Wildstar

[Raiah]

Just saw a preview of this game pop up on pcgamer. Think I might have seen a short teaser for it last year but there seem to be a lot more actual information about it now and I'm liking what I'm seeing. Since I thought the game looks like it might be pretty darn neat when it comes out I figured I'd make a quick post about it.

I always prefer MMOs with a touch of sci-fi and I really like the tone they are going for with the game as well as their class and path concept although information about that is a bit scarce, it basically seem to lead to different mission types, including several that isn't focused on combat. They get a bunch of points for having a robot species as well

Here are a couple of fairly short (except for the last) videos, they ought to do a pretty good job describing the game show you the style they are going for.
What is WildStar?
Meet the Dominion (faction)
Meet the Exiles (faction)
Gameplay demonstration

And since it has a tendency to interest roleplayers, 2 video for player housing which seem to be one well developed feature, so much so that they call it a core feature.
Player Housing Announcement
Player Housing DevSpeak

This is also a pretty good news post from earlier this year, link.

A part that sounds particularly interesting:

For players who like playing cooperatively: We want epically hard raids, which reward you not only for managing to complete them – but that allow you to compete for truly epic rewards if you can prove that you are better than everyone else on the planet.

To this end, we’ve built some cool tech – it lets us change our world and modify the terrain very easily, in some cases dynamically. This lets us mix up our raids and dungeons on a weekly basis to provide new challenges, but it goes beyond this.

For instance, this tech lets you not just build a house, but modify the land around it in ways that truly matter.

But housing’s been done before – so what’s the next step? We’ve used this to hand you the power to band together and build a full-on battlefield (your Warplot, we call it) – so that the best in the world at PvP have a way to build, invest, and show their dominance not just through cool armor or glowy swords, but by creating truly epic persistent fortresses to take to war.

And solo players are tragically underserved in most MMOs – something like 65% of players tend to play largely solo (Massively Single-player, as it were). So we can use that same tech to give them frequent updates of new solo story content for the cap frequently – advancing our world story and giving you more to do than daily quests or reputation grinds.

You can find more information about the species, classes and so on, on the website.

I for one will be keeping a close eye on this game. If when it comes out later this year it doesn't have a subscription I feel pretty sure I'll be giving it a try, if it does have a subscription I might just give it a try anyway

[Zenosis]

Ok,

if the game keeps its sense of humour it might be good, if it goes down the PS2 route it will not be.

on a side note considering I have not played SWTOR for ages now, I am cancelling my sub, may or may not be back.

incase your wondering where I have been, I have been Beta testing Star Trek Online's new expansion Legacy of Romulus

[Raiah]

New dev speak regarding their four paths, Explorer, Scientist, Soldier and Settler. In Wildstar you'll pick one of these during character creation and they'll give you extra missions/activities to do like jumping puzzles and hidden areas (explorer), scanning things and getting lore info (scientist), just fighting more things (soldier) or building various kinds of things like timed mounts, vendors, taxi points and so on to benefit you and other players.

You can see the devspeak video for more info here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtYZ0lkwOMY

[Raiah]

Have a look at this recent post on the Wildstar website.

Basically it's a showcase of the housing system showing of some cool creations of some beta players. Just looking at these screenshots it's obvious there is quite a bit of freedom in what you can put in your house and how you put it in there.

Link

[Raiah]

And here we have a new dev speak video focusing on aiming in wildstar. The basic version of it is, traditional somewhat boring MMO tab targeting but you can also manually target your abilities which let's you line up multiple enemies or friendlies within the path of the attack to maximize the results.

Hardly the most awesome thing ever but it is kind of neat and definitely a step forward from single target tab cycling.

Link to video.

[Raiah]

For anyone who might be curious, we now know that Wildstar will be a subscription based MMO, but (just like in EVE) you'll be able to pay for gametime by playing the game. If you're unfamiliar with EVE the way it works is that you can buy something called a PLEX (Pilot License Extension), or in the case of Wildstar a CREDD (Certificates of Research, Exploration, Destruction and Development) for real money, this item can then either be used to add gametime to your account or be sold to other players in the game.

The current planned release for Wildstar is Spring 2014.

[XilerJ'errok]

Actually looking forward to wildstar

[Raiah]

New Devspeak, this time around they're dealing with CC.
http://www.wildstar-online.com/uk/media ... /devspeak/

As with many other game mechanics they started out with what's basically MMO tradition and from there worked to make it more interesting and interactive. Just to sum it up, no point in me explaining exactly ow they do it when you can just watch the video

[Raiah]

More stuff. First we have an article on "Shiphand Missions". Around the world you'll find ships ready to take you to some kind of situation off-planet. The missions scale from one to five players, they're repeatable and generally a bit move involved than standard quests. Just like the dungeons and raids there is often an element of randomness to how any given shiphand mission plays out.

You could end up on an asteroid, exploring the mystery behind the mining operation’s sudden silence. Another ship might take you to a space station where the whole crew has started hallucinating due to a laboratory accident – and it looks like they’re fresh out of gas masks. You may even find yourself an unwilling contestant on the Darkspur Cartel’s infamous bloodsport reality show, The Gauntlet!

All in all, kind of sounds like scaling mini dungeons. Not amazing, but kind of neat.

Next we have a new devspeak which deals with ability mechanics. Just like the name says it's about how player abilities work and how WildStar deals with the traditional Instant, Cast time and Channel abilities (you can move while doing cast time and channel) and what other mechanics they use.

They hint at the end that they'll soon start discussing more class specifics.

[Raiah]

Update time! In case anyone cares

They've announced a few things recently, biggest of which being their winter beta. There will be a large scale beta starting in December.

They started doing livestreams to show of gameplay, first is here. That one contains two demos, one with a low level character, showing of the basic gameplay mechanics, and one with a higher level character.

Besides the beta they also announced that they'll soon be showing they final two classes (so announcing an announcement really) but before that they'll be reintroducing the ones we already know as they've all changed in some way. First to be reintroduced is the warrior which has gotten quite a detail class page over on their website. The next livestream (Saturday Nov 9) will focus on the warrior.

EDIT: There's also a Devspeak for the warrior, missed it when writing this post. Here's a link.