Ex Dev on wildstar here. Watched the video and although it was quiet informative, I just wanted to chime in on some of the key factors on why this game was a huge flop. I worked on the game for 5+ years and let me tell you.. This games was destined to fail wayyy before there was any issues with servers or not enough updates. Development on this project was a nightmare. The real Development time frame was closer to 10/11 years. Coming onto the project at the 5 year mark I soon realized that the leads and big boys had no fucking clue what a good game was and they could not commit to any idea. Too many cooks in the kitchen that can't cook anything other than Mayo and Beef Jerky sandwiches... Look for the double meaning in that. It's there. One of the most prevalent issues with the game that I noticed was bad direction from top down. People like Tim Cain specifically made way more problems than they were worth. Honestly the guy was a total dick. Awful to work with and almost nothing he "did" ended up in the game. His lack of leardership I would say was one of the reasons why the first 4-5 years of the game were almost completely thrown out. Literally... Then you have an art director who couldn't keep his nose out of anything. His selfishness drove off many of the best artists in the company including cory loftis. Literally... Cory Loftis LEFT the game which is based off of his style almost entirely because of this guy. This same art director was also responsible for hijacking the story and overall vision of the game as well. Wondering why there wasn't more raids and dungeons? Because the ART DIRECTOR thought several ALREADY MADE LEVELS didn't fit the story anymore... So they threw them away... He also made calls on gameplay... Which... is a hole other nightmare. The gameplay was once good... I would say around the 7 year mark. 1v1 combat was very fun at this point and each class felt very unique and fun. Unfortunately most of that was thrown away and replaced with alot of new stuff that was just NOT tested enough. I repeat... most of what launched in Wild star combat wise was BARELY tested. Stuff like Warplots was broken to shit from start to finish. The designers leading WarPlots were absolute lazy trash and would knowingly put in broken systems and call them done just to appease their bosses. The only reason that warplots was even REMOTELY playable on launch was because of some amazing talent on the 3D prop team. I am not joking.. Artists LEANRNED HOW TO SCRIPT TO FIX THIS CRAP. Pvp in general was absolutely broken. I didn't even work on paper let alone work in a multi million dollar game. The idea of telegraphs is pretty straight forward and seems to just work for most cases in combat.... except in any fight larger that has more than two characters per team... Attack telegraphs drawing on the ground is very clear when you have a small amount of people fighting but in medium to large pvp fights ( pretty much every fight that matters) the entire ground becomes a multi colored disco dance floor. Casual to moderate gamers were like deer in headlights during the VERY FEW playtests that were had for larger pvp battles. SO MUCH FEEDBACK was given by the teams that participated in these tests and almost nothing was fixed about it. The leadership was god awful. Proof of this was that most of the BEST things in the games that players loved the most such as Double Jump and Hoverboards were things that were never planned for or schedules by leads. Those were passion projects. Double Jump was made by an ARTIST. That artist got in trouble for making double jump and eventually fired for other reasons. Never got credit either. Hoverboards were snuck in by an animator... He got written up for secretly working on hoverboards in his freetime with other coworkers. The place was a prison of ideas and everyone was getting shanked for even THINKING that they WANTED to think of something to improve the game. Oh did I mention mandatory Crunch? We would crunch for months at a time. Mandatory. I remember working from 10am to 3 am everynight 6 days a week for about 3 months straight. And I got a talking to once because I was 10 minutes late to work. ONCE. Because Jeremy Gafney saw me coming in late. Everyone working on this game was absolutely DONE with the BS and it shows. The love died way before this game launched. No one in the studio really wanted to play the game. And then we shifted to try to cater to the hardcore audience?! ( this was the version on launch. The hardcore not for pansies mmo) During a time where pretty much almost every successful game was being carried hard by more casual players. I can go on but... I think you get the picture. These devs thought they were clever enough to ignore pretty much every other successful business model and all other mmorpgs to make this.. There you have it...
This explains so much! Do you know if NCSOFT had anything to do with the launch date being so early? I had a bad feeling as soon as it was announced. I always figured they pushed it out early, but it looks like there were big problems closer to home.
Artist who implemented double jump here chiming in. everything in here is true, the game's faults weren't in the decisions after launch or the pricing model. the company was a fucking nightmare to work for. all due to the higher ups being so poor at their jobs. i got in trouble multiple times for implementing features in my free time or even giving opinions that didn't agree with the people in charge. wast constantly told to just sit at my desk and make props and nothing else. even though i implemented one of the features players loved the most. People who knew me there knew i could implement fun features and had an eye for game feel but i got in trouble for everything i made even if it was fun and added to the game. the art director was awful, him and i had a disagreement in email and the guy called me into his office privately and cursed me out and told me to go home. then he had my lead fire me "for being unprofessional" the following week. coward didn't even have the balls to face me himself probably because he knew he was wrong. of course i've heard many other stories as to why i got fired afterwards but almost none of them mention how he called me into his office just to berate me. that should give you an idea as to how this company was run. that's the kind of people who were calling the shots. just the shadiest people were in charge. the game didn't fail because of server issues or business models. it failed because the company was awful and the people in charge were always on a power trip and couldn't stand to have their egos get hurt. I have no problems being 100% open and honest about how shitty this company and the people in charge of it were. i'm sorry to the fans of the game that had huge expectations and were let down. you absolutely deserved more and some of us tried our best to deliver that to you. people like gaffney, cain, and mocarski were nothing but con men making false promises to ncsoft in exchange for their paychecks they didn't deserve. they had the power, the money, and the time to make a truly wonderful mmo and instead they were more concerned about themselves and not the project. us passionate devs tried our best to make changes in the game and literally put our jobs on the line to do so. double jump and action oriented combat were both things that artists had to risk their jobs to try and get implemented and even then we never got to see everything implemented the way we wanted to. we had so many big ideas and constantly were benched or fired. some of us really do care about making amazing games in this industry and we will risk our jobs to do so but there are some in this industry that are just con men looking to pad their resume with fancy titles and making promises they can't fulfill. that's how bad games are made.
seems these days its all about money and not making a great game fun. a lot of what I've noticed these days with games is there some amazing games, but a lot of them don't factor in fun, is it enjoyable. if the game is not fun why bother.
The main thing that killed this game is NCSOFT and NCSOFT only! This game helped kill one of the greatest MMO's of all TIME and that game was City of Heroes/Villains (IMO the greatest MMO ever made even to this day). NCsoft shut down City of Heroes/Villains when it was still making them over 10 million dollars a year and the shut down came out of nowhere, even the Devs didn't see it coming! City of Heroes/Villains holds the Genius Book Wolrd Records for the most Free Updates for an MMORPG and still holds this record Today! NCsoft shut down CoX on Nov 30 2012 to prepare for this Wildstar garbage and to help Guild Wars 2. If NCsoft would have just left CoX alone then this game(Wildstar) probably would have been fine! Now there are 3 superhero MMO's coming out in the next few years because of this, all from hardcore CoX fans. These games are called Ship of Heroes, City of Titans and Valiance Online and you can check them all out and even play one right now in its alpha for a small donation! The last 2 or 3 years of CoX where the greatest years of the game because they listened to there community more then any other MMO EVER HAS and we got everything we wanted almost and it made it insanely different and 100% better then it was in the first 3 to 5+ years of its life.
Vincent you clearly have no fucking idea what happened with NCsoft. Wildstar was never and would never be fine. it was never going to succeed with the people they had in charge and city of heroes wasn't shut down out of nowhere. the devs for city of heroes were told by ncsoft that they wanted them to make city of heroes 2. they gave them a ton of funding to get that going and out of nowhere without telling ncsoft the devs decided to make a completely different game. they didn't want to make city of heroes 2 so they were making a different game on ncsofts dime without telling them first. when ncsoft found out about this and confronted them upset that they were lied to the devs thought they couldn't be touched because city of heroes was so successful and still making money. ncsoft let them all go to send a message. don't fucking lie to the people funding your project. ncsoft made the right decision. when you give people funding you cannot lie about what you're going to do with that money. it's a matter of trust. successful game or not i feel not sympathy for those devs that made that choice.
I loved sprint, double jump and double-tap-to-dodge mechanics in a MMORPG. I had a great first year with this game, but I felt like it didnt have much going on so I stopped coming back to it.
To the Devs the ones that gave a damn. Thank you. I'm going to miss this game. It showed us a spark of greatness with a universe I loved from the get-go. Sad to see it die.
I agree. I loved the combat, the house building and the overall world design. It also had a pretty smooth launch, which is amazing for an MMO. It's a shame the game never really got any traction.
Yeah that is the cool thing, wildstar raids are super fun, because of that. I don't really liked GA much the where some fun boss, but the whole design was boring for me, but DS and RMT is such a blast. Rigth now I playing wow and I finished the current raid content in raid finder, normal and Heroic and started progressing mytic which is the dificult one, but still none of the mytic boss I tried was so much fun as like malestorm or system deamons. I really miss wildstar raids sometimes,
What Igor Liba said^ The first three bosses of Mythic raids are easy in wow because that's blizz's design philosophy right now. But the last 2-3 bosses are INSANELY difficult (KJ on release took close to 1000 pulls to down for most mythic race guilds (method's world first in about 700 is an extreme outlier). If you do KJ now, because there are like 5+ guides for the mythic fight, WAAAAAAAY better gear, better artifacts, etc. it'd be far easier relatively. IF you want to really experience the truly difficult wow content, before it gets nerfed/you have lots of guides to help you through it, you have to do it as close to release as possible to really see what's difficult. (I.E. be a mythic race raider). which means....next xpac lmao
@@umber8904 KJ on heroic was harder than the first few mythic bosses in that raid lol i cant even imagine trying do it world 1st in the gear they were in
This one makes me sad, because unlike the rest of the games you covered I actually played this one and invested about $50 into it when it went free to play. I loved the world and characters and spent days customizing my home. I still technically got more than my money's worth out of it, but still this is tragic to watch...
Aesthetically this game is still my favorite. I loved the Ratchet and Clank / Jak and Daxter vibe it gave off. Also the housing was really really good for an MMORPG. I played it all the way to the end and still kind of miss it.
I really loved WildStar, and I still have a Rowsdower Plushie on my desk that reminds me of those days. As much as I loved the game I always felt Carbine Studios made two fatal mistakes. The first was limiting their potential audience by going all in on the "We're too Hardcore For You Babies" mentality rather making the game be about fun for all types of players. The second fatal mistake was getting into bed with NCSoft. NCSoft is the killer of dreams. WildStar was one of the most beautiful MMO's I've ever played. I loved the sense of humor, I loved my psychotic Chua, I loved building in the game, and to a lesser extent I really loved the world PvP. Had Carbine not fallen into some of the traps so common with a new MMO launch, and focused on routinely adding new content that appealed to all kinds of players, WildStar might still be around today.
After years of playing wow, I still remember logging in to WS for the first time and being blown away by how fresh, and fun and full of character and charm it was. So sad it never made it, I wanted nothing but for wild Star to be my go to. I hope the team that created still have it in them to keep creating in the future, their vision was wonderful.
My experience with Wildstar was getting attuned to the launch raid on two different characters, my guild downing the first boss, and then half the people noshowing the next raid night. 40 people is just too many people to coordinate.
Most of the difficulty in EQ and Vanilla WoW was management. I remember getting into raiding... how often we had to pause for a week or two because half the raids were in college and had finals or mid-terms. Then we wound up having to lose a couple people over the summer (Because they had to get a full-time job or take summer classes). Then when school started we got more people... only to regularly end up repeating the cycle again.
I never was a hardcore raider, always somewhere in-between casual and hardcore, but as much as I loved the game, the attunement process for Wildstar was a little excessive.
@@brettpierce5225 I think it was fine. You still had small public group content in the form of dungeons but had to actually do something to get into raiding, not too much. I got attuned pretty fast, although my guild guided me along the way. I would've not had even close to the required gear even before that and just got it as I got attuned, so... I think it was perfect.
I loved the art style and setting. The playable races weren't just colored humans with a different forehead or a tail like SWTOR or every asian MMO i've ever played.
SLOW? Leveling was too fast for my tastes. I could gain a level or two during an evening's play. I reached max level well before I finished the content.
I never understood what core market they were going for exactly - the gameplay itself was focusing on PvP and hardcore raids for "oldschool gamers", but the art style, overall 'mood' of the game, the long animated trailers, and especially the housing system and huge amounts of in-game lore all seemed to be targeting RPers and more casual gamers. I'm not saying people can't be both types or that they can't coexist, but it just always struck me as odd how the gameplay and literally everything else about the game were driving at the two most opposite sides of the gaming population and I still reckon that had a pretty big hand in it.
People act like WoW casualized because they wanted to. No, they read the tea leaves. People now a days have so many other options for online experiences, you can't just survive on hardcores alone.
Ethan Matz So why are most of the casual MMOs barely limping along with bloated cash shops and horrible P2W tactics in order to stay afloat? This game died by a thousand cuts, not because they catered to 1% hardcore raiders.
The audience for MMORPGs is withering away full stop, the world has had a vast increase in people that play games online over the last 10 years, yet look how few play MMORPGs (meanwhile 80 million play LoL, 30 million Overwatch, etc). Problem with MMORPGs is the world has moved on, an online world is no longer a new amazing thing, which leaves you with the gameplay, which in many respects is bad, I mean no one sane wants to run the same dungeon for the 50th time rolling their face across the keyboard. So that only really appeals to two groups of player, Skinner Box zombies who basically play for shiny things and don't really care about gameplay, which is a niche audience or super casual gamers who won't be running those dungeons a zillion times over anyway, but that audience has largely been swallowed up by mobile games (as to an extent have the Skinner Box zombies). But the fact that these two groups make up the bulk of what is left of the MMORPG playerbase is what holds the genre back and is why the genre is so stagnant. (along with the fact there is very little talent in the gaming industry)
somename99 this is total bs, people still want MMOs is just the corporate suits took over the industry and turned the genre into the zombie wasteland it is today. I'd say the Wow clone mentality is what destroyed the industry the most, not a lack of interest. Look at the popularity and hype surrounding Bless, if the genre lacked interest from gamers, why where their servers slammed? They also reported strong presales as well.
MMOs were casualized because players eventually got tired of grinding and better options appeared. For PVP: mobas,team shooters and the new battle royale genre provide a grind-free (and mostly balanced) PVP experience. For PVE: most MMOs copied wow's themepark quest/dungeon design, which got boring eventually. So players returned to single player games as they (again) tend to provide a better and grind-free PVE experience. Plus, MMOs had always difficulty with providing a good story. Synopsis: MMOs rely on grinding to keep players hooked, and that's why most of them have failed. If they change their design philosophy into providing *interesting* content instead of grindy content, then we will see the next big hit in MMOs. The fact that most MMOs (and 90% of Asian MMOs) have predatory microtransaction practices embedded only proves the stagnation of the genre.
Classic will be popular, and all you Vanilla haters will have to eat crow. I've been playing Vanilla WoW for years now, and guess what? It ain't nostalgia, like all the haters love to spout, that version of the game is actually fun despite what the haters love to go on about.
This was a game i wanted to succeed. Along with Firefall. How many MMO's we have on which you have to somehow aim or dodge instead of zombieing your way to max level?
I worked as support for the German/French costumers of this game at launch. There were 60 of us, training as crazy and all ready for the day our computers would be flooded with mails and questions. Around 3 weeks later there were only 3 of us left working, with nothing, absolutely nothing to do the whole day. Maybe the game per se was not cool enough or whatever and people stopped playing, but it was a flop from minute 1. People just didn't care about it.
I seriously hope that Carbine's next game will be a spiritual successor to Wildstar. I absolutely LOVE the lore, story, and world they've built and to see it all go so quickly is heartbreaking. I couldn't imagine my life without Nexus, the Dominion, the Exiles, all the races, the Eldan, Drusera, the Entity, the Strain, and Protostar. It feels horribly crushing to know that this game and it's world probably won't get to see 2019.
Man this makes me feel really sad. I loved Wildstar. I loved the style, the lore, the races, the classes, the housing system which was the BEST in any MMO bar none. I loved how it could be dark and serious when needed and funny and campy as well. The combat was fun and active. It had it's glaring flaws but it was still a heartwarming and fun game. It didn't deserve what happened to it.
Man. Wildstar was a great game for the 1% of people who could no-life it like I could. Had so much fun raiding in Datascape with 39 of my other buddies. The problem was that it was a bad game to come home and only play for an hour or two.
Their autoban system thought I was a bot. I ended up getting unbanned but after a few days of not playing I guess the Stockholm Syndrome broke and I realized I was only playing the game to raid. I've always been someone who enjoyed PvP and other aspects of MMOs.
It's a shame because they fixed all of that relatively quick? Especially with drop 4. The problem was they never properly d the game after the initial launch.
Most MMOs require huge timesinks to get to end game content. The casual player will often have more hardcore friends who end up weeks ahead. MMOs will always have difficulty coping with the opposite ends of catering to both casual and hardcore players.
Yup I have fond memories of pushing GA hard when it first released, but the bugs and poor performance really took a toll. My guild saw the cracks and soon quit after pushing for top rankings. Was fun while it lasted but the game wasn't going to survive in the state it was in. Especially for the majority of casual players.
worth mentioning he contradicts what is reported here by those who got rid of him (naturally... and he has a very good reputation, so he's worth listening to)
It did not go to waste, alot of people had a lot of fun in the game. Just because it will not be played anymore it doesnt mean it did not serve its purpose. I played Wildstar way more per dolar spent on it than i usualy play other games.
Wildstar ruined MMOs for me; I can't play other ones without feeling like I'm missing something. The combat felt so awesome to me and the housing was flat out amazing. I stopped playing because customer service screwed me over a few months in, and them trying to pass off bot responses as human was beyond insulting. I think half of what killed them was NCSoft not providing proper support on their end. The other half was making most of the end game progression tedious. The way the ranking worked for adventure/dungeon rewards made them very all or nothing affairs. I was in a guild that could handle them easy enough, but even still it was painful having to always worry about every death every single time you ran something. A lot of my more casual friends left precisely because of it. Then there was the pvp where if you didn't go hard into it at the start, it became almost impossible to advance through it without someone else's help because of how the rewards worked. It was fine having the raiding be for the hardcore only, but there needed to be something there for everyone else as well. If they could have handled that stuff the bleed off of players wouldn't have been nearly as bad, which wouldn't have made their dwindling server issues so bad.
The world of Wildstar is in my opinion excellent. I would love to see them use this world for more stuff. Maybe some pen and paper role-playing game or even some single player games. Wouldn't mind seeing a 'Death of a Game' on Rift or Dawngate.
PvP scene in GW2 has gotten alot of love recently, not sure why you said they arnt supporting it, you cant even recognise it if you only played at the launch, everythings changed
While its gotten love recently, the big problem was that GW2/ArenaNet tried to "sell" the PvP as being the next big thing for eSports and they managed to botch that hard. The PvP love lately is nice, but it might be a little too late for many that originally came into the game for the PvP. Also they still have no idea what to do with WvW and it feels like they are still grasping at straws on that front. I say all this as someone with 2 accounts and over 18 level 80 toons whose been around since beta of GW2.
Yeah they did the DC Cinematic Universe mistake of jumping right into the "e-sport" marketing, instead of making a good PVP scene and building the esport scene around it.
Still, people are dumbass in PvP on GW2... It's like : you hardwin or you hardloose. Most of the time it is the second option so xD I quit this game because of it, and the lack of PVE endgame content to do in Guilds (raids are a complete joke for instance).
Just a correction: Player housing happened at launch. It was Housing Communities introduced in 2017, a large additional feature of Housing. Another point: You covered a lot of points where Carbine was at fault, but you didn't say anything about how the vocal online community continuously produced vitriol and negative comments on every media outlet such as Reddit, Facebook comments, Twitter and so on. The community was just as integral in WildStar's downfall. When F2P went live, the veteran response to the wave of new players was completely toxic; players who didn't know the combat while no one in the community stepped up to provide resources and information like fansites do in other MMO's. The elitism drove just as many players away as Carbine's missteps. The 40-man raids were a mistake to begin with and they downscaled in the first quarter that it was live and the raid community was thriving as a result.
Yeah, the housing error really baffled me considering he actually played the game for so long. Wildstar's housing is objectively one of the most robust and best in the entire genre, was there from the beginning, and it was one of the biggest advertised features at every point of its lifecycle. And yeah, the loudest sections of W*'s community were sadly also the shittiest.
Wildstar was awesome! Loved playing a blue spacebunny who shoot heals. The raids were epic, combat was fun, housing was insane, music was great! So sad that it didn't get to live.
While Wildstar was still developing, a lot of players kept asking for harder, harder, really punishing game play. I was one of them. At the time, action combat was shifting from the "new big thing" to the "norm", and players who burned through GW2 content + Diablo III content (like myself) wanted a "challenge". Carbine actually listened. Test after test, things got harder and more difficult. Soon it was tuned to a level where even the first dungeon felt like raid difficulty, which finally satisfied the hardcore testers. And then the game launched. It was going really good at the beginning despite all the problems --- it was by all means, a very solid game. People complained about the normal things that any game launch would have, yet they kept playing. But a few weeks, a few months into the game, the atmosphere changed. Many people who previously thought that they were "hardcore players" because they raided in WoW, were locked behind very difficult content where it was impossible to progress rather than "get good" --- no gearing upgrade/drops, no raid until no-death dungeon achievements. Players had to keep dying to the same dungeon (yes, first dungeon, most can't even get past the first boss without a highly coordinated group) without any progress. Patience started to die out, and more importantly players felt shitty about themselves, so they found other reasons to complain about (like minor crafting issues etc) and left ('cause nobody wants to admit that the game is too difficult for them, but at the same time they kinda felt it, so it was soul crushing). So the hardcore and really good players should enjoy it plenty right? Wrong, raids required 20 people to have passed those 4 dungeons with gold/silver/bronze difficulty (yeah they kept reducing the difficulty, but it was too little too late). You just can't get enough people. The one who passed them first had to go back each night trying to get guildies through dungeons, some of these guildies never make it, some of them make it but then they are also in that boat having to try to get other guildies to pass. In some servers you can't even find 20 people across the entire server to form a raid group, nevermind within one single guild. So why was it hard to crack the demise of Wildstar when everything was looking so good, EVEN by today's standard? Because nobody wanted to speak of the devil: the game was too difficult for the audience it tried to grab. It was designed for huge groups, having 20 man and 40 man raids, and 40 man war-plots (PvP). Yet it was also designed like Dark-Soul where one mistake and you're dead. Even very simple games become very difficult when you need to coordinate 20 people. Its humour and style attracted fun-liking people but its combat was hardcore and unforgiving. It knew exactly what it wanted to be, but it forgot to do a thorough market search to make sure that there are ENOUGH PEOPLE to pay for that niche. Also, half of the hardcore players who finally stuck through to the raiding days also ended up leaving after a few months. When a game has only hardcore players left, suddenly a very good player feel mediocre at best. The atmosphere also shift to become more competitive and almost business-like. It may be difficult to wrap our minds around but, hardcore players actually need casual players there to feel good about themselves. And ego fuels a lot of us. Sure, they started to tune down difficulty week by week after they realized that less than 1% even made it past the first boss after getting stuck on it for weeks. But it was too little too late. And the bigger problem? The difficulty of the game actually WOUNDED some players, I had a very hard time convincing friends back into the game (unlike other games that we play together), because although they don't say it, Wildstar didn't make them feel like "it was a shitty game" --- rather, "I'm a shitty player at that game". So actually, changing the contents and adding/fixing stuff didn't help at all, because most people weren't leaving because of the game, most people left because they had doubts of THEMSELVES through playing the game. Evidence: people complained about server, well server was fixed, but no one came back. They complained about crafting, well crafting was overhauled, still no one came back. The game was tuned to be easier sure, but who's gonna go back to a game knowing that it was something that you can only beat when it gets "dumbed down for you"? It was a lost cause, dissatisfied customers can still come back after fixes, but wounded customers don't. Partly, the community was to blame. People always say, devs should listen to the players --- nope. Some players, sure. Not all players. Not even MOST players. Players don't know what we're talking about. We're no game design experts, neither are we psychologists. We can only tell what WE want, and what WE want reflect only the very small fraction of people who are like minded. Game-fanatics and hardcore players like myself instinctively assume that everyone would want to play like us --- and to be honest, sometimes it's just impossible for me to imagine how can someone find dodging red circles difficult. But some people DO find it difficult, that's just a FACT, and that fact can result in player frustration that builds up, builds up, builds up, until the player has to leave and the money is gone, eventually it will burn to my tail. Wildstar was a lesson for all of us, I'm sure many hardcore Wildstar players knew this in our hearts.
@Aaron Dodo What role did you play? i played healer and trying to run around and hit people with healing while they dodge roll all over the place and still get hit by random stuff slowly grinded away from me until i could not do it anymore. Add to that increased time i needed to farm everything for raid since i rarelly got any damage dealing loot and actually having a job and social life.. it really cut into my sleeping schedule and was doing bad things to my health. The breaking point was when we had to collect stuff from normal dungeons to enhance the gear. Damage dealers were rather soloing low level dungeons ( with reduced drops ) rather than group up for high level ones with us healers... so we kind of got left hanging. I complained a lot about that thing, got told down and out and decided to switch to damage dealer instead. That did not go well and i got demoted from hardcore raider to filler so i quit...
i agree with most of what you said, except that wow has harder endgame content that wildstar. w* was some of the best raid content since ulduar in terms of difficulty. To be completely honest, all of wows raiding content is too easy if you have even the basic understanding of raiding.
This is honestly my biggest 'disappointment' in years. I LOVED this game on release. Played the hell out of it. Tons of other people did. We all thought 'this is the next big thing...people just need to know about it, people need to try it!'. But that's the thing... This is a damn shame. This game was utterly fantastic. Way ahead of it's time in so many ways, with things that I wish so many other companies did...but won't take the risk.
I agree this game had so much potential! It had legendary housing (imo), Fantastic gameplay (pve wise), and just an interesting concept. I’m pretty casual and I couldn’t find it in me to the attunement for raids.(that’s when i stopped) However, I cant describe how much fun i had in the dungeons and other instances variants! It felt like an arcade game dodging all the telegrams and getting your group to perfectly interrupt the boss. I could go on forever about how much i loved this game. Years later and i still cant get over this game’s downfall. I doubt it would’ve been a WoW killer but it could’ve been another big name mmo with a dedicated fan base like ESO and GW2.
I loved the beta. Then launch happened. The launch was utterly disastrous here in EU. During the beta we'd already seen that the servers they'd provided weren't going to be enough. The days leading up to launch further cemented that fact. Then, way too late they added additional servers, but at this point in time subscriptions were ticking and people hadn't even gotten into the game. I remember sitting in login queues that were set to last for over a week, even after sitting in the queue for hours. Of course I would eventually have gotten in, but how long would I have to wait in queue before that? Six hours? Eight? Twelve? I played other things, didn't renew my subscription, and WildStar, which I'd adored in the beta and looked forward to for very long, simply got forgotten.
They should have added more dungeons, with high difficulty. This is something I think ESO does great, vDSA was a mini raid for 4 players. WoW did adress this slightly for a while with Karazan, but were quickly to cut it up in to several dungeons. So much easier to grab a few irl buddies over discord and do some decently engaging pve togheter.
Didn't had. HAS. Wildstar is still alive. As long as people fear the game closing, the game won't get a following big enough to warrant updates. The game is in a great place right now, with some hiccups and issues that can be fixed but they don't have the manpower. But it's casual enough for everyone and has a sick raiding. "WS is dead" Yet it just had it's 4th year birthday. Just enjoy the game and get people to play it and it'll get a following to warrant attention.
I played Wildstar from day 1 and stayed for the first year. I really wanted the game to succeed. This video did not mention another huge factor for the games failure. That being the rushed aspect of QA. So many game breaking bugs at launch and through most major initial patch updates. Then there was the RNG on RNG on RNG that made an already unforgiving combat system feel bad when you didn’t get the right rune or roll on gear. That turned a lot of people away quickly.
Oh, what could've been. So much about this game I loved. The art, the music, the gameplay, the general goofiness and overall tone. Sigh. If only it hadn't been run by monkeys on an ego trip. RIP Wildstar. I, for one, will miss you.
Right from the start this was positioned openly as 'the game you play because you're /hardcore/ and you're sick of being /babied/ by World of Warcraft' and it was the sheer pretentiousness that made me just recoil away from it before it even opened. I never understood how they thought a game apparently made for the few people who ran OG Naxxramas would appeal to enough people for an actual game to happen.
I wasn't annoyed by the pretentiousness... I was more turned off by the fact that by 2014, I only had 2-3 hours available to play per day, and that was on a GOOD day. on a bad day I got nothing. Back then I thought "Shit, how many people still have the time?" Turns out I was right.
There is a big difference though. Naxxramas was difficult to an extent but it took no where near the intensity of all the movement that Wilstar inflicted on you. My hands would litterly be sweating and I was all tensed up. Thats fun on occasion, but it was just too much for me. I could never relax doing a dungeon or raid, always max intensity.
@@Terestrasz Well I dont think that had anything to do with why wildstar died. It was because the artstyle and humor were extremly niche. Peoples have plenty of freetime because responsibilitys in life is a choice you dont have to make. Game like runescape, warframe and path of exile are games cattered towards a more hardcore audience yet they do fine. Back then I could probably spare more than 12 hours a day yet I never really got into wildstar. Peoples like to pretend they have no freetime when in reality if they actually want something they could make time for it but instead they cry about it. Because usually the same peoples that say they have no time for games have no problem watching tv for 4-5 hours a day.
@@styxzero1675 Even Grim Dawn, Warframe, and Path of Exile don't require *nearly* the amount of time as classic MMORPGs used to. Now, if there's one thing we can learn from Seconds from Disaster, it's that it's not just one factor that causes things. The "target demographic is now in their 20s-30s" was just one thing - you can glance at Sam Noone down there to mention about the mismanagement that was going on. I'm sure that did not help either.
I'm a little confused by something. You said that Carbine implemented housing in 2017.... but that's not the case. Housing has been a part of Wildstar since beta, and released with the game going live.Were you talking about Neighborhoods where players could link their housing lots? Because that was something that did happen in September 2017.
yes, housing was part of WS since launch. But they added more housing to the game later on. AFter that, many saw WS as a housing mmo with little to do outside of that afterwards. With no one to raid or pvp with.
Ligerwolf Beasttamer the housing was one of the most robust aspects of the game at launch. You didn't have to use it or anything, but I can't imagine a player not even knowing it was there 'til 2017.
Aah, Maker were forever sending me free monthly passes for this game so I could make videos and promote it, But I never used them. Loved the art design though, Overwatch before Overwatch.
Yeah, that's the main thing i want to see. An MMO (Preferably PvE focused)that looks like WildStar did. Something a little more bright and colourful than most things out there.
The WoW devs that came over probably had insight or worked on Project Titan (aka what Overwatch originally was going to be) so they probably modeled their art design after that
These days, with a saturated MMORPG market, you can't make a hardcore raid focused MMO, like Blizzard could do when they first made WoW (which has become ever more casual friendly over the years, while maintaining a small core of hardcore raiders). Any new MMO needs to focus _hard_ on catering to the casual player, because the single biggest requirement for an MMO to succeed is having the player numbers to do group content, and the casual market is where you will find those player numbers. You can have hardcore raiding, but the game needs the very broad foundation of a playerbase not entirely from that market segment. Eventually, many casual players will become more hardcore over time as they become more dedicated to the game, allowing your hardcore playerbase to grow. Start with too few hardcore players, from that too small market segment, or make your content too hard for the casuals to want to keep playing, and you won't have the numbers for players to even start large group content. PvP has a more extreme version of this catch 22 of needing sufficient player numbers to keep your players engaged, in that you can't place both high skill and low skill players into the same games, or neither will have a rewarding experience. That makes it doubly hard to get PvP off the ground, because when you have low numbers, you're kind of forced to put them all into the same matches. In those cases you can't get a PvP playerbase together without taking measures to minimise the degree to which individual skill is the sole determinant of success (eg teamwork, or semi PvE style objectives, where resource gathering or supporting roles are more important than direct combat). Again, use build the core PvP playerbase on top of the much bigger PvE playerbase, by creating a point where they can play together.
TBH Wildstar's "No casuals allowed! Well, ok, you can join, maybe your LEET friends will give you pity tokens to play." marketing was probably the biggest thing that ensured it would fail from the word 'Go.' You need the 'mouthbreathers' to keep the game world and economy active. Without that the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
Great video and analysis as usual, nerdSlayer. I played Wildstar and was active on the subreddit during that time, so after watching this video, I decided to pop into the Wildstar subreddit because I was curious if there is any activity still going on there. Behold, I saw someone post your video. Dude, there are some salty ass people in that subreddit comment thread ready to deny everything about this video lol
Great job...wonderful research. I'm saying I agree or disagree with your conclusions, just that those conclusions were well reasoned and thought out. Subscribed.
Watching this on the day it shuts down in a few hours, I can’t help but feel a bit sad. There goes over $200 I will never get back from subs, game copies and credd purchases. As much as I loved the game, lore and and character animations, something always felt off about it. I just couldn’t get myself to be committed. Now this makes a whole lot of sense.
I loved the art, the characters, the humor... but simply noone wanted to play the game. I tried, but all my friends played something else and i went to join them. I was sad, when this game died. I wanted it to succeed and make people want to come and play. But... nothing was done? It’s such a shame.
from a casual pvp player.. I left when they added pvp gear where the top gear was only reachable by being either an elite player or wintrading to get elite status.. They did this after WoW had already made an even playing field by allowing everyone access to same pvp stats on gear. I argued on the forums for a couple months that different rewards (like WoW) could be given for being an elite ranked player but that giving anyone a pvp advantage on gear was not in the best interest of a good pvp game. Than though I thought WS was a cool game I left and never played it again.
I really enjoyed Wildstar when it first came out, but their focus on the hardcore player is what doomed them. Trying to do a dungeon with a pickup group was next to impossible and they were told over and over that 40 man raids were a thing of the past but still stuck with it. I loved the world and the combat even the great housing. But as a mostly casual player there really wasn’t much end game content available. I had a max level of every class and crafter do I played the game a good bit. They did go overboard on the telegraphs especially in dungeons and pvp
Wildstar was such a good game... Honestly i found it to be my favorite MMO ever played. Visually cool, perfect Housing, combat system was great, PvP was cool at the beginning (mostly cause of the queue time was ok), PvE was awesome, a bit too much into grid especially for the raid and hardmode access. I've followed Wildstar since the beginning, played it like a year or so... It's so sad to see the state of the game now, it was for me the perfect MMO, got me hyped as hell, i enjoyed it so much. Sad :'( Thanks for the video nerdSlayer, that was really great, nostlagia and sadness at the same time x)
From what it's looking like in the dev's comment section on here, it's not NCsoft's fault directly, just they seem to attract some of the worst in the business.
After watching this, i'm currently downloading it on steam. Looks fairly interesting and i like the graphical style. Always wanted to try it so nows my chance i guess before it disappears.
Enjoy the leveling journey on Nexus thats pretty much all you can do since the population dwindled to a private server for WoW but not just regular one but Warlords of Draenor one which not many people liked to begin with hence why I made this reference...Anyways I enjoyed my time in Wildstar but it was shame that they build it p2p I was worrying from start with their shifted focus...I think it would be great if they instead would drop that hardcore karma much sooner and made the game b2p
Not really, there is a following. Pservers on WoW have almost 2k people nowadays which is enough, and WS has people to play. The issue is that the LFG tool is buggy, so you need to ask for groups in Nexus Chat. Don't go by the LFG tool. There ARE guilds and raiders yet.
You can enjoy any aspect of the game except PVP at this moment, I´ve been playing it for years and the low population only affected the PVP side of the game, PVE is still working and you will have no problems doing any raid tier available.
Man I really tried to get into this game when it went f2p, but just couldn't. Combat was good as far as action goes, but it really lacked impact which made it hard for me to enjoy.
Enrique Cabrera I think it's pretty similar to WoW. Harder impact sound effects would've helped for me. But that's just a very small nit-pic lol. I think the addition of some type of bow class would've kept me playing longer as well due to the fact that I always play Bow classes. I played the dual gunner class in Wildstar, and the majority of the skills I unlocked literally went through the enemies.
Enrique Cabrera WoW is pretty impactful when it comes to its combat. Ranged sounds do sound meh but melee is pretty on point. Kidney shot for example, feels like a real gut wrencher
Something that pretty much everyone glosses over with these MMO's is accesibility for casual gamers. When Wildstart came out I had an older computer and could barely run the game with the graphics settings turned all the way down. At the time I was also playing WoW and could run it just fine. Even today I had a high end laptop that's now 6 years old and I can still play WoW. However none of the new MMO's will hardly run at all. It not worth me paying $1000+ to get a new rig when I have other systems and games out there to play.
liar! Everything is fine, Neowiz did good job and Bless is very good game. Everything is just international conspiracy of evil streamers, youtubers and paid by ArenaNet and Pearl Abyss! :-D
yeah I’m unsubbing if he doesn’t come out with a new vid tomorrow. We need to put our foot down and demand what we want as viewers or we’ll be watching a Death of a Channel vid real soon
i vivdly remember how incredibly strange the gearing process was once you hit max level at launch. first you had to do scenarios with objectives like escort missions, that gave 3 different medals at completion that each awarded exclusive gear. and generally not more than 1-2 items for a 5 man group. problem was to have any chance in normal! dungeons, you needed full gold medal gear, but gold medals were incredibly hard to get and generally failed if even one player didnt know exactly what they were doing. combined with very bad difficulty balancing and glitches it was pretty impossible to do these with random groups. everyone, including me who came from wow were expecting some medio core difficulty, wow style gearing up to raids, doable in group finder and the real challenge coming with raids. this was hardcore without any kind of warning. paired with laggs and performance issues, this was frustrating beyond believe, seeing all those dungeons available, but they were so incredibly impossible to complete that we had to grind the same 4 or 5 scenarios over and over. nobody wanted to do scenarios and everyone wanted to get boosted through, it was just a huge disaster that ultimately made me quit less than a month in.
I was one of those guys that joined a guild before the game was even out. Spent hours on twitch to get a code for closed beta. Once the game launched I set my self up as a tank and started learning how to be a raid leader. The way they made each boss fight even in normal dungeons unique with multiple phases and the chance to stun made each of those dungeons special. I was sad to see it all go down and I still consider it the second best mmo I’ve ever played as still miss it. At least I have City of heroes back. Perhaps wildstar will get the same treatment.
The "Hardcore" stance was one of the main problems. The devs were trying to cater to the 1 percent hardcore playerbase, and you can't make money when you are focusing only on the smallest part of the playerbase.. A symptom of this is the insane difficulty, the most basic, lowest level 5-man leveling dungeon was as hard or harder than, for example, an end-of-expansion mythic hard mode raid from World of Warcraft. The telegraph system was a very tricky thing, introducing all kinds of problems, particularly for healing. A group needs to coordinate like they were a world class epic raiding guild, and almost needed to be a hive-mind to dodge the electric-boogaloo disco-inferno of telegraphs from bosses in perfect unison with each other so you can actually be healed. Having to be ultra super serious on the most basic of dungeons is not fun. No MMO will survive if it's focus is "Hardcore raiding" because hardly anyone does that relative to the rest of the playerbase. The only people who think it should be the main focus are the actual hardcore raiders who are delusional and self-entitled. They're like vultures, they pick at a corpse but once it's picked clean(no longer able to focus on their hardcore raid cravings) they just go to another body and pick at that instead. If they are loud enough, like Tigole, they can actually do serious damage to an MMO, as they trick the developers into focusing on hardcore raids and alienate the other 99 percent of the playerbase, causing players to leave for another, more comfortable MMO, and of course, those very hardcore raiders who did this damage inevitably leave anyway because of their own vanity and vapidity. Such loud raiders are like parasites, killing a game and leaving it to die once all of it's vital fluids have been drained. It's a shame, because I actually liked the story and setting of Wildstar.
That seems like a bit of an exaggeration. I am by no means some hardcore raider and I rarely venture beyond heroic dungeons in WoW, but I had no problems with the dungeons in WildStar (I can't speak for the raids). Were there wipes? Sure. Did I come across some groups that couldn't get the job done? A few times. The problem is, people are so used to FacerollZergGangbang WoW/FF14 dungeons that anything that requires a strategy other than, "sprint to the end of the room and AoE everything" is, "too hard". You didn't need to be some world class player to get through these dungeons, you just couldn't mindlessly barrel through everything.
@Lord Proteus This is a myth, this game had loads of content for casual players. I mean the housing system alone was a godsend for casuals. I believe the combat system was the main reason people didn't stick around for this game.The telegraph system and that limited action bar is was a gimick that really didn't resonate with MMO gamers. The classes as well were boring af. I'd also add the it's science fiction theme had very limited appeal.
I agree with you, I tried out Wild Star when it went free to play, loved the story and the graphics didn't bother me much. Hit max level and tried my first dungeons AND PvP battle grounds... and it was an utter SHIT SHOW. After seeing all the cluttered red light green light telegraphs on the ground, it killed the game for me.
So MMOs should be mind numbingly easy? Modern wow is shit. It requires no effort to level up, you just smash your face again the keyboard and everything dies. Everybody sprints through dungeons in 5 minutes so they can do the next one.
In Wow Mythic+ 5 mans and Mythic raids are for the people that want a challenge but people that don't do the harder content love to complain about it being easy.
I really enjoyed Wildstar's gameplay, but when I got to endgame there wasn't much to do. I crafted better gear than what I could get from any dungeon, and only the raids could give me better ones. Not a lot of people ran raids and only once per week, so I quit.
Me and my friend had the same problem. Once we reached end game, there was barely anything to do and most of the content wasn't holding our attention. Loved the combat system, setting, art style, and everything, but without much content, we got stagnated.
Pretty much. You can't build your game on the back of the 10~1% that reach the very endgame of content, you need to pay attention to the other 90%+. Having something to strive for is well and good, but players like to feel as though they're making progress.
No, that's wrong... In fact it's 100% the other way around. You simply don't understand how much money is lost always trying to bring new players over the massive amount of revenues NOT advertising to players that stick around for years. Sure, 1 mil players 2 months in is great, but 300k 6 months later and less than 100k 1 year later ends games. It's pretty simple math... Problem is most people don't understand business, but that does not stop them from talking about it. Planet Fitness is a great example of a "WoW" business model... make the worse version of something that was great, but challenging. Sell the fuck out of it... But only so many years later no one else can pull off a WoW, because people learned the games were crap, they can see they are playing the same game, so they start and quit in just months. 100,000 people playing a great game they can't get somewhere else at 15$ a month is 1.5 mil a month, 18 mil a year... You should not only be rich, but also able to pay everyone really well... But these games spend 50 million making a game, so they need too many subs day one because they know in 6 months to a year they will be closing servers left and right... laying people off... and so on.
I think when you get right down to it, making a truly good game is an art form and truly good art can’t be made in a factory, much to the frustrations of business majors which are firmly rooted in the practical.
i was so sad that this didn't do well. even i stopped playing it, because like you said, it seemed so dead. there was no one on my server and i just felt like i was completely alone. i really wanted to keep playing because i liked the crudeness of the space characters. the combat was fun, and the races looked really cool. but the game play was just so weird... i haven't touched it (and actually forgot about it until i seen this video) since it launched on F2P. i'm thinking they put too much time into looks instead of actual events and stuff in game.
This was my friend's issue. He was a non-hardcore "hardcore" player that constantly complained about casuals and how easy WoW was without Mythic Raiding or even touching Mythic+ dungeons, let alone avoid all forms of PVP but complaining how vanilla AV was the best PVP ever because of how "hardcore" it was. Once returning to WoW, I learned that he put himself in actual debt from using real money to get carries in Wildstar and lost his car because of it, opting for public transportation in the city that he lives in. He was only able to play WoW once again because of the gold he had before he left, using it to play with the WoW Token. He wants to go back to Wildstar, but his wife threatened to leave him if he drops money (and time) on a game like that again. Sadly, he isn't alone in his situation, as I know several others that have come back to WoW for one reason or another, would being casual friendly enough to simply pick back and afford with a few hours of dedicated farming a month for no real money.
It was taken from Diablo 3's Greater Rift mechanics that its had for years now, which increase in level every time you clear it, constantly challenging players, having increased rewards and leaderboards supported. Diablo 3 may have gotten it from another action RPG, but I haven't heard of it in any other MMO.
If there is a trend to be found in these dead MMO's, it's that prior successes, do not guarantee future successes. Just because "joe blow" worked on a popular game like WoW or something, doesn't mean anything. So tired of seeing games, to this day, be advertised on "joe blow's" prior successes. "From the Alternate 3rd Unit Sub-Executive Janitorial Production Supervisor of WoW's 3rd Patch in WotLK, comes a new MMO...." It's almost comical to buy a game, or even have faith in one, because of a handful of people, who were merely involved in prior successful games.
I think you heavily misunderstood the Homecoming Patch. It didn't add player housing, that was there since the start. The Homecoming Patch, which came in September 2017, just added communities, which let players link their housing plots together to make bigger projects. But housing was a shipped feature in the game, it was even tested in beta.
Wildstar died in part due to its commitment to "hard core", it's mis steps of 40 man raiding that lead to a re-release of DS (it's 40 man raid) into a 20 man instance. Basically new raid instance that was the same instance as the 40 man version, a massive waste of development time. Add to this some of the massive sink's related to attunement that turned off massive parts of the population and the continued redesigning of the itemization system and you have lots of wasted development resources leading to less new content. I will note the actual action combat and endgame content wildstar put out was amazing and i do wish more individuals could have experienced it.
I loved the game. It wasnt as upkeep heavy as wow but it had all the raiding mechanics. I had so many good memory in raids and dungeons and bad memories when it was dying
Yeah, blaming an MMO's failure on Free To Play is, kinda a cop-out. Not only is WoW still using that model, but FFXIV does too and that didn't come out all that long before Wildstar did. Subscription model MMO's are fine, they just need to have something unique and compelling to draw players in. With WoW, it's the games size and sheer amount of content. With FFXIV, it's the story and frequent content patches. But with Wildstar, I'm not sure what it's unique hook was supposed to be.
You mentioned GW2 devs not working on PVP and ignoring it, yet it has one of the most active PVP scenes, with both dev and player run tournaments, not to mention WvW. (maybe im wrong, i havent played it in a while, but still...)
You're absolutely right. I play regularly and even though I'm a PVE-er, I can tell you ANet pays so much attention to PvP, with seasonal tournaments and such. You can even earn legendary gear from both modes so the hardcore WvW/PvP players don't have to do raids.
Indeed I was a constant WvW player from launch and played the game for over a year. PvP was very much a part of the game during the first year the WvW content was packed to the brim with players I can vouch for that.
WvW is pretty braindead zerging and sPVP wasn't updated for years where people just compete with whose build is more broken. They are both curious concepts and people play them because of that, but they are very poorly balanced.
To any developer that worked on Wildstar, thank you! I thought the game was incredibly creative and fun. In fact, I installed it again yesterday. It's F2P, why not! I play Overwatch every day, while my friends jumped back on to Wow because of the xpac. The tab targeting is so boring in WoW that I can't take it. I loved the fighting and movement in Wildstar. Wish it could relaunch.
The problem with raids, in my experience, (I was raiding Wildstar in the first few months after the release) were not in terms of having the people (although, true, you needed attunements) but the bugs and the loot tables. It was really hard to maintain a positive attitude for all 40 people involved if the boss just bugged out for no reason, or the drops were laughable. I really wanted to love Wildstar but they just dropped the ball on the raid content at the release, and the damage was done.
The game is awesome at the start, full of humor, but leveling was too fast, and when you got to 50, there was no dungeon to start at that didn't kick your everloving in a big way. Hard core gamers do not pay the bills, and they are a bitchy whiny lot if you don't have new content. It felt like the game was still in Beta, lots of bugs. 40 man raids should have had 20 man versions. PVP gear and PVE gear didn't get along which always caused frustration. I came back a bit under a year ago, things are geared down, with primal levels that are hard for the geared people without the skills. PVP is dead except usually only one part of the day. Primal matrix was a good slow progression that people love to whine about, but wasn't bad. My only complaint is the penalty if you were doing something challenging that you were nerfed if you didn't have the heroism(progression in primal matrix) Which is completely unfair.
God, I absolutely LOVED Wildstar when it first came out. It was so fresh and visually different from other titles out there that I loved that I actually looked forward to logging in when I had time to play. I just never had a lot of time to give it thanks to work and school....then when I finally was able to give it the time I wanted, it was pretty much dead. :(
Tim Cain leaving Carbine to join Obsidion is really fascinating seeing some of the similarities tonally and content-wise between Wildstar and the Outer Worlds
I hope you guys like this video, this one took a bit longer to write as Wildstar was a tough nut to crack. But hopefully you guys think I did it justice. Homecoming patch added aspects to housing, but I incorrectly stated it added housing which was actually in since the beginning. Thanks for watching. Oh and the "please subscribe bell thing" part at the beginning is not a recurring thing, we just wanted to point it out for people who are questioning why they aren't getting their updates. It will probably transition to a graphic of sorts. Forgive me pronouncing Aliso Viejo as "Vieja" too (i'm Hispanic I have no excuse). And the "few and far inbetween" part sounds disjointed because I had to fix a problem with the sound (hence creating an "uneven" sound...which is kinda a problem too? :thinking:).
FYI at about 2:00 - Tim Cain led on development the original Fallout, his impact on Fallout 2 seems to have been small as he left to found Troika while it was being developed
The video was good and touched on all the major aspects that led to the game's downfall, imo. Do you feel it could have been worth mentioning that the drawn-out raid attunement for Genetic Archives along with the Isle of Quel'Danas-tier lvl 50 reputation grind might have scared off a sizeable chunk of the playerbase or do you feel that those were ultimately negligible because of how Wildstar set out to appeal to the hardcore MMO crowd in the first place?
As a dude who didn't know WS released with housing-- one of its two best features-- I don't think anyone should be trusting your assessments. The game is low pop, it's not 'dead'. Your clickbait title says more about you than it does the game...
Wildstar was the first and probably last western developed MMORPG I ever enjoyed playing. I had a lot of good times with the game, especially with the RP community (Rest In Piece, Evindra RP server), but also a lot of bad times, too. With that aside, I feel like the addition of the megaservers was the time the game started to drop off for me as Carbine kept making too many boneheaded decisions that was ultimately destroying their own game (like changing the stat system THREE TIMES and bad balance updates like nerfing and rebuffing Medics for PvP) and the switch to F2P was basically just a giant bandaid fix that didn't do much to solve a lot of issues for players that didn't give a damn about raids. Carbine stated that they watched carefully how other MMORPGs failed and they wouldn't make the same mistakes, but in the end, not only did they make the same mistakes as other MMORPG games did, but they ended up making new mistakes that no other MMORPG has went through before. How do you even manage to do that? I can't even believe that the servers are still even active to this day, because there is no way the game is making enough income for NCSoft and Carbine to justify keeping the lights on for it. Still, I may revisit it one day, simply to look at my giant hamster maze of a skyplot again.
Mikedot bruh same. The death of Evindra was such a blow, it felt like us rpers were being thrown to the wolves. Don’t even get me started on the instancing bullshit. I’m really sad to see it go. Spent two years of my life playing that game obsessively but I couldn’t stick around to watch it slowly die :(
I bet with the current state of the MMO industry right now if they would launch again they could have a chance at it... of course if they manage the game better then what they done before ! Never played Wildstar but I would pay a sub right now to try it out.
I have to say your video was among the best Ive ever seen on this game. I have played on release and I was a hardcore player. I was a PvE player and loved the game for what it shouldve been. When the first changes to stats hit and I have already spent a fortune to craft the best gear and after I have beaten the 20 man raid I left. Mostly because most of the work I have done until this point was in vain. 90% of my gear was uselss which Ive spent ages to acumulate. And the gear dropped in raids was unsatisfying for the effort you put into it. Yet what mostly drove me off the game were the 40-man raids. It was already hard enough for us to gather 20 man to kill Ohmna and after we have achieved that there was no way we wouldve gone into 40 man with a full group. I am now to old probably to wish for another one of these games with the right focus, but I still hope that one time the developers realize their USP before they ruin the game.
This game is absolutely needed in today's absolutely depressing mmo-scene. The issues that plagued wildstar are things that could have easily been fixed, but god fucking damn it, it just had to be left to die the way it was. There's no genuine mmo option today that feels completely satisfying, everything has this glaring weakness that makes jump between wow ffxiv and eso. When Wildstar was out it was MY mmo, now there's just nothing that scratches that itch. It just genuinely hurts to not be able to play this game anymore.
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Ex Dev on wildstar here. Watched the video and although it was quiet informative, I just wanted to chime in on some of the key factors on why this game was a huge flop.
I worked on the game for 5+ years and let me tell you.. This games was destined to fail wayyy before there was any issues with servers or not enough updates.
Development on this project was a nightmare. The real Development time frame was closer to 10/11 years. Coming onto the project at the 5 year mark I soon realized that the leads and big boys had no fucking clue what a good game was and they could not commit to any idea. Too many cooks in the kitchen that can't cook anything other than Mayo and Beef Jerky sandwiches... Look for the double meaning in that. It's there.
One of the most prevalent issues with the game that I noticed was bad direction from top down. People like Tim Cain specifically made way more problems than they were worth. Honestly the guy was a total dick. Awful to work with and almost nothing he "did" ended up in the game. His lack of leardership I would say was one of the reasons why the first 4-5 years of the game were almost completely thrown out. Literally...
Then you have an art director who couldn't keep his nose out of anything. His selfishness drove off many of the best artists in the company including cory loftis. Literally... Cory Loftis LEFT the game which is based off of his style almost entirely because of this guy. This same art director was also responsible for hijacking the story and overall vision of the game as well. Wondering why there wasn't more raids and dungeons? Because the ART DIRECTOR thought several ALREADY MADE LEVELS didn't fit the story anymore... So they threw them away... He also made calls on gameplay... Which... is a hole other nightmare.
The gameplay was once good... I would say around the 7 year mark. 1v1 combat was very fun at this point and each class felt very unique and fun. Unfortunately most of that was thrown away and replaced with alot of new stuff that was just NOT tested enough. I repeat... most of what launched in Wild star combat wise was BARELY tested. Stuff like Warplots was broken to shit from start to finish. The designers leading WarPlots were absolute lazy trash and would knowingly put in broken systems and call them done just to appease their bosses. The only reason that warplots was even REMOTELY playable on launch was because of some amazing talent on the 3D prop team. I am not joking.. Artists LEANRNED HOW TO SCRIPT TO FIX THIS CRAP.
Pvp in general was absolutely broken. I didn't even work on paper let alone work in a multi million dollar game. The idea of telegraphs is pretty straight forward and seems to just work for most cases in combat.... except in any fight larger that has more than two characters per team... Attack telegraphs drawing on the ground is very clear when you have a small amount of people fighting but in medium to large pvp fights ( pretty much every fight that matters) the entire ground becomes a multi colored disco dance floor. Casual to moderate gamers were like deer in headlights during the VERY FEW playtests that were had for larger pvp battles. SO MUCH FEEDBACK was given by the teams that participated in these tests and almost nothing was fixed about it.
The leadership was god awful. Proof of this was that most of the BEST things in the games that players loved the most such as Double Jump and Hoverboards were things that were never planned for or schedules by leads. Those were passion projects. Double Jump was made by an ARTIST. That artist got in trouble for making double jump and eventually fired for other reasons. Never got credit either. Hoverboards were snuck in by an animator... He got written up for secretly working on hoverboards in his freetime with other coworkers. The place was a prison of ideas and everyone was getting shanked for even THINKING that they WANTED to think of something to improve the game.
Oh did I mention mandatory Crunch? We would crunch for months at a time. Mandatory. I remember working from 10am to 3 am everynight 6 days a week for about 3 months straight. And I got a talking to once because I was 10 minutes late to work. ONCE. Because Jeremy Gafney saw me coming in late. Everyone working on this game was absolutely DONE with the BS and it shows. The love died way before this game launched. No one in the studio really wanted to play the game. And then we shifted to try to cater to the hardcore audience?! ( this was the version on launch. The hardcore not for pansies mmo) During a time where pretty much almost every successful game was being carried hard by more casual players.
I can go on but... I think you get the picture. These devs thought they were clever enough to ignore pretty much every other successful business model and all other mmorpgs to make this.. There you have it...
This explains so much! Do you know if NCSOFT had anything to do with the launch date being so early? I had a bad feeling as soon as it was announced. I always figured they pushed it out early, but it looks like there were big problems closer to home.
Artist who implemented double jump here chiming in. everything in here is true, the game's faults weren't in the decisions after launch or the pricing model. the company was a fucking nightmare to work for. all due to the higher ups being so poor at their jobs. i got in trouble multiple times for implementing features in my free time or even giving opinions that didn't agree with the people in charge. wast constantly told to just sit at my desk and make props and nothing else. even though i implemented one of the features players loved the most. People who knew me there knew i could implement fun features and had an eye for game feel but i got in trouble for everything i made even if it was fun and added to the game. the art director was awful, him and i had a disagreement in email and the guy called me into his office privately and cursed me out and told me to go home. then he had my lead fire me "for being unprofessional" the following week. coward didn't even have the balls to face me himself probably because he knew he was wrong. of course i've heard many other stories as to why i got fired afterwards but almost none of them mention how he called me into his office just to berate me. that should give you an idea as to how this company was run. that's the kind of people who were calling the shots. just the shadiest people were in charge. the game didn't fail because of server issues or business models. it failed because the company was awful and the people in charge were always on a power trip and couldn't stand to have their egos get hurt. I have no problems being 100% open and honest about how shitty this company and the people in charge of it were.
i'm sorry to the fans of the game that had huge expectations and were let down. you absolutely deserved more and some of us tried our best to deliver that to you. people like gaffney, cain, and mocarski were nothing but con men making false promises to ncsoft in exchange for their paychecks they didn't deserve. they had the power, the money, and the time to make a truly wonderful mmo and instead they were more concerned about themselves and not the project. us passionate devs tried our best to make changes in the game and literally put our jobs on the line to do so. double jump and action oriented combat were both things that artists had to risk their jobs to try and get implemented and even then we never got to see everything implemented the way we wanted to. we had so many big ideas and constantly were benched or fired. some of us really do care about making amazing games in this industry and we will risk our jobs to do so but there are some in this industry that are just con men looking to pad their resume with fancy titles and making promises they can't fulfill. that's how bad games are made.
seems these days its all about money and not making a great game fun. a lot of what I've noticed these days with games is there some amazing games, but a lot of them don't factor in fun, is it enjoyable. if the game is not fun why bother.
The main thing that killed this game is NCSOFT and NCSOFT only! This game helped kill one of the greatest MMO's of all TIME and that game was City of Heroes/Villains (IMO the greatest MMO ever made even to this day). NCsoft shut down City of Heroes/Villains when it was still making them over 10 million dollars a year and the shut down came out of nowhere, even the Devs didn't see it coming! City of Heroes/Villains holds the Genius Book Wolrd Records for the most Free Updates for an MMORPG and still holds this record Today! NCsoft shut down CoX on Nov 30 2012 to prepare for this Wildstar garbage and to help Guild Wars 2. If NCsoft would have just left CoX alone then this game(Wildstar) probably would have been fine! Now there are 3 superhero MMO's coming out in the next few years because of this, all from hardcore CoX fans. These games are called Ship of Heroes, City of Titans and Valiance Online and you can check them all out and even play one right now in its alpha for a small donation! The last 2 or 3 years of CoX where the greatest years of the game because they listened to there community more then any other MMO EVER HAS and we got everything we wanted almost and it made it insanely different and 100% better then it was in the first 3 to 5+ years of its life.
Vincent you clearly have no fucking idea what happened with NCsoft. Wildstar was never and would never be fine. it was never going to succeed with the people they had in charge and city of heroes wasn't shut down out of nowhere. the devs for city of heroes were told by ncsoft that they wanted them to make city of heroes 2. they gave them a ton of funding to get that going and out of nowhere without telling ncsoft the devs decided to make a completely different game. they didn't want to make city of heroes 2 so they were making a different game on ncsofts dime without telling them first. when ncsoft found out about this and confronted them upset that they were lied to the devs thought they couldn't be touched because city of heroes was so successful and still making money. ncsoft let them all go to send a message. don't fucking lie to the people funding your project. ncsoft made the right decision. when you give people funding you cannot lie about what you're going to do with that money. it's a matter of trust. successful game or not i feel not sympathy for those devs that made that choice.
I loved sprint, double jump and double-tap-to-dodge mechanics in a MMORPG. I had a great first year with this game, but I felt like it didnt have much going on so I stopped coming back to it.
Same, super creative but nothing enough to keep me playing long term. Like most MMOs in general now days
To the Devs the ones that gave a damn. Thank you. I'm going to miss this game. It showed us a spark of greatness with a universe I loved from the get-go. Sad to see it die.
Was a fun game for sure to bad it died
Just as I finished watching this it was announced that Carabine and Wildstar are shutting down, talk about coincidence.
And now it's officially closing. RIP Wildstar
DAMN............... :O
fuck, it hurt to see this game go down the drain, that house building mechanic was great
I agree. I loved the combat, the house building and the overall world design. It also had a pretty smooth launch, which is amazing for an MMO. It's a shame the game never really got any traction.
It was the entire reason I played it. I spent over 300 hours building a Junk City that wowed people...back when there was anyone left to show it to.
Jeb I was lvl 16 for so long playing house and exploring houses
You can indeed. But you'll have to change your region in the launcher and make a character on NA.
the fact that they fuckin gave you your own instances plot of land so early was amazing. could alter your personal skybox too, such a dream
Wildstar was the only mmorpg I was hyped for after WoW. Really hurt seeing it die :/
Same here. I just started playing wow again after wildstar and man everything is so easy even the mytich mode compered to wildstar raids.
Yeah that is the cool thing, wildstar raids are super fun, because of that. I don't really liked GA much the where some fun boss, but the whole design was boring for me, but DS and RMT is such a blast. Rigth now I playing wow and I finished the current raid content in raid finder, normal and Heroic and started progressing mytic which is the dificult one, but still none of the mytic boss I tried was so much fun as like malestorm or system deamons. I really miss wildstar raids sometimes,
Achinhi FrostWhisper should start raiding when it is open not so late when everyone knows what to do and overgearing it by 20+i lvl.
What Igor Liba said^
The first three bosses of Mythic raids are easy in wow because that's blizz's design philosophy right now. But the last 2-3 bosses are INSANELY difficult (KJ on release took close to 1000 pulls to down for most mythic race guilds (method's world first in about 700 is an extreme outlier).
If you do KJ now, because there are like 5+ guides for the mythic fight, WAAAAAAAY better gear, better artifacts, etc. it'd be far easier relatively.
IF you want to really experience the truly difficult wow content, before it gets nerfed/you have lots of guides to help you through it, you have to do it as close to release as possible to really see what's difficult. (I.E. be a mythic race raider). which means....next xpac lmao
@@umber8904 KJ on heroic was harder than the first few mythic bosses in that raid lol i cant even imagine trying do it world 1st in the gear they were in
This one makes me sad, because unlike the rest of the games you covered I actually played this one and invested about $50 into it when it went free to play. I loved the world and characters and spent days customizing my home. I still technically got more than my money's worth out of it, but still this is tragic to watch...
Aesthetically this game is still my favorite. I loved the Ratchet and Clank / Jak and Daxter vibe it gave off. Also the housing was really really good for an MMORPG. I played it all the way to the end and still kind of miss it.
I really loved WildStar, and I still have a Rowsdower Plushie on my desk that reminds me of those days. As much as I loved the game I always felt Carbine Studios made two fatal mistakes. The first was limiting their potential audience by going all in on the "We're too Hardcore For You Babies" mentality rather making the game be about fun for all types of players. The second fatal mistake was getting into bed with NCSoft. NCSoft is the killer of dreams.
WildStar was one of the most beautiful MMO's I've ever played. I loved the sense of humor, I loved my psychotic Chua, I loved building in the game, and to a lesser extent I really loved the world PvP. Had Carbine not fallen into some of the traps so common with a new MMO launch, and focused on routinely adding new content that appealed to all kinds of players, WildStar might still be around today.
As a large fan of Wildstar, this was a comprehensive video and a fair take on the issues
Death of a game Vindictus
as a human being with two eyes, i can see through the bullshit of this overused phrase.
This game was fucking incredible and the soundtrack is still one of the best things about it
After years of playing wow, I still remember logging in to WS for the first time and being blown away by how fresh, and fun and full of character and charm it was. So sad it never made it, I wanted nothing but for wild Star to be my go to. I hope the team that created still have it in them to keep creating in the future, their vision was wonderful.
This game has such a pretty design and atmosphere. It makes me feel nostalgic and it makes my heart hurt knowing it'll be gone soon.
My experience with Wildstar was getting attuned to the launch raid on two different characters, my guild downing the first boss, and then half the people noshowing the next raid night.
40 people is just too many people to coordinate.
Most of the difficulty in EQ and Vanilla WoW was management.
I remember getting into raiding... how often we had to pause for a week or two because half the raids were in college and had finals or mid-terms. Then we wound up having to lose a couple people over the summer (Because they had to get a full-time job or take summer classes). Then when school started we got more people... only to regularly end up repeating the cycle again.
That was me. I quit the same way, just too much effort/concentration involved in raiding. I couldnt imagine keeping going on, it wasnt fun.
I never was a hardcore raider, always somewhere in-between casual and hardcore, but as much as I loved the game, the attunement process for Wildstar was a little excessive.
@@brettpierce5225 I think it was fine. You still had small public group content in the form of dungeons but had to actually do something to get into raiding, not too much. I got attuned pretty fast, although my guild guided me along the way. I would've not had even close to the required gear even before that and just got it as I got attuned, so... I think it was perfect.
As I do molten core on wow classic tonight lol
I loved the art style and setting. The playable races weren't just colored humans with a different forehead or a tail like SWTOR or every asian MMO i've ever played.
Yeah, I loved my Aurin Esper yet the game got so old so quickly... since leveling was so slow.
SLOW? Leveling was too fast for my tastes. I could gain a level or two during an evening's play. I reached max level well before I finished the content.
Art style is the main reason I joined.
I never understood what core market they were going for exactly - the gameplay itself was focusing on PvP and hardcore raids for "oldschool gamers", but the art style, overall 'mood' of the game, the long animated trailers, and especially the housing system and huge amounts of in-game lore all seemed to be targeting RPers and more casual gamers. I'm not saying people can't be both types or that they can't coexist, but it just always struck me as odd how the gameplay and literally everything else about the game were driving at the two most opposite sides of the gaming population and I still reckon that had a pretty big hand in it.
UltimateCarl your spot on mate . And it's sad they should have catered to casuals .
People act like WoW casualized because they wanted to. No, they read the tea leaves. People now a days have so many other options for online experiences, you can't just survive on hardcores alone.
Ethan Matz So why are most of the casual MMOs barely limping along with bloated cash shops and horrible P2W tactics in order to stay afloat? This game died by a thousand cuts, not because they catered to 1% hardcore raiders.
The audience for MMORPGs is withering away full stop, the world has had a vast increase in people that play games online over the last 10 years, yet look how few play MMORPGs (meanwhile 80 million play LoL, 30 million Overwatch, etc).
Problem with MMORPGs is the world has moved on, an online world is no longer a new amazing thing, which leaves you with the gameplay, which in many respects is bad, I mean no one sane wants to run the same dungeon for the 50th time rolling their face across the keyboard.
So that only really appeals to two groups of player, Skinner Box zombies who basically play for shiny things and don't really care about gameplay, which is a niche audience or super casual gamers who won't be running those dungeons a zillion times over anyway, but that audience has largely been swallowed up by mobile games (as to an extent have the Skinner Box zombies).
But the fact that these two groups make up the bulk of what is left of the MMORPG playerbase is what holds the genre back and is why the genre is so stagnant. (along with the fact there is very little talent in the gaming industry)
somename99 this is total bs, people still want MMOs is just the corporate suits took over the industry and turned the genre into the zombie wasteland it is today. I'd say the Wow clone mentality is what destroyed the industry the most, not a lack of interest. Look at the popularity and hype surrounding Bless, if the genre lacked interest from gamers, why where their servers slammed? They also reported strong presales as well.
MMOs were casualized because players eventually got tired of grinding and better options appeared.
For PVP: mobas,team shooters and the new battle royale genre provide a grind-free (and mostly balanced) PVP experience.
For PVE: most MMOs copied wow's themepark quest/dungeon design, which got boring eventually. So players returned to single player games as they (again) tend to provide a better and grind-free PVE experience. Plus, MMOs had always difficulty with providing a good story.
Synopsis: MMOs rely on grinding to keep players hooked, and that's why most of them have failed. If they change their design philosophy into providing *interesting* content instead of grindy content, then we will see the next big hit in MMOs. The fact that most MMOs (and 90% of Asian MMOs) have predatory microtransaction practices embedded only proves the stagnation of the genre.
Classic will be popular, and all you Vanilla haters will have to eat crow. I've been playing Vanilla WoW for years now, and guess what? It ain't nostalgia, like all the haters love to spout, that version of the game is actually fun despite what the haters love to go on about.
This was a game i wanted to succeed. Along with Firefall.
How many MMO's we have on which you have to somehow aim or dodge instead of zombieing your way to max level?
firefall was so damned good until it all went horribly wrong. Broke my heat to see it rotting in the final months.
Had a lot of fun for a weekend playing the pvp mode.
Guild wars 2 is by far the best action combat MMO right now.
I actually thought Wildstar copied The Secret World with the dodging and aiming. Tho I think it looks prettier in Wildstar.
I keep trying to forget about Firefall because i miss it so much but people like you won't let me :(
I worked as support for the German/French costumers of this game at launch. There were 60 of us, training as crazy and all ready for the day our computers would be flooded with mails and questions. Around 3 weeks later there were only 3 of us left working, with nothing, absolutely nothing to do the whole day. Maybe the game per se was not cool enough or whatever and people stopped playing, but it was a flop from minute 1. People just didn't care about it.
I seriously hope that Carbine's next game will be a spiritual successor to Wildstar. I absolutely LOVE the lore, story, and world they've built and to see it all go so quickly is heartbreaking. I couldn't imagine my life without Nexus, the Dominion, the Exiles, all the races, the Eldan, Drusera, the Entity, the Strain, and Protostar. It feels horribly crushing to know that this game and it's world probably won't get to see 2019.
Man this makes me feel really sad. I loved Wildstar. I loved the style, the lore, the races, the classes, the housing system which was the BEST in any MMO bar none. I loved how it could be dark and serious when needed and funny and campy as well. The combat was fun and active. It had it's glaring flaws but it was still a heartwarming and fun game. It didn't deserve what happened to it.
I miss the personality of the game. The humor, the psychotic hamsters. This needs to be brought to a game again.
Don Davi yes this so much . Idk about all the mmo polotics I would fucking take a single player rpg of this games style anyday.
I would play a polished re release, above anything else, any day. Gief!
Back to Rachel and Clank
I agree
Man. Wildstar was a great game for the 1% of people who could no-life it like I could. Had so much fun raiding in Datascape with 39 of my other buddies. The problem was that it was a bad game to come home and only play for an hour or two.
ZybakTV Death of Wildstar: banning Zybak from Wildstar = no content creator left
Their autoban system thought I was a bot. I ended up getting unbanned but after a few days of not playing I guess the Stockholm Syndrome broke and I realized I was only playing the game to raid. I've always been someone who enjoyed PvP and other aspects of MMOs.
It's a shame because they fixed all of that relatively quick? Especially with drop 4. The problem was they never properly d the game after the initial launch.
Most MMOs require huge timesinks to get to end game content. The casual player will often have more hardcore friends who end up weeks ahead. MMOs will always have difficulty coping with the opposite ends of catering to both casual and hardcore players.
Yup I have fond memories of pushing GA hard when it first released, but the bugs and poor performance really took a toll. My guild saw the cracks and soon quit after pushing for top rankings. Was fun while it lasted but the game wasn't going to survive in the state it was in. Especially for the majority of casual players.
Cannot remember how many times I heard a friend say this or whatever MMO is the wow killer!
I don’t see anything killing wow at this point. Lol
@@John_Notmylastname Same, if even BFA didn't managed to kill WoW, nothing can.
Wow will kill itself tbh 😂 😂
Wow classic sort of killed wow retail lol
@@kungfuvoodoo9889 you high? Retail has the larger playerbase
If anyone is interested in learning more, Tim Caine has a youtube channel where he talked about his struggles working on the game
worth mentioning he contradicts what is reported here by those who got rid of him (naturally... and he has a very good reputation, so he's worth listening to)
Video made me tear up because i really had hopes for this game. I see all that work the devs made all go to waste :( RIP wildstar
It did not go to waste, alot of people had a lot of fun in the game. Just because it will not be played anymore it doesnt mean it did not serve its purpose. I played Wildstar way more per dolar spent on it than i usualy play other games.
Wildstar ruined MMOs for me; I can't play other ones without feeling like I'm missing something. The combat felt so awesome to me and the housing was flat out amazing. I stopped playing because customer service screwed me over a few months in, and them trying to pass off bot responses as human was beyond insulting. I think half of what killed them was NCSoft not providing proper support on their end.
The other half was making most of the end game progression tedious. The way the ranking worked for adventure/dungeon rewards made them very all or nothing affairs. I was in a guild that could handle them easy enough, but even still it was painful having to always worry about every death every single time you ran something. A lot of my more casual friends left precisely because of it. Then there was the pvp where if you didn't go hard into it at the start, it became almost impossible to advance through it without someone else's help because of how the rewards worked. It was fine having the raiding be for the hardcore only, but there needed to be something there for everyone else as well.
If they could have handled that stuff the bleed off of players wouldn't have been nearly as bad, which wouldn't have made their dwindling server issues so bad.
I agree especially with the dungeon part; kinda why I avoid dungeons and even other players....
So who's here after Tim's video on Carbine and Wildstar?
The world of Wildstar is in my opinion excellent.
I would love to see them use this world for more stuff.
Maybe some pen and paper role-playing game or even some single player games.
Wouldn't mind seeing a 'Death of a Game' on Rift or Dawngate.
would make an awesome animated series
Wildstar gave me the time of my life...nothing but the best to anyone that worked on it, from the bottom of my heart
PvP scene in GW2 has gotten alot of love recently, not sure why you said they arnt supporting it, you cant even recognise it if you only played at the launch, everythings changed
While its gotten love recently, the big problem was that GW2/ArenaNet tried to "sell" the PvP as being the next big thing for eSports and they managed to botch that hard. The PvP love lately is nice, but it might be a little too late for many that originally came into the game for the PvP. Also they still have no idea what to do with WvW and it feels like they are still grasping at straws on that front. I say all this as someone with 2 accounts and over 18 level 80 toons whose been around since beta of GW2.
Yeah they did the DC Cinematic Universe mistake of jumping right into the "e-sport" marketing, instead of making a good PVP scene and building the esport scene around it.
Still, people are dumbass in PvP on GW2... It's like : you hardwin or you hardloose. Most of the time it is the second option so xD I quit this game because of it, and the lack of PVE endgame content to do in Guilds (raids are a complete joke for instance).
Just a correction: Player housing happened at launch. It was Housing Communities introduced in 2017, a large additional feature of Housing.
Another point: You covered a lot of points where Carbine was at fault, but you didn't say anything about how the vocal online community continuously produced vitriol and negative comments on every media outlet such as Reddit, Facebook comments, Twitter and so on. The community was just as integral in WildStar's downfall. When F2P went live, the veteran response to the wave of new players was completely toxic; players who didn't know the combat while no one in the community stepped up to provide resources and information like fansites do in other MMO's. The elitism drove just as many players away as Carbine's missteps. The 40-man raids were a mistake to begin with and they downscaled in the first quarter that it was live and the raid community was thriving as a result.
This.
Yeah, the housing error really baffled me considering he actually played the game for so long.
Wildstar's housing is objectively one of the most robust and best in the entire genre, was there from the beginning, and it was one of the biggest advertised features at every point of its lifecycle.
And yeah, the loudest sections of W*'s community were sadly also the shittiest.
"Let's find out what went wrong"
"Company is acquired by NCsoft"
There it is
Yikes.
I mean there is a comment above yours from a dev on the game that directly contradicts this that is backed up by another dev that replied to it
@@Jaqen-HGhar UP!
Wildstar was awesome! Loved playing a blue spacebunny who shoot heals. The raids were epic, combat was fun, housing was insane, music was great! So sad that it didn't get to live.
While Wildstar was still developing, a lot of players kept asking for harder, harder, really punishing game play. I was one of them. At the time, action combat was shifting from the "new big thing" to the "norm", and players who burned through GW2 content + Diablo III content (like myself) wanted a "challenge". Carbine actually listened. Test after test, things got harder and more difficult. Soon it was tuned to a level where even the first dungeon felt like raid difficulty, which finally satisfied the hardcore testers.
And then the game launched.
It was going really good at the beginning despite all the problems --- it was by all means, a very solid game. People complained about the normal things that any game launch would have, yet they kept playing. But a few weeks, a few months into the game, the atmosphere changed.
Many people who previously thought that they were "hardcore players" because they raided in WoW, were locked behind very difficult content where it was impossible to progress rather than "get good" --- no gearing upgrade/drops, no raid until no-death dungeon achievements. Players had to keep dying to the same dungeon (yes, first dungeon, most can't even get past the first boss without a highly coordinated group) without any progress. Patience started to die out, and more importantly players felt shitty about themselves, so they found other reasons to complain about (like minor crafting issues etc) and left ('cause nobody wants to admit that the game is too difficult for them, but at the same time they kinda felt it, so it was soul crushing).
So the hardcore and really good players should enjoy it plenty right? Wrong, raids required 20 people to have passed those 4 dungeons with gold/silver/bronze difficulty (yeah they kept reducing the difficulty, but it was too little too late). You just can't get enough people. The one who passed them first had to go back each night trying to get guildies through dungeons, some of these guildies never make it, some of them make it but then they are also in that boat having to try to get other guildies to pass. In some servers you can't even find 20 people across the entire server to form a raid group, nevermind within one single guild.
So why was it hard to crack the demise of Wildstar when everything was looking so good, EVEN by today's standard? Because nobody wanted to speak of the devil: the game was too difficult for the audience it tried to grab. It was designed for huge groups, having 20 man and 40 man raids, and 40 man war-plots (PvP). Yet it was also designed like Dark-Soul where one mistake and you're dead. Even very simple games become very difficult when you need to coordinate 20 people. Its humour and style attracted fun-liking people but its combat was hardcore and unforgiving. It knew exactly what it wanted to be, but it forgot to do a thorough market search to make sure that there are ENOUGH PEOPLE to pay for that niche.
Also, half of the hardcore players who finally stuck through to the raiding days also ended up leaving after a few months. When a game has only hardcore players left, suddenly a very good player feel mediocre at best. The atmosphere also shift to become more competitive and almost business-like. It may be difficult to wrap our minds around but, hardcore players actually need casual players there to feel good about themselves. And ego fuels a lot of us.
Sure, they started to tune down difficulty week by week after they realized that less than 1% even made it past the first boss after getting stuck on it for weeks. But it was too little too late. And the bigger problem? The difficulty of the game actually WOUNDED some players, I had a very hard time convincing friends back into the game (unlike other games that we play together), because although they don't say it, Wildstar didn't make them feel like "it was a shitty game" --- rather, "I'm a shitty player at that game". So actually, changing the contents and adding/fixing stuff didn't help at all, because most people weren't leaving because of the game, most people left because they had doubts of THEMSELVES through playing the game. Evidence: people complained about server, well server was fixed, but no one came back. They complained about crafting, well crafting was overhauled, still no one came back. The game was tuned to be easier sure, but who's gonna go back to a game knowing that it was something that you can only beat when it gets "dumbed down for you"? It was a lost cause, dissatisfied customers can still come back after fixes, but wounded customers don't.
Partly, the community was to blame. People always say, devs should listen to the players --- nope. Some players, sure. Not all players. Not even MOST players. Players don't know what we're talking about. We're no game design experts, neither are we psychologists. We can only tell what WE want, and what WE want reflect only the very small fraction of people who are like minded. Game-fanatics and hardcore players like myself instinctively assume that everyone would want to play like us --- and to be honest, sometimes it's just impossible for me to imagine how can someone find dodging red circles difficult. But some people DO find it difficult, that's just a FACT, and that fact can result in player frustration that builds up, builds up, builds up, until the player has to leave and the money is gone, eventually it will burn to my tail.
Wildstar was a lesson for all of us, I'm sure many hardcore Wildstar players knew this in our hearts.
You wrote a fucking Novel
@Aaron Dodo
What role did you play? i played healer and trying to run around and hit people with healing while they dodge roll all over the place and still get hit by random stuff slowly grinded away from me until i could not do it anymore.
Add to that increased time i needed to farm everything for raid since i rarelly got any damage dealing loot and actually having a job and social life.. it really cut into my sleeping schedule and was doing bad things to my health.
The breaking point was when we had to collect stuff from normal dungeons to enhance the gear. Damage dealers were rather soloing low level dungeons ( with reduced drops ) rather than group up for high level ones with us healers... so we kind of got left hanging.
I complained a lot about that thing, got told down and out and decided to switch to damage dealer instead. That did not go well and i got demoted from hardcore raider to filler so i quit...
this is quite the insightful bit of a retrospective. well done.
This. So much this.
i agree with most of what you said, except that wow has harder endgame content that wildstar. w* was some of the best raid content since ulduar in terms of difficulty. To be completely honest, all of wows raiding content is too easy if you have even the basic understanding of raiding.
This is honestly my biggest 'disappointment' in years.
I LOVED this game on release. Played the hell out of it. Tons of other people did.
We all thought 'this is the next big thing...people just need to know about it, people need to try it!'.
But that's the thing...
This is a damn shame. This game was utterly fantastic. Way ahead of it's time in so many ways, with things that I wish so many other companies did...but won't take the risk.
I agree this game had so much potential! It had legendary housing (imo), Fantastic gameplay (pve wise), and just an interesting concept. I’m pretty casual and I couldn’t find it in me to the attunement for raids.(that’s when i stopped) However, I cant describe how much fun i had in the dungeons and other instances variants! It felt like an arcade game dodging all the telegrams and getting your group to perfectly interrupt the boss. I could go on forever about how much i loved this game. Years later and i still cant get over this game’s downfall. I doubt it would’ve been a WoW killer but it could’ve been another big name mmo with a dedicated fan base like ESO and GW2.
Yeah I loved the housing, combat, humor, and art style alot. A shame it didn't end up successful.
I loved the beta. Then launch happened. The launch was utterly disastrous here in EU. During the beta we'd already seen that the servers they'd provided weren't going to be enough. The days leading up to launch further cemented that fact. Then, way too late they added additional servers, but at this point in time subscriptions were ticking and people hadn't even gotten into the game.
I remember sitting in login queues that were set to last for over a week, even after sitting in the queue for hours. Of course I would eventually have gotten in, but how long would I have to wait in queue before that? Six hours? Eight? Twelve? I played other things, didn't renew my subscription, and WildStar, which I'd adored in the beta and looked forward to for very long, simply got forgotten.
They should have added more dungeons, with high difficulty.
This is something I think ESO does great, vDSA was a mini raid for 4 players.
WoW did adress this slightly for a while with Karazan, but were quickly to cut it up in to several dungeons.
So much easier to grab a few irl buddies over discord and do some decently engaging pve togheter.
Didn't had.
HAS. Wildstar is still alive.
As long as people fear the game closing, the game won't get a following big enough to warrant updates. The game is in a great place right now, with some hiccups and issues that can be fixed but they don't have the manpower. But it's casual enough for everyone and has a sick raiding.
"WS is dead"
Yet it just had it's 4th year birthday.
Just enjoy the game and get people to play it and it'll get a following to warrant attention.
I played Wildstar from day 1 and stayed for the first year. I really wanted the game to succeed.
This video did not mention another huge factor for the games failure. That being the rushed aspect of QA. So many game breaking bugs at launch and through most major initial patch updates.
Then there was the RNG on RNG on RNG that made an already unforgiving combat system feel bad when you didn’t get the right rune or roll on gear.
That turned a lot of people away quickly.
Oh, what could've been. So much about this game I loved. The art, the music, the gameplay, the general goofiness and overall tone.
Sigh. If only it hadn't been run by monkeys on an ego trip.
RIP Wildstar. I, for one, will miss you.
Right from the start this was positioned openly as 'the game you play because you're /hardcore/ and you're sick of being /babied/ by World of Warcraft' and it was the sheer pretentiousness that made me just recoil away from it before it even opened. I never understood how they thought a game apparently made for the few people who ran OG Naxxramas would appeal to enough people for an actual game to happen.
I wasn't annoyed by the pretentiousness... I was more turned off by the fact that by 2014, I only had 2-3 hours available to play per day, and that was on a GOOD day. on a bad day I got nothing. Back then I thought "Shit, how many people still have the time?"
Turns out I was right.
There is a big difference though. Naxxramas was difficult to an extent but it took no where near the intensity of all the movement that Wilstar inflicted on you. My hands would litterly be sweating and I was all tensed up. Thats fun on occasion, but it was just too much for me. I could never relax doing a dungeon or raid, always max intensity.
I was tired of being babied by WoW so I unsubbed and went and played... not Wildstar. Problem is that there were actually other options to WoW.
@@Terestrasz Well I dont think that had anything to do with why wildstar died. It was because the artstyle and humor were extremly niche. Peoples have plenty of freetime because responsibilitys in life is a choice you dont have to make. Game like runescape, warframe and path of exile are games cattered towards a more hardcore audience yet they do fine. Back then I could probably spare more than 12 hours a day yet I never really got into wildstar. Peoples like to pretend they have no freetime when in reality if they actually want something they could make time for it but instead they cry about it. Because usually the same peoples that say they have no time for games have no problem watching tv for 4-5 hours a day.
@@styxzero1675 Even Grim Dawn, Warframe, and Path of Exile don't require *nearly* the amount of time as classic MMORPGs used to.
Now, if there's one thing we can learn from Seconds from Disaster, it's that it's not just one factor that causes things. The "target demographic is now in their 20s-30s" was just one thing - you can glance at Sam Noone down there to mention about the mismanagement that was going on. I'm sure that did not help either.
The tale of Wildstar is a tragic one.
I'm a little confused by something. You said that Carbine implemented housing in 2017.... but that's not the case. Housing has been a part of Wildstar since beta, and released with the game going live.Were you talking about Neighborhoods where players could link their housing lots? Because that was something that did happen in September 2017.
Mayor DasMoose Ello didn’t think to find u here
Hiiiiiii mooooooose 👋
yes, housing was part of WS since launch. But they added more housing to the game later on. AFter that, many saw WS as a housing mmo with little to do outside of that afterwards. With no one to raid or pvp with.
Hiiiii!
Ligerwolf Beasttamer the housing was one of the most robust aspects of the game at launch. You didn't have to use it or anything, but I can't imagine a player not even knowing it was there 'til 2017.
Aah, Maker were forever sending me free monthly passes for this game so I could make videos and promote it, But I never used them.
Loved the art design though, Overwatch before Overwatch.
Or Ratchet & Clank after Ratchet & Clank. ;)
Oh yeah!
Yeah, that's the main thing i want to see. An MMO (Preferably PvE focused)that looks like WildStar did. Something a little more bright and colourful than most things out there.
Ironically I looked this up after watching an Overwatch video, since it made me think of cartoony games like Wildstar and League of Legends.
The WoW devs that came over probably had insight or worked on Project Titan (aka what Overwatch originally was going to be) so they probably modeled their art design after that
just heard wildstar was shutting down and the first thought that crossed my mind, "didn't nerdSlayer made a video about this some time ago?"
These days, with a saturated MMORPG market, you can't make a hardcore raid focused MMO, like Blizzard could do when they first made WoW (which has become ever more casual friendly over the years, while maintaining a small core of hardcore raiders).
Any new MMO needs to focus _hard_ on catering to the casual player, because the single biggest requirement for an MMO to succeed is having the player numbers to do group content, and the casual market is where you will find those player numbers.
You can have hardcore raiding, but the game needs the very broad foundation of a playerbase not entirely from that market segment. Eventually, many casual players will become more hardcore over time as they become more dedicated to the game, allowing your hardcore playerbase to grow. Start with too few hardcore players, from that too small market segment, or make your content too hard for the casuals to want to keep playing, and you won't have the numbers for players to even start large group content.
PvP has a more extreme version of this catch 22 of needing sufficient player numbers to keep your players engaged, in that you can't place both high skill and low skill players into the same games, or neither will have a rewarding experience. That makes it doubly hard to get PvP off the ground, because when you have low numbers, you're kind of forced to put them all into the same matches. In those cases you can't get a PvP playerbase together without taking measures to minimise the degree to which individual skill is the sole determinant of success (eg teamwork, or semi PvE style objectives, where resource gathering or supporting roles are more important than direct combat). Again, use build the core PvP playerbase on top of the much bigger PvE playerbase, by creating a point where they can play together.
TBH Wildstar's "No casuals allowed! Well, ok, you can join, maybe your LEET friends will give you pity tokens to play." marketing was probably the biggest thing that ensured it would fail from the word 'Go.' You need the 'mouthbreathers' to keep the game world and economy active. Without that the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.
To be fair,when WoW came out,it was the more casual MMO around
Great video and analysis as usual, nerdSlayer. I played Wildstar and was active on the subreddit during that time, so after watching this video, I decided to pop into the Wildstar subreddit because I was curious if there is any activity still going on there. Behold, I saw someone post your video. Dude, there are some salty ass people in that subreddit comment thread ready to deny everything about this video lol
They are stuck in the denial stage because they need 40 players to continue.
Great job...wonderful research. I'm saying I agree or disagree with your conclusions, just that those conclusions were well reasoned and thought out. Subscribed.
Another NCSoft game killed by it's own more successful brothers, like CoH/CoV.
Watching this on the day it shuts down in a few hours, I can’t help but feel a bit sad. There goes over $200 I will never get back from subs, game copies and credd purchases. As much as I loved the game, lore and and character animations, something always felt off about it. I just couldn’t get myself to be committed. Now this makes a whole lot of sense.
I loved the art, the characters, the humor... but simply noone wanted to play the game. I tried, but all my friends played something else and i went to join them.
I was sad, when this game died. I wanted it to succeed and make people want to come and play. But... nothing was done? It’s such a shame.
from a casual pvp player.. I left when they added pvp gear where the top gear was only reachable by being either an elite player or wintrading to get elite status.. They did this after WoW had already made an even playing field by allowing everyone access to same pvp stats on gear. I argued on the forums for a couple months that different rewards (like WoW) could be given for being an elite ranked player but that giving anyone a pvp advantage on gear was not in the best interest of a good pvp game. Than though I thought WS was a cool game I left and never played it again.
I really enjoyed Wildstar when it first came out, but their focus on the hardcore player is what doomed them. Trying to do a dungeon with a pickup group was next to impossible and they were told over and over that 40 man raids were a thing of the past but still stuck with it. I loved the world and the combat even the great housing. But as a mostly casual player there really wasn’t much end game content available. I had a max level of every class and crafter do I played the game a good bit. They did go overboard on the telegraphs especially in dungeons and pvp
Wildstar was such a good game... Honestly i found it to be my favorite MMO ever played. Visually cool, perfect Housing, combat system was great, PvP was cool at the beginning (mostly cause of the queue time was ok), PvE was awesome, a bit too much into grid especially for the raid and hardmode access.
I've followed Wildstar since the beginning, played it like a year or so... It's so sad to see the state of the game now, it was for me the perfect MMO, got me hyped as hell, i enjoyed it so much. Sad :'(
Thanks for the video nerdSlayer, that was really great, nostlagia and sadness at the same time x)
Death of a game: lego universe
Yet another game in the NCSoft graveyard...
From what it's looking like in the dev's comment section on here, it's not NCsoft's fault directly, just they seem to attract some of the worst in the business.
To be fair NCSoft everything points to this already being _in_ the graveyard by the time they got involved. MBM - Managed by Morons
As someone who's been here for almost the entire lifetime of the game, i dont think it was NCsoft's fault.
I love criticizing NCSoft every other day of the week, but in this case, it wasn't their fault.
im still mad. I was so excited about this. I wish the game was re-launched by a competent studio.
After watching this, i'm currently downloading it on steam. Looks fairly interesting and i like the graphical style. Always wanted to try it so nows my chance i guess before it disappears.
Eyyy same. The combat looks interesting and I'm gonna try it for myself.
Enjoy the leveling journey on Nexus thats pretty much all you can do since the population dwindled to a private server for WoW but not just regular one but Warlords of Draenor one which not many people liked to begin with hence why I made this reference...Anyways I enjoyed my time in Wildstar but it was shame that they build it p2p I was worrying from start with their shifted focus...I think it would be great if they instead would drop that hardcore karma much sooner and made the game b2p
Not really, there is a following. Pservers on WoW have almost 2k people nowadays which is enough, and WS has people to play. The issue is that the LFG tool is buggy, so you need to ask for groups in Nexus Chat.
Don't go by the LFG tool. There ARE guilds and raiders yet.
Black Peixera if he types /who he'll find out aside from 2 hours a day there are less than 50 players at any one time 😂🤣😂🤣
You can enjoy any aspect of the game except PVP at this moment, I´ve been playing it for years and the low population only affected the PVP side of the game, PVE is still working and you will have no problems doing any raid tier available.
This game had such an amazing art style
Silenced Games Sure. If you're six.
LiquidDIO if never really seen the WoW look of things applied to sci-fi
or like Fortnite.
Look up Cory Loftis.
The art style is why I avoided this game. Looked too silly, like a rejected Pixar film.
Man I really tried to get into this game when it went f2p, but just couldn't. Combat was good as far as action goes, but it really lacked impact which made it hard for me to enjoy.
Enrique Cabrera I think it's pretty similar to WoW. Harder impact sound effects would've helped for me. But that's just a very small nit-pic lol. I think the addition of some type of bow class would've kept me playing longer as well due to the fact that I always play Bow classes. I played the dual gunner class in Wildstar, and the majority of the skills I unlocked literally went through the enemies.
Enrique Cabrera WoW is pretty impactful when it comes to its combat. Ranged sounds do sound meh but melee is pretty on point. Kidney shot for example, feels like a real gut wrencher
please bring this game back, so fun to play, and very gorgeous to look at
Something that pretty much everyone glosses over with these MMO's is accesibility for casual gamers. When Wildstart came out I had an older computer and could barely run the game with the graphics settings turned all the way down. At the time I was also playing WoW and could run it just fine.
Even today I had a high end laptop that's now 6 years old and I can still play WoW. However none of the new MMO's will hardly run at all. It not worth me paying $1000+ to get a new rig when I have other systems and games out there to play.
@AquaJetEmpoleon It doesn't matter whose fault it is. He is a customer whose money you won't get.
Death of a Game: Bless Online
Whiteshade never been born ( at least not in the western world )
liar! Everything is fine, Neowiz did good job and Bless is very good game. Everything is just international conspiracy of evil streamers, youtubers and paid by ArenaNet and Pearl Abyss! :-D
I came here to post this.
Sarazan Do you actually believe this?
It was...It was born 4 times and died 4 times...Perfect material.
I demand more of these videos. Tomorrow new vid or else!
XxXVideoVeiwerXxX Not to mention it requires hours upon hours of research and editing.
yeah I’m unsubbing if he doesn’t come out with a new vid tomorrow. We need to put our foot down and demand what we want as viewers or we’ll be watching a Death of a Channel vid real soon
i vivdly remember how incredibly strange the gearing process was once you hit max level at launch.
first you had to do scenarios with objectives like escort missions, that gave 3 different medals at completion that each awarded exclusive gear. and generally not more than 1-2 items for a 5 man group. problem was to have any chance in normal! dungeons, you needed full gold medal gear, but gold medals were incredibly hard to get and generally failed if even one player didnt know exactly what they were doing. combined with very bad difficulty balancing and glitches it was pretty impossible to do these with random groups.
everyone, including me who came from wow were expecting some medio core difficulty, wow style gearing up to raids, doable in group finder and the real challenge coming with raids.
this was hardcore without any kind of warning. paired with laggs and performance issues, this was frustrating beyond believe, seeing all those dungeons available, but they were so incredibly impossible to complete that we had to grind the same 4 or 5 scenarios over and over. nobody wanted to do scenarios and everyone wanted to get boosted through, it was just a huge disaster that ultimately made me quit less than a month in.
I was one of those guys that joined a guild before the game was even out. Spent hours on twitch to get a code for closed beta. Once the game launched I set my self up as a tank and started learning how to be a raid leader. The way they made each boss fight even in normal dungeons unique with multiple phases and the chance to stun made each of those dungeons special. I was sad to see it all go down and I still consider it the second best mmo I’ve ever played as still miss it. At least I have City of heroes back. Perhaps wildstar will get the same treatment.
Looking back on this video now. You called it by 5 months
100% n.s. can see the future
The "Hardcore" stance was one of the main problems. The devs were trying to cater to the 1 percent hardcore playerbase, and you can't make money when you are focusing only on the smallest part of the playerbase.. A symptom of this is the insane difficulty, the most basic, lowest level 5-man leveling dungeon was as hard or harder than, for example, an end-of-expansion mythic hard mode raid from World of Warcraft. The telegraph system was a very tricky thing, introducing all kinds of problems, particularly for healing. A group needs to coordinate like they were a world class epic raiding guild, and almost needed to be a hive-mind to dodge the electric-boogaloo disco-inferno of telegraphs from bosses in perfect unison with each other so you can actually be healed. Having to be ultra super serious on the most basic of dungeons is not fun.
No MMO will survive if it's focus is "Hardcore raiding" because hardly anyone does that relative to the rest of the playerbase. The only people who think it should be the main focus are the actual hardcore raiders who are delusional and self-entitled. They're like vultures, they pick at a corpse but once it's picked clean(no longer able to focus on their hardcore raid cravings) they just go to another body and pick at that instead. If they are loud enough, like Tigole, they can actually do serious damage to an MMO, as they trick the developers into focusing on hardcore raids and alienate the other 99 percent of the playerbase, causing players to leave for another, more comfortable MMO, and of course, those very hardcore raiders who did this damage inevitably leave anyway because of their own vanity and vapidity. Such loud raiders are like parasites, killing a game and leaving it to die once all of it's vital fluids have been drained.
It's a shame, because I actually liked the story and setting of Wildstar.
That seems like a bit of an exaggeration. I am by no means some hardcore raider and I rarely venture beyond heroic dungeons in WoW, but I had no problems with the dungeons in WildStar (I can't speak for the raids). Were there wipes? Sure. Did I come across some groups that couldn't get the job done? A few times.
The problem is, people are so used to FacerollZergGangbang WoW/FF14 dungeons that anything that requires a strategy other than, "sprint to the end of the room and AoE everything" is, "too hard". You didn't need to be some world class player to get through these dungeons, you just couldn't mindlessly barrel through everything.
@Lord Proteus This is a myth, this game had loads of content for casual players. I mean the housing system alone was a godsend for casuals. I believe the combat system was the main reason people didn't stick around for this game.The telegraph system and that limited action bar is was a gimick that really didn't resonate with MMO gamers. The classes as well were boring af. I'd also add the it's science fiction theme had very limited appeal.
I agree with you, I tried out Wild Star when it went free to play, loved the story and the graphics didn't bother me much. Hit max level and tried my first dungeons AND PvP battle grounds... and it was an utter SHIT SHOW. After seeing all the cluttered red light green light telegraphs on the ground, it killed the game for me.
So MMOs should be mind numbingly easy? Modern wow is shit. It requires no effort to level up, you just smash your face again the keyboard and everything dies. Everybody sprints through dungeons in 5 minutes so they can do the next one.
In Wow Mythic+ 5 mans and Mythic raids are for the people that want a challenge but people that don't do the harder content love to complain about it being easy.
I really enjoyed Wildstar's gameplay, but when I got to endgame there wasn't much to do. I crafted better gear than what I could get from any dungeon, and only the raids could give me better ones. Not a lot of people ran raids and only once per week, so I quit.
Don't know how it's now. I played when it went f2p.
Me and my friend had the same problem. Once we reached end game, there was barely anything to do and most of the content wasn't holding our attention. Loved the combat system, setting, art style, and everything, but without much content, we got stagnated.
Sadly, hardcore players arent enough to pay the bills.
+1
Pretty much. You can't build your game on the back of the 10~1% that reach the very endgame of content, you need to pay attention to the other 90%+. Having something to strive for is well and good, but players like to feel as though they're making progress.
No, that's wrong... In fact it's 100% the other way around. You simply don't understand how much money is lost always trying to bring new players over the massive amount of revenues NOT advertising to players that stick around for years. Sure, 1 mil players 2 months in is great, but 300k 6 months later and less than 100k 1 year later ends games.
It's pretty simple math... Problem is most people don't understand business, but that does not stop them from talking about it. Planet Fitness is a great example of a "WoW" business model... make the worse version of something that was great, but challenging. Sell the fuck out of it... But only so many years later no one else can pull off a WoW, because people learned the games were crap, they can see they are playing the same game, so they start and quit in just months.
100,000 people playing a great game they can't get somewhere else at 15$ a month is 1.5 mil a month, 18 mil a year... You should not only be rich, but also able to pay everyone really well... But these games spend 50 million making a game, so they need too many subs day one because they know in 6 months to a year they will be closing servers left and right... laying people off... and so on.
david abe
You don't get it. There are not enough hardcore players out in this world to pay the bills. Simple as it is.
*cough*pathofexile*cough*
Fitting for this video to be rather recent, as now NCSoft has gone out and said they're shutting the game, and the studio behind the game down.
I think when you get right down to it, making a truly good game is an art form and truly good art can’t be made in a factory, much to the frustrations of business majors which are firmly rooted in the practical.
Good video, cupcake
21:38 sums up the entire answer in a single frame
i was so sad that this didn't do well. even i stopped playing it, because like you said, it seemed so dead. there was no one on my server and i just felt like i was completely alone. i really wanted to keep playing because i liked the crudeness of the space characters. the combat was fun, and the races looked really cool. but the game play was just so weird... i haven't touched it (and actually forgot about it until i seen this video) since it launched on F2P. i'm thinking they put too much time into looks instead of actual events and stuff in game.
this level of quality editing can go on a tv channel
Playing wow for 10 years, and I learned after investing that long into the game, its not worth starting any new MMO, because odds are its gonna die.
This was my friend's issue. He was a non-hardcore "hardcore" player that constantly complained about casuals and how easy WoW was without Mythic Raiding or even touching Mythic+ dungeons, let alone avoid all forms of PVP but complaining how vanilla AV was the best PVP ever because of how "hardcore" it was.
Once returning to WoW, I learned that he put himself in actual debt from using real money to get carries in Wildstar and lost his car because of it, opting for public transportation in the city that he lives in. He was only able to play WoW once again because of the gold he had before he left, using it to play with the WoW Token. He wants to go back to Wildstar, but his wife threatened to leave him if he drops money (and time) on a game like that again.
Sadly, he isn't alone in his situation, as I know several others that have come back to WoW for one reason or another, would being casual friendly enough to simply pick back and afford with a few hours of dedicated farming a month for no real money.
Has any other MMO done Mythic Keystone dungeons, or the like? I wonder if that feature could have been a WoW killer if done before WoD
It was taken from Diablo 3's Greater Rift mechanics that its had for years now, which increase in level every time you clear it, constantly challenging players, having increased rewards and leaderboards supported. Diablo 3 may have gotten it from another action RPG, but I haven't heard of it in any other MMO.
Ah yes, I think I knew this... but forgot it ;)
That is also why I don't watch TV shows any more...the ones I love just get cancelled.
wildstar is still my favorite mmo
If there is a trend to be found in these dead MMO's, it's that prior successes, do not guarantee future successes. Just because "joe blow" worked on a popular game like WoW or something, doesn't mean anything.
So tired of seeing games, to this day, be advertised on "joe blow's" prior successes. "From the Alternate 3rd Unit Sub-Executive Janitorial Production Supervisor of WoW's 3rd Patch in WotLK, comes a new MMO...."
It's almost comical to buy a game, or even have faith in one, because of a handful of people, who were merely involved in prior successful games.
I think you heavily misunderstood the Homecoming Patch. It didn't add player housing, that was there since the start.
The Homecoming Patch, which came in September 2017, just added communities, which let players link their housing plots together to make bigger projects. But housing was a shipped feature in the game, it was even tested in beta.
Can't wait for the New World episode of this series!
I'm surprised the infamous attunement chart didn't make an appearance.
Because the hardcore raiders loved that shit.
FINALLY ! I was so hyped for that game back then :(
Hardcore killed the game . If this game released right now on Consoles and PC as a casual friendly game it would do good.
Wildstar died in part due to its commitment to "hard core", it's mis steps of 40 man raiding that lead to a re-release of DS (it's 40 man raid) into a 20 man instance. Basically new raid instance that was the same instance as the 40 man version, a massive waste of development time. Add to this some of the massive sink's related to attunement that turned off massive parts of the population and the continued redesigning of the itemization system and you have lots of wasted development resources leading to less new content. I will note the actual action combat and endgame content wildstar put out was amazing and i do wish more individuals could have experienced it.
I loved the game. It wasnt as upkeep heavy as wow but it had all the raiding mechanics. I had so many good memory in raids and dungeons and bad memories when it was dying
Yo I just found this series the other day. Love this "death of a game" such a great series idea. Plz keep making these forever. K thanks :D
Yeah, blaming an MMO's failure on Free To Play is, kinda a cop-out. Not only is WoW still using that model, but FFXIV does too and that didn't come out all that long before Wildstar did. Subscription model MMO's are fine, they just need to have something unique and compelling to draw players in. With WoW, it's the games size and sheer amount of content. With FFXIV, it's the story and frequent content patches. But with Wildstar, I'm not sure what it's unique hook was supposed to be.
And wildstar and carbine died officialy yesterday!
Woooooo
You mentioned GW2 devs not working on PVP and ignoring it, yet it has one of the most active PVP scenes, with both dev and player run tournaments, not to mention WvW. (maybe im wrong, i havent played it in a while, but still...)
You're absolutely right. I play regularly and even though I'm a PVE-er, I can tell you ANet pays so much attention to PvP, with seasonal tournaments and such. You can even earn legendary gear from both modes so the hardcore WvW/PvP players don't have to do raids.
Indeed I was a constant WvW player from launch and played the game for over a year. PvP was very much a part of the game during the first year the WvW content was packed to the brim with players I can vouch for that.
WvW is pretty braindead zerging and sPVP wasn't updated for years where people just compete with whose build is more broken. They are both curious concepts and people play them because of that, but they are very poorly balanced.
Low pop roaming is one of the best stuff I had in WvW gotta agree
Wildstar had the most charm of any MMORPG I have played...
To any developer that worked on Wildstar, thank you! I thought the game was incredibly creative and fun. In fact, I installed it again yesterday. It's F2P, why not! I play Overwatch every day, while my friends jumped back on to Wow because of the xpac. The tab targeting is so boring in WoW that I can't take it. I loved the fighting and movement in Wildstar. Wish it could relaunch.
The problem with raids, in my experience, (I was raiding Wildstar in the first few months after the release) were not in terms of having the people (although, true, you needed attunements) but the bugs and the loot tables. It was really hard to maintain a positive attitude for all 40 people involved if the boss just bugged out for no reason, or the drops were laughable. I really wanted to love Wildstar but they just dropped the ball on the raid content at the release, and the damage was done.
I love the art style and the combat looks amazing.
It really was amazing. :( There won't be another MMORPG like WildStar. It was quite unique.
The game is awesome at the start, full of humor, but leveling was too fast, and when you got to 50, there was no dungeon to start at that didn't kick your everloving in a big way. Hard core gamers do not pay the bills, and they are a bitchy whiny lot if you don't have new content. It felt like the game was still in Beta, lots of bugs. 40 man raids should have had 20 man versions. PVP gear and PVE gear didn't get along which always caused frustration. I came back a bit under a year ago, things are geared down, with primal levels that are hard for the geared people without the skills. PVP is dead except usually only one part of the day. Primal matrix was a good slow progression that people love to whine about, but wasn't bad. My only complaint is the penalty if you were doing something challenging that you were nerfed if you didn't have the heroism(progression in primal matrix) Which is completely unfair.
God, I absolutely LOVED Wildstar when it first came out. It was so fresh and visually different from other titles out there that I loved that I actually looked forward to logging in when I had time to play. I just never had a lot of time to give it thanks to work and school....then when I finally was able to give it the time I wanted, it was pretty much dead. :(
Tim Cain leaving Carbine to join Obsidion is really fascinating seeing some of the similarities tonally and content-wise between Wildstar and the Outer Worlds
I hope you guys like this video, this one took a bit longer to write as Wildstar was a tough nut to crack. But hopefully you guys think I did it justice. Homecoming patch added aspects to housing, but I incorrectly stated it added housing which was actually in since the beginning.
Thanks for watching. Oh and the "please subscribe bell thing" part at the beginning is not a recurring thing, we just wanted to point it out for people who are questioning why they aren't getting their updates. It will probably transition to a graphic of sorts.
Forgive me pronouncing Aliso Viejo as "Vieja" too (i'm Hispanic I have no excuse). And the "few and far inbetween" part sounds disjointed because I had to fix a problem with the sound (hence creating an "uneven" sound...which is kinda a problem too? :thinking:).
FYI at about 2:00 - Tim Cain led on development the original Fallout, his impact on Fallout 2 seems to have been small as he left to found Troika while it was being developed
The video was good and touched on all the major aspects that led to the game's downfall, imo.
Do you feel it could have been worth mentioning that the drawn-out raid attunement for Genetic Archives along with the Isle of Quel'Danas-tier lvl 50 reputation grind might have scared off a sizeable chunk of the playerbase or do you feel that those were ultimately negligible because of how Wildstar set out to appeal to the hardcore MMO crowd in the first place?
You could have stopped the video of what went wrong before the two minute mark after stating NCSoft acquired it..
As a dude who didn't know WS released with housing-- one of its two best features-- I don't think anyone should be trusting your assessments.
The game is low pop, it's not 'dead'. Your clickbait title says more about you than it does the game...
BTW Asheron's Call video when?
Wildstar was the first and probably last western developed MMORPG I ever enjoyed playing. I had a lot of good times with the game, especially with the RP community (Rest In Piece, Evindra RP server), but also a lot of bad times, too. With that aside, I feel like the addition of the megaservers was the time the game started to drop off for me as Carbine kept making too many boneheaded decisions that was ultimately destroying their own game (like changing the stat system THREE TIMES and bad balance updates like nerfing and rebuffing Medics for PvP) and the switch to F2P was basically just a giant bandaid fix that didn't do much to solve a lot of issues for players that didn't give a damn about raids. Carbine stated that they watched carefully how other MMORPGs failed and they wouldn't make the same mistakes, but in the end, not only did they make the same mistakes as other MMORPG games did, but they ended up making new mistakes that no other MMORPG has went through before. How do you even manage to do that?
I can't even believe that the servers are still even active to this day, because there is no way the game is making enough income for NCSoft and Carbine to justify keeping the lights on for it.
Still, I may revisit it one day, simply to look at my giant hamster maze of a skyplot again.
Mikedot bruh same. The death of Evindra was such a blow, it felt like us rpers were being thrown to the wolves. Don’t even get me started on the instancing bullshit.
I’m really sad to see it go. Spent two years of my life playing that game obsessively but I couldn’t stick around to watch it slowly die :(
I bet with the current state of the MMO industry right now if they would launch again they could have a chance at it... of course if they manage the game better then what they done before !
Never played Wildstar but I would pay a sub right now to try it out.
I have to say your video was among the best Ive ever seen on this game.
I have played on release and I was a hardcore player. I was a PvE player and loved the game for what it shouldve been.
When the first changes to stats hit and I have already spent a fortune to craft the best gear and after I have beaten the 20 man raid I left.
Mostly because most of the work I have done until this point was in vain. 90% of my gear was uselss which Ive spent ages to acumulate. And the gear dropped in raids was unsatisfying for the effort you put into it.
Yet what mostly drove me off the game were the 40-man raids. It was already hard enough for us to gather 20 man to kill Ohmna and after we have achieved that there was no way we wouldve gone into 40 man with a full group.
I am now to old probably to wish for another one of these games with the right focus, but I still hope that one time the developers realize their USP before they ruin the game.
This game is absolutely needed in today's absolutely depressing mmo-scene. The issues that plagued wildstar are things that could have easily been fixed, but god fucking damn it, it just had to be left to die the way it was. There's no genuine mmo option today that feels completely satisfying, everything has this glaring weakness that makes jump between wow ffxiv and eso. When Wildstar was out it was MY mmo, now there's just nothing that scratches that itch. It just genuinely hurts to not be able to play this game anymore.