Wildstar: Overwhelmingly Negative

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Wildstar: Overwhelmingly Negative

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Dolphin Fetus posted:

edit - now my keybinds stopped working and I keep getting annoying pop up messages mid combat from npcs :|

See, this is the leading problem with the game right now (past the fact that this f2p launch has been an unmitigated disaster) - the game is actually fairly good combat-wise, looks pretty (even if I'm not a fan of the art style itself), and has decent music, but all of that is overshadowed by the dull as dishwater story, the numerous annoying-but-not-gamebreaking bugs that have mostly been around since the original launch (in some cases since early beta), and arguably the sense of 'humour' that the game shoves down your throat. Also the levelling really really sucks past about 30 from what I've heard, which hasn't changed from before.

This is completely discounting the endgame of course.

Edit: Oh and PVP in this game may as well be nonexistent - it sucks and nobody plays it.

vvv I dont actually play the game, because I'm not retarded, I was more on about max level pvp with what I've heard from people who play.

Crumpet fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Oct 2, 2015

# ¿ Oct 2, 2015 15:16

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 05:21

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

It's apparently around 70 people now, not much under half of carbine's staff, allegedly.

According to other places, this includes pretty much the entirety of their raid team.

It sucks for the people that got let go, but at least this abortion of a game can finally finish fulfilling the thread title.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2016 23:32

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Rhymenoserous posted:

tbh videos of really good players doing it makes it look easy. watching fuckups getting mown down by lasers is probably far more entertaining. When doing that fight there's a lot of mechanics happening at once, and there's about 3-4 mechanics I didn't even describe in my post.

The timing is such that generally you are dealing with a mechanic every few seconds at a near constant pace with very little slack. If they were just standing still and dpsing they were probably so overgeared that they could just eat a lot of the incidental damage that as a first time step in you absolutely must avoid.

But the big killer in kurulak is that small AOE. The damage it does isn't really significant. But it applies a slow which makes it harder to keep up with the group/heals, and you are more likely to get hit by more small AOE's that you can't get out of due to slow, which further slow you down in a cascading effect.

Also anyone who has the egg buff on them has a massive dot that will kill them in give or take 8 seconds if they aren't receiving an incoming healing, and it's compounded if you get hit by the small AOE's. The small AOE's speed debuff is important because you need to move back into position quickly if you are debuffed because the person that breaks you out of the next egg phase needs to know where you are during that phase or poo poo can go sideways quickly.

Basically for most of that fight people need to be within a few characters length of specific places at specific times in order to pull it off. If you try to just shotgun it tank and spank style and don't move people back to their specific floor positions you are probably going to wipe. Unless you are overgeared.

None of that poo poo really shows in a video though.

Wildstar's raids are hyped up and people praise them, and I never saw why.

Visually they're a complete clusterfuck (or just boring), barring a few noteworthy and relatively good looking 'huh, that's neat' scenarios.

The other problem is that most of Wildstar's challenge in raids comes from dodging aoes. There's really not a lot more in terms of actual innovative or particularly challenging boss mechanics other than 'don't stand in stuff'. Plus occasionally 'stand/don't stand next to this'.

While that may be a great endurance test and a great source of artificial difficulty, it really doesn't compare very favourably to how various other MMOs do their (arguably more well designed) raid combat.

Minibosses were also a complete waste of time, despite being hyped up for some godforsaken reason.

Rhymenoserous posted:

And the sad thing is I'm sure that if I took this same guild into the latest WoW raid they'd do much better. Because WoW raiding usually requires a successive chain of fuckups to fail compared to the "Just one fuckup" of wildstar raiding.

This isn't true at all unless you're doing early heroic HFC stuff. A single gently caress up on a crucial mechanic (like your egg example) will cost you the entire fight in most of the latter parts of BRF and HFC, except it's just not so obvious as 'WELP ONLY GOT 15 PEOPLE? YOU'RE DEAD'.

Edit:

Belzac posted:

Invoking the XIV demons the highest level fights in that game are pretty much the bees knees in terms of raid design

Yeah, XIV has some great boss/raid design. Too bad about the horrific netcode and the variety of other issues that stop them from taking full advantage of their designer's creativity.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2016 23:43

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Psykmoe posted:

Yeah but the problem is you seem to be comparing high difficulty modes in WoW (unless I'm missreading the underlined part) to literally the only available option for seeing Wildstar raid content.

Heroic is what normal used to be called in mop and below. Flex became normal, and old Heroic became Mythic.

Current heroic content in wow is not really a high difficulty mode - it's the 'you have a dedicated raid group' mode (normal is the 'random people' mode, and mythic is the ballbusting stuff).

# ¿ Mar 17, 2016 14:59

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Psykmoe posted:

Hm, I don't know, talk like that can easily be misconstrued to paint you as a member of the Wildstar target demographic. "Heroic is no longer hard enough. Normal mode is only fitting for a group of randomly assembled scrubs."

Are you talking about the semantics of how they renamed difficulty levels? Because that's dumb, and three still exist - hell, Mythic is for the most part (taken on hearsay here), allegedly harder than most Heroic level raids from past expansions.

Rhymenoserous posted:

I still don't understand why it's so hard for them to just create a fun base level raid that any group of idiots can enjoy provided they have at least a couple of the right classes and then do challenge modes for the people who require video game validation.

Basically I'm saying I really liked Wrath WoW, and if I was going to tickle a nostalgia bone, I'd go for the one that was actually pretty good and not just "The only thing on the market at the time."

Because, believe it or not, people differ vastly in how good they are at video games. There is never going to be one-size-fits-all raiding.

Case in point: WoTLK had 4 difficulty modes. Normal 10, Normal 25, Heroic 10 and Heroic 25. There was overlap between each, but they all served their own role, and it worked tremendously well. Guess what? There's still 4 difficulty levels (with overlap) currently (if we include the joke that is LFR [not that 10N was much harder tbh]). WoTLK succeeded for more reasons than just its raiding.

The current levels of difficulty work pretty well as they are, and it's not hard to understand the purpose of each.

Also challenge modes are dumb (and for the most part aren't even that challenging). Doing them in MoP was just a chore to be honest, and I understand it's not much better now.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2016 22:31

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Cao Ni Ma posted:

[...] missing the crucial holiday release they were aiming for. [...]

The holiday release would've been poo poo for them anyway. Just a reminder that wildstar released just before summer started proper, at a time when wow was in the pre-expac lull, and no other mmos were doing anything really (barring ESO which doesn't really count since I can count the number of people I know who cared about it on one hand), but they still managed to royally gently caress it up in every way. They could not have had a better time of release.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2016 20:20

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Arzachel posted:

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/55tg0e/tom_chilton_in_polish_gaming_magazine_pixel_wow/

Blizzard later stated that the number was a misinterpretation on the interviewer's behalf, iirc. I doubt they got that close to 10 million with legion.

But why does it matter anyway? WoW isn't going anywhere for a long, long time, and if you need sub numbers to justify playing a game, then perhaps you have a problem.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2016 14:15

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

DeathSandwich posted:

Also isn't a not insignificant amount of those however-many-million people playing on the Asian servers that're treated closer to a free-to-play mmo with a heavily incentivised cash shop?

I thought I remember hearing that come up whenever WoW sub numbers gets discussed in some places.

If I remember right, South Korea pays for WoW in hours, because of the prevalence of Internet caf�s (PC Bangs). Their cash shop definitely has more than the western one, but I don't know what it contains exactly. I'm not sure about China, but it wouldn't surprise me if a similar model was in place.

They always included these subs in some way for their previous sub number disclosures, since a few times they've blamed the majority of sub drops on the Asian market; it's hard to say what proportion of subs come from that region though, since they never disclosed the breakdown per-region.

Not that any of this matters, since despite what people may say, how many subs the game has, or my own personal opinions on what WoW's become, the game is still going strong (hell, any other developer would kill to be making as much money as WoW still does).

# ¿ Oct 19, 2016 19:47

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Dockworker posted:

So they're basically copying the artifact traits and mythic+ systems from WoW.

The ship's still sinking, but we got a fancy new rudder!

mp5 posted:

I got more of a FF10 Sphere Grid vibe but I also didn't really read it closely

It's like they ripped off both and combined the worst parts of each. Impressive.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2017 23:34

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

inflatable fish posted:

weren't Massively also really enthusiastic about Wildstar?

they were incredibly enthusiastic about anything that wasnt wow iirc, even if the game they were enthusing about was complete garbage

# ¿ Jan 8, 2017 23:36

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Baba Yaga Fanboy posted:

Wait, so, to learn a new language you had to commit genocide on the people who spoke it? Seems a little counter-intuitive if ya ask me.

Also, chiming in on the Rift talk a few pages back, it's a shame what a ghostland that game's become. I played it for a while and really enjoyed the customization options, both in terms of cosmetics and your class. The soul/tree/root system was pretty rad, and I wish I knew of another game that offered that kind of flexibility.

Rift honestly seems like it stopped evolving right around when Wrath of the Lich King came out and instead opted to make its in-game store a hellscape moneysink.

uhhh, rift came out like 3 years after wotlk launched - i'm pretty sure it came out just before the (pretty terrible) zandalari patch during cataclysm

rift stopped evolving almost as soon as it launched - not a lot of the new content they added was anything particularly new or interesting

if rift actually had a story worth caring about, the combat was tighter, and the graphics weren't consistently muddy it would have done a lot better than it did

the developer being trion didnt help, since they only seem interested in whales

# ¿ Jan 9, 2017 11:35

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Rhymenoserous posted:

MMO's really attract some loving broken people though.

Quoth the pot - I'm pretty sure anyone who plays an MMO is broken in some way, though. I know people who have quit MMOs and have moved onto more predatory gaming interests (mobile gaming...) because they scratch the same sort of itch.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2017 14:18

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

randombattle posted:

Wildstar's development wasn't cheap.

Absolutely. Bear in mind that the game was in development for ~10 years. And still came out in the state it did.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2017 21:23

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

SpaceDrake posted:

Jesus. Jumpgate limped along with 100 people for a long time but that was a totally different era and a totally different budget. That the game's ended up with so few people is... I want to say "mind blowing" but no, it's perfectly understandable. I just still didn't imagine it'd get that bad before NCSoft pulled the plug.

At this point I have to figure that someone remaining at Carbine is friends with NCSoft management or said management somehow sees keeping the game going as part of the marketing for MxM, because there's no real justification otherwise for the game servers remaining up.

edit: holy gently caress, the reddit is so slow that posts submitted a week ago, with less than 10 comments, remain on the front page

Always remember that CoH was killed at least in part to enable this shitpile to exist.

# ¿ May 20, 2017 10:56

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Harrow posted:

The one thing I thought was cool about Rift was how it handled the WoW-style talent trees. Only four classes, but each one had like 12 talent trees each that you could mix and match in groups of three, and every class could do at least two of the "tank/healer/DPS" roles. It was really cool and I enjoyed how you could sorta freeform create classes by mixing the talent trees you used. I have no idea how that turned out in the endgame because Rift being basically WoW but less fun made me stop playing by level 20 or so, but it was at least a neat concept.

I never played Rift very much, but unsurprisingly people calculated the best builds and that was the end of the creativity they were touting with their system. It didn't even take long.

# ¿ May 24, 2017 18:59

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Go RV! posted:

There's been two major content droughts, but they're doing pretty great now. New major content is added every 2-3 months, with smaller story events added in between.

I'm gonna effort post a bit here in the bad mmo thread, sorry.

This is true, but their dungeons weren't that good anyway, and they realized that. They've shifted to Fractals, which are better.

This isn't true. Ascended gear was in the game from beta, just not implemented. They did really drop the ball in messaging that, though. There's been no other armor tiers added in the 4 years since then, and they've been adamant it will never happen.

I don't know about WoW zones, so I can't compare there, but I doubt that's true! The Maguuma wastes maps were like that, but all the expansion zones were decently sized, but very vertical and very dense.

Since then, every Living Story update has had a small map released with it, at least comparable with the entire Wastes map. So, that's 5 new ones since the expansion, plus another one on the way, and then another expansion (images were already leaked and these new zones are pretty big).

Which was reworked after criticism and readded. WvW is now the two classic Alpine map and then one Desert.

It's more a sub-class for each class, with core class mechanics being changed. There's a new one for each class coming each expansion.

Each sub-class gets a weapon the class couldn't otherwise use, so new weapon options are still being added. Though they have not straight up added a brand new weapon type, that's true.

Mostly true, but there are new ability mechanics added, like an extra downed state ability and context sensitive ability key that does stuff.

There is too much stuff in the gem store versus regular play, but there is new stuff added decently often. It is a problem though.

That may have been true at launch, but there's a fair number of builds that don't use expansion content, assuming you're talking about PvP.

It's definitely not a perfect game or anything, but there's been lots of improvements, and honestly right now is a real good streak for the game.

The first expansion was kinda content-light, but it added a ton of features to the game which improved it lot, and the content there was was pretty good. They've cleaned up a lot of it to make it even better. The next expansion is going to be announced in a month or two. It's improved a lot since the Heart of Thorns release. (Part of the problem seems to have been incompetent management, and there's been a lot of changes in leadership, which seems to have helped the game a lot.)

That said, if you've got base problems with the gameplay or class structure/lack of trinity, the game still isn't going to be for you. It's not a fundamentally different game.

i'm not sure your nose could be further in arena net's arse if you tried

# ¿ Jun 20, 2017 21:40

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

There's a reason people who consistently mention they were vanilla WoW devs are ex-WoW devs. Bearing in mind that as fun as vanilla WoW was at the time, it was still aggressively anti-player for the most part.

Crumpet fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Jun 22, 2017

# ¿ Jun 22, 2017 22:15

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

Byolante posted:

both method and exorsus have up on kj

Assuming you meant that they'd given up - source? That would be hilarious. I saw the complaining about being beta testers but not this.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2017 19:30

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 05:21

Crumpet: Apr 22, 2008

CoffeeBooze posted:

Yes, what else would Carbine be working on?

A game that's actually good? After Wildstar that's dubious, but you never know.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2017 20:51

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Wildstar: Overwhelmingly Negative