Aion: Tower of Eternity was the first MMROPG database we made on MMORPG Life. Almost five years passed since then and both us as people and MMORPG Life as project have changed significantly. We are now only a few minutes away before everyone will be able to enjoy Wildstar and start exploring Nexus and I can’t help but wonder how come I am yet again excited to be playing a new MMO.
I’ve played many MMOs in the meantime, and some I was very passionate about. Unfortunately, most of them failed me entirely (as a gamer) or were thoroughly disappointing. Whether it was that my expectations were high, or the companies that were making those games had the wrong thing on their minds or, in some cases, companies just didn’t know how to make good games – I just don’t know. What I know for sure is that I started losing faith that I will ever again be excited about a game launch.
The first chance I had to sit down and play Wildstar was more than a year ago at a press event. I was fortunate to meet game devs at that point and hear their perspective on game making. At the time, I thought, it was just marketing speak again. In the meantime I was constantly surprised by how open in their contact with the fans and the press Carbine has been. Never was there a more straight-forward and open developer in my experience so far.
This translates into the game as well. Mostly everything the devs have been talking about is in the game and working (mostly) as intended. There are several ways for a player to reach the end game and combat, dungeon difficulty, questing and everything else is pretty much in line with what was said it would be. Nothing less and nothing more. We won’t have to wait for a patch to see end game. We won’t have to wait for a patch to have progress blocking bugs resolved. Things are not perfect with all the server queues and several client crashing bugs, but they are far from being the worst we’ve seen in MMORPG launches.
I enjoyed my early access time with Wildstar so far. After you get past the initial queue (or choose a lower population server for no queues) the game offers so many things I almost feel overwhelmed at times, but I am always properly awarded and I never felt like spending an hour hunting achievements or spending another hour exploring different crafting progressions was time bad spent. Wildstar is a MMORPG filled with content that jumps at you every minute of your gaming experience and the sheer variety of things to do makes every playsession an enjoyable one.
MMORPG as a genre has suffered way too many failures and disappointments in the past 3+ years. Almost every game that came out in that period turned out to be an overhyped mess that did not meet expectations. For the first time in a long while I am confident in saying that if there is one game any MMORPG fan should give a chance to than it is Wildstar. It was not made by a hugely popular game dev studio. It does not have an overhyped license associated with it. The world is new, the guys making it are veterans of the business and boy, is it fun!
P.S. The image above is image from Wildstar and image from a quest in Aion called “Where’s Tutty?”. I thought it sums up our experience and evolution from Aion to Wildstar both as MMORPG players and as MMORPG Life.