Anticipated sci-fi MMO, Wildstar, had a presence at MCM London Comic Con this year. European Community Manager, Mark “Anlath” Hulmes, took to one of the con’s stages to explain to London what Wildstar is and take questions from eager fans on tenterhooks.
Whilst Hulmes’s presentation didn’t give away anything new regarding content information that hasn’t already been released, the Q&A session that followed was a brilliant opportunity for fans to get some specific and more detailed information on the title.
PvP Balance
Some of the audience showed interest in not only what PvP the game will offer, but also about how they will have to go about finding groups, and how balanced the gameplay will be. With PvP ranging from one-on-one to 40v40, it’s no surprise that this is an area of interest and concern.
Regarding balance, Hulmes offered assurance that the development behind balancing gameplay is going to focus on being less gear orientated, and more about player ability.
Group Finding
There will be a function for automatically finding players to go into dungeons/PvE instances with. All members wanting to utilise this function, however, must have visited the location at least once first. Afterwards, there is no requirement for them to actually be in the location when ready to enter the instance.
These group finders will have the ability to find players from across all servers, OR find players looking for group on your server only.
Unfortunately, for larger raids, players will still have to manually put groups together, and then all travel collectively to the destination to enter.
Sever Congestion and Cross-Country Play
Given the mishaps that both Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and Grand Theft Auto Online have suffered at launch, Hulmes offers assurance that Carbine Entertainment have paid close attention to the issues in both of these particular instances, and therefore is confident that Wildstar won’t succumb to the same fate.
As for European and North American players being able to play on the same server, Hulmes was unable to give any definite statement on whether this will be possible or not, but mentioned that this would be something that is currently being considered, so don’t lose hope yet!
Quests
MMOs are notorious for a huge amount of grind to advance within the game. However, Hulmes promises that Wildstar will take a more flexible and intuitive approach.
For example, if you need to kill a certain amount of adversaries, instead of slaying a specific number of a certain class, you’ll be expected to fill a gauge, with higher levels monsters in that class contributing more to it. This will encourage players to punch at or above their levels, rather than slog it out with the lower level players.
Also, if you enter an area where a quest is available, or you kill a monster or collect an item related to a quest that you’ve yet to initiate, you’ll get a prompt from an NPC as to whether you’d like to register the quest or not.
Add-Ons
One audience member was concerned about whether the developers will support add-ons and modifications made by the community. Hulme’s response was not only positive, but also welcoming of add-ons. Wildstar will provide full add-on and User Interface (UI) support when the game launches. In fact, Hulmes mentions that there are already modders working on add-ons during the current beta phase.
Hulmes and his team are perfectly aware that sometimes the community can actually create better modifications and peripherals for the game that are better than what the official creative team can do themselves. Hulmes goes even further to say that good and popular add-ons may even be promoted by Wildstar for players to use.
Bracketing and eSports
Hulmes is wholly aware of the potential for ranked competitive play, and the potential the game has at become a platform for eSports tournaments. Whilst there will be a rating system for Arena events, Wildstar will not initially be hosting any large-scale eSports or tournaments at launch. This is because the developers really want to see how the game will work and sort out any issues before being offering this to players. Therefore, it’s possible that this may not happen.
Housing and Crafting
Unfortunately, Hulmes was unable to provide any further comments to what has already been announced, despite this being something that has a lot of fans a-twitter with anticipation. However, he’s personally excited about the capacity to choose specific friends to be neighbours in the instanced housing areas, or even roomies!
As for crafting, Hulmes says that it will have “traditional” elements, but will add “customisation”. As to what this alludes to, we can only wait until more information is made publicly available.
Wildstar will be released in Spring 2014. For more information about the game, and to sign up to the beta, visit www.wildstar-online.com.
