Author Archives: Serge

Wildstar is closing on November 28th 2018

Day has come – Wildstar is about to be no more. I played the game for the first time in 2013. It was one of the earliest builds and we had a chance to play it in NCSoft offices in Brighton. It was a wonderful experience meeting all the developers, fellow MMORPG enthusiasts and seeing the game in action for the first time. My initial impressions were very positive. The game seemed to be going in the right direction. It had all the components any post WOW era MMORPG should have and promised to have them on launch. It also had a lot of movement and combat mechanics that seemed to be above and beyond what any of the competition was offering. Graphics were great. Combat was interesting and novel. World was well built. There were tons of things to do. Everything seemed to be just right.

At the time the only other big thing happening on the MMORPG horizon was launch of the Elder Scrolls Online. Genre as a whole was in a downward spiral and wasn’t drawing in big enough crowd to be considered lucrative by big studios.

My thoughts after playing the game in Brighton were that Wildstar is the best MMORPG release since World of Warcraft. If the players do not pick up on it and it does not succeed then there is something seriously wrong with the MMORPG genre as a whole.

When the game launched it became painfully obvious that it’s not going to happen. At launch it performed worse than Elder Scrolls Online did at launch in terms of the number of players that were first adopters. After a couple of weeks people started leaving and after a few months the game had maybe 1/10th of its initial numbers. That is not strange for any MMO, but it made one thing obvious. Wildstar was not going to be the swan song of the mmorpg genre. It was going to be just another in a long line of mediocre performing western MMORPGs. At one point it just wasn’t making any money for us to justify putting any effort into it. Love is one thing, but paying for food is a fact of life. The day I saw that a great game like Wildstar could not find a big enough audience was the day I decided I will not be working on MMORPG games exclusively anymore and the day we started creating www.gosunoob.com.

A lot of effort went into creating Wildstar Life website. I programmed for months trying to create as many things as possible to create a good database for Wildstar players. Considering all the programming was done by one man I believe we created something good. My wife and friend created all the other content on the website. All the guides and screenshots for quests and pois – everything was recorded in game and input into the website and database by us playing the game and uploading it into the website. It may have never been as good as some other websites out there created by big companies, but it was the best the three of us could do and that is all one can ask for. I believe one other helped with programming for a short while and another person played the game with us and helped with some of the content, but Wildstar Life was made by Srdjan, Nada and Miroslav.

I will leave the website live although it will not have any visitors left after the game goes down. It is a testament to a great game once existed and all the hard work we put into covering it. Comments will be disabled at one point and completely removed and so will the ads.

I would like to thank all the developers at Carbine studios for creating something that was far above and beyond anyone thought was possible to do. I would also like to thank NCSoft PRs for allowing us to become part of the Wildstar story so early in its existence. If anything, I would like to tell them that the work they did was extraordinary and that I’m sorry it didn’t work out better. They did everything humanly possible to make Wildstar a success, but sometimes, things just don’t work out.

GamesCom 2014 Code Giveaway

wildstar-giveaway

THIS RAFFLE IS OFFICIALLY OVER. Congratulations to the lucky winners.

Thanks to the EU Wildstar Community Managers we have a chance to give away 8 Wildstar codes that grant special in-game items. These codes can only be obtained by visiting Wildstar booths at conventions like PAX, GamesCom or E3 and we are very happy to be able to give these away to people that can’t attend any of these. CODES CAN ONLY BE APPLIED TO EU ACCOUNTS! Please don’t be inconsiderate and apply for the giveaway without having a European Wildstar account. It will be useless to you and you won’t be able to apply it to your account. We will strictly monitor all applicants and when we draw the prizes only EU applicants will be eligible. We will also monitor the entries and exclude all spammers or RTM applicants. In other words – only true EU Wildstar fans will be eligible. We apologize to NA players, but PAX East is just around the corner and I am sure there will be NA codes to give away as well.

What you will get if you win one of these codes:

  • Title Showstopper
  • Fancy-Pants Top Hat (pictured above)
  • GamesCom Blue-Purple Dye
  • Fancy Table (decor item)

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Wildstar content updates – interview with Megan Starks

Great thing about gaming conventions is that you get a chance to actually meet the people that make the games we play. We were lucky to sit down with Wildstar developers at GamesCom 2014 and get all the footage you’ve been seeing on our website in the past few days. We kept the best thing as last though. We got to sit down and talk to mrs. Megan Starks, Senior Game Designer on WildStar. We got to discuss content updates and whether Carbine plans to continue the update cadence they had so far. We got her to answer one of the questions asked by a Wildstar redditor. We even got her to reveal what she and her team are working on next! You can check all of it out in our video interview bellow:

New daily zone coming to Wildstar – Star-Comm Basin

Wildstar was playable on the show floor of GamesCom 2014 on both Twitch and Alienware booths and the demo shown on those computer had a brand new land for players to explore. This zone is called Star-Comm Basin and it will be a new daily zone in the game, coming with one of the future content drops. Zone is a level 50 version of Levian Bay and it brings new rewards and ways for you to earn Eldan gems. Mark Hulmes, EU English community manager was kind enough to walk us through the demo of the zone and you can see some gameplay footage (including some PvP) as well as some of the reputation rewards you can earn by replying daily quests in this zone in the video bellow:

Halloween event and new arena coming to Wildstar

During GamesCom 2014, largest Europen gaming convention, we had the pleasure of getting some exclusive info on upcoming content updates for Wildstar. Wildstar will have its first seasonal event for Halloween! Event is called Shade’s Eve and it will feature completely revamped capital cities, instances with easy bosses and a realm wide event for all to participate in. We were also shown short footage about the new Ice Box arena and Protostar Games dungeon. You can view all of this footage in the video bellow

The Defile presentation from GamesCom 2014

During our visit to Europe’s largest gaming convention, GamesCom, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Wildstar devs and having a presentation of upcoming content for the game. Majority of the presentation was dedicated to a new zone coming to the game called the Defile.

New zone tells the story of what happens after the events described in Blighthaven. It is a level 50 zone with solo, 5-man and 20-man content with new quests, bosses, datacubes and repeatable zone events (think of it as the Tree and the Bird events in Blighthaven). There are places in the zone that are there only for people to explore through with new missions for all paths and new datacubes.

Along with the new content coming with the patch there will also be some quality of life updates to the game. In housing you will be able to unlock skies, instead of replace one with the other and lose the previous one forever. There will also be an ambiance music tab added to your house where you can shoose the background music for your housing plot. More decor items will be introduced as well.

*SPOILERS ALERT*
If you are not level 50 yet and you do not want your story spoiled – stop reading here.
*SPOILER ALERT*

Main story of the content drop will be that the Strain is trying to release the Entity from the prison Drusera and the Eldan put it in. The Defile will actually finish the story arc of the fight between Drusera and the Entity … for now.

All of the above and more is shown in the video of the presentation and you can check it out bellow.

There is also a part 2 of this presentation with exclusive new information of what is coming to the game which we’ll release later in the day.