Nice thing about Wildstar is that it has so many alien races you can choose from when creating your character. Yes, there are restrictions if you are determined to play one class over the other (some races can play only certain classes), but in my case choosing a race is much more a matter of physics (and psyche).
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A few days ago Carbine sent the first batch of beta invites for Wildstar. At this stage beta invites will only come from the WildStar team, which means no external entity is in possession of a key, nor can they offer or sell it to you. Participation in the WildStar beta is free, but don’t forget that you are under the NDA – Non-Disclosure Agreement, so keep everything about the game to yourself and the beta forums. The first round of beta invites is based on people’s computers. Subsequent rounds will focus on inviting loyal fans.
Unfortunately, some people that got into the beta were not appreciative enough of being the privileged ones to get in first into the world of Wildstar. They decided to break the NDA and leak patch notes from the beta. This can be very harmful to game development (at this stage a lot of things are not meant for the general public) and hurts future beta invites. Fansites and the general press decided to not report on those patch notes and as a thank you Carbine decided to do a very cool thing. They “leaked” the patch notes officially on their website so that everyone can discuss them in open.
Click here to read Carbine’s official statement as well as FULL beta patch notes
Reading the official Wildstar races page I found a lot of diverse and different looking races to choose from (you like robots – they got them; demons – no problem; anime style – why not; they are all there and available), but Draken are the ones that caught my eye. I guess that is because, in my mind, they reminded me of rogues and starcraft zealots that, as game characters, I liked the most in my gaming history. Since I do not particularly fancy mechanical characters, nor little bunnies wielding deadly weapons I think I’ll play this race and, as you can probably deduce from my previous sentence, I will be playing a stalker.
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What is Wildstar Wednesday? For those following Wildstar avidly for months the answer is known, but for you folks just discovering this game let me explain what Wildstar Wednesday is. It is an article series created by Carbine where you can read stuff like Pope-a-telli (when referring to Mike Donatelli), where Notch is mentioned (developer of Minecraft) and where you find out that Poptart is the name of the first Wildstar closed beta test character (allegedly). All this and much more was related to us through the Wildstar Wednesday article posted on the official Wildstar website by none other than eremy “Gaffer” Gaffney. You can read the full article here and if you last ’till the end you’ll notice that the name of the first announced Wildstar dungeon is Stormtalon and those attending Arkship EU will get to play it (more about that in our next article)!
I was able to finally realize that we are going to play Wildstar in the next 24 hours while boarding the airplane that will take us to London. Hours before that were filled with preparation, working on getting the last bits of Wildstar Life ready and general pre-travel anxiety, so I did not take the time to saver the fact that we are going to be among the first few thousand people in the world to play this great MMO.
Heathrow, London, is where we met up with people from other fansitest and what followed during our drive to Brighton hasn’t stopped throughout this whole experience so far – constant talk about Wildstar. Guys from http://www.wildstaronline.de/, a couple from gamegate French gaming portal and Wildstar RP French Forum owner were all riding with us and we covered everything from what will we see during the event up to what kind of payment model should Wildstar adopt.
We arrived to a surprisingly sunny Brighton and got settled in a seaside hotel. We just had enough time to gather ourselves before going down into the conference room where we finally got to meet all the attending Carbine and NCSoft staff. Next several hours made the following abundantly clear – they are very enthusiastic about their game and they were genuinely excited about things that were happening. Yes, there was gameplay, but, I have to tell you, we spent a lot of time just talking to the devs and picking their brains about all the different mechanics we were seeing. I was very surprised by the fact that once you sit down and play the game it exceeds any expectations you had and playing it live, instead of watching videos of it being played, is much better than I anticipated. In the end, we were treated with killing a “world boss” Metal Maw. Killing this monster, that was initially created by the community, during a community event, in presence of the people that created it, made my day.
The folks over at ZAM recently sat down with WildStar’s Lead Software Engineer Steve Moret to talk about the engine that powers the WildStar world. The interview is quite extensive and gives a nice look into all the hard work the team is doing to give us players an amazing world to have fun in.
Even if you’re not familiar with code jargon yourself the interview is still worth a read, Steve does his best to keep his answers a streamlined as possible for those of us who only know that the long string of 1s and 0s that exist behind any program somehow let us do amazing things in game. It’s a great chance to see how the game engine combines with all other aspects of the game to bring the complete package together.
Check out the full interview over at ZAM.
As some of you might know we attended a gathering of Wildstar websites in Brighton, UK, called Arkship EU 2013. We took this awesome opportunity to meet and talk to several Carbine game developers and staff. All of them are really nice and very knowledgeable people and we took the opportunity to interview some of them. Since the overall theme of Arkship was the ability for us to play the newly announced dungeon, Stormtalon’s Lair, we talked dungeons with none other but Lead Systems Designer, Mr. Christopher Behrens. Here’s the video of the interview and you can find the full transcript bellow: