're allied together and shit like that, but it's not apparent at all if you start Exile, it feels like a generic F2P MMO.

The following zones follow similar patterns, some are great(for example Aurin one imo) while others are fairly awful(the human snowish one). I don't know if the zones at higher levels all get better or what, I assume once they become contested shared zones the stories will get more interesting though.

Anyway it could use some improvements, especially certain zones, but it's all around not that bad.
 

skribble

Golden Knight of the Realm
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Yeah the quests are extremely bland and I feel really detached from the world when questing, which is a shame since I like almost everything else about Wildstar. Good platform to work off though I guess.
 

iannis

Musty Nester
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The storyline is there you just have to dig around in your journal for it and connect the dots yourself. It reminds me of EQ in that one way.

I mean there are some kinks to iron out -- but this is a case of gonna bitch about anything. If they spoonfed it the complaint would be "I have to close a 2 page popup everytime I get a new quest".

The tasks are a little bland, but it's just that the tasks are a little bland. The episode missions do tend to be better. The story is there if you look for it.
 

Bondurant

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Only filthy tablet gaming casuals would give a damn about story / lore during leveling, anyway. On a more serious note, like Iannis said, story is there, but instead of having 2 text pages popping on your screen each time you take some quest, they're going in your Codex. If you care about story / lore (lol peasant gamer) just bind Codex UI window to some mice button, you'll be able to enjoy story whenever you want.