what went wrong with Wildstar?

MMOExposed

What went wrong with Wildstar in your opinion?

Morlewen

Wildstar missed the zeitgeist totally at the beginning. It started with the wrong business model. You cannot use a subscription model and say "We want no barriers for new players.".  It offered too less variety for different players groups. It was not and still is not casual enough. It has still a bad PvP system.

murilor

What went wrong with all mmorpgs in these days ? I was talking with my cousin about this, honestly people are still looking for a game like Ultima Online (for old school gamers). my first mmorpg was Ultima Online, and i remember the first time that i played World of Warcraft, was awsome of course, but i miss something, the freedom. People are looking for this freedom again, because this games like Archeage or others sandbox are so hyped. But you know ? I wanna tame a dragon again ! i wanna play harp or guitar in the city, i wanna find places to tame rare mounts, pets, i wanna tame a chicken to make them fight and gamble on this. Why ? Because who makes a mmorpg fun it's the players. People wanna play mmorpgs for fun, not to be stress.

Sorry my english.

Veexer_Nui

They focused on the 1% of the population (40man raiders). Instead of the other 99%, solo players and PvPers. 

pupurun

what totally discouraged me to continue playing it was 2 things:

1) Performance issues

2) Its overly excessive UI. Way to much clutter on in my screen at even the first minute. 

Herase

IMHO, i think players just didn't want the work or effort. Why play a themepark that takes time and effort when i can play so many that requires not much of me.

 

All i can say is when people say on here, games are too easy these day we need effort, don't believe them xD

Kabon

If you ask me there have been too many artificial placed barriers in Wildstar stuff u had to wait a day and another day and another day and so on to get it done... max faction per day ...which bothered me alot ..its like if you play our Game along time you can get that item if you log in every day for a month and kill 50 of these ... kind of very very boring. Super easy to get but you need to log in every day and farm that crap = Major Turnoff.

That along with todays soloability and the pickupgroups often suck Major too ...since everyone just solos anyway + as usual Team play didn feel worth it ..soloing was better ..and to me i need content i want to do in a group hard content ...that does reward me . If there is raid equipment i want it ...in order to show off in a group situation like look i got that item from that boss ..not in order to do a even harder raid + i need grouping to be worth  my time like Advancement even at max lvl ..that what Games today dont get.

To me its kind of boring to just run after gear at max lvl .Group up kill millions of things for a chance of gear only instead of advancing my char even further. Dont tell me thoose million of kills didn make my character stronger.

Timesplit

I think Carbine simply thought they had old school figured out, but forgot to take an extra look at what they were making, what systems they were implementing. I also think that the change to make it Action / Telegraph combat happened in the middle of development, which would explain why their class designs clashed with reality (especially the Stalker).

There were plenty of barriers to stall progression in Wildstar as well, not to mention the absurd attunement requirement. The attunement alone was worse than what for example WoW had in Vanilla.

 

And no, it had nothing to do with the business model.

 

 

Dakeru

The reasons have been discussed to death so instead I will say:

Oh look it's THAT guy with THAT post ... again...

borghive49

I think the biggest turn off to this game was two things. First off the art style was over the top Saturday morning cartoonish,  and secondly the telegraphing combat was just plain awful.  Old school raiders in my opinion want tab targeting combat, as well as a more serious theme to the game. 

Elevenb4

Originally posted by borghive49
I think the biggest turn off to this game was two things. First off the art style was over the top Saturday morning cartoonish,  and secondly the telegraphing combat was just plain awful.  Old school raiders in my opinion want tab targeting combat, as well as a more serious theme to the game. 

I completely agree on the artwork being over the top. Good grief, my first impression about 1 minute after I logged in was the horrendous animations. Thinking about it still bothers me beacause there were a lot of other things I liked about the game. Those things needed a little polish but they were cool. 

 

I've said it more than a few times here, and in other places, the artwork and animations were such a turn off to me that I couldn't look past them. I played a few toons/classes to the mid 20's and into the low 30's, but just couldn't get past the point that I hated looking at the movement of my toons. 

bcbully

YOU YOU AND YOOOOU OP! If wasn't for those meddling ki....

 

 

The "development" team.

Muntz

Although I had some interest in the game I never bought it. There were a couple of issues for me. Marketing it as a raider game was probably the biggest if it had other things to offer that certaily didn't come through in the hype for the game prior to launch. I've raided enough, to me raiding is a job not fun. The second was after GW2 came out this seemed like a game that should have followed in it's foot steps as box to play. I'm not saying subs can't work but I don't think it WS offered enough to merit one. 

Amjoco

Originally posted by borghive49
I think the biggest turn off to this game was two things. First off the art style was over the top Saturday morning cartoonish,  and secondly the telegraphing combat was just plain awful.  Old school raiders in my opinion want tab targeting combat, as well as a more serious theme to the game. 

First I think the cartoony look is no different than the cartoony look of WoW, which is the Mac Daddy of mmorpgs. Second just turn off the telegraphing in the options. 

imho the developers designed the title for old school raiders in mind, and when they showed up it was too difficult. I'm not sure there are any of them truly left, especially in a themepark game. As someone posted earlier, no one wants to put that much effort into it anymore. Basically the novelty of huge raids has warn out.

This game offers a much better combat system than WoW and other clones, and has one of the best housing systems in the genre. I really hope that the f2p system brings people back, it will be hard to see another good game flop.

arakkune

its kinda off topic but maybe part of the reason. Do u think wildstar needs more low level dungeons? i think 4 is far too little....

jazz.be

Honestly I think it was a well executed polished game and I'm surprised it failed so hard.

The reason I quit was combat design. But with the lack of MMORP games today, I'll gladly play Wildstar if it had a healthy pool of players.

Kajidourden

because mmo gamers are pansies now and if they can't faceroll content they quit.

 

Annnnd then proceed to whine about being able to faceroll

Charlie.Cheswick

Art direction.

Foomerang

Huge open world. Tons of instanced content. Player cap on zones. Dead looking mmo.

ButeoRegalis

Originally posted by Kajidourden

because mmo gamers are pansies now and if they can't faceroll content they quit.

 

Annnnd then proceed to whine about being able to faceroll

You forgot:

because mmo gamers whine about every game that runs on a computer being a WoW clone.

 

Annnnd then proceed to whine about the game not being enough like WoW.

Jaedor

WS is a fun game if you are playing with friends, and I had a blast in beta. But when everyone bailed before launch, there wasn't any hook within the game itself. Turnoffs for me were art style and over-the-top gimmicks.

hallucigenocide

for me it was the combat mostly.. i'm not against "action combat" but i did'nt like the way it was done. i also hated the sprint mechanic i know what they wanted it to do but for most players it was just something you just had to use all the time to move faster.

also the telegraphs where just too many it's no fun staring at the ground all the time especially in this fun world they created.

yeah people say you can turn them off but then you cant really play the game properly so that argument is just bogus.

optimization has also been a problem for a long time i hear it's better now but it was really bad for a long time(last time i checked their forums it was still an issue to some though)

mysticmouse

I was really looking forward to Wildstar till I got to play it during open beta. I did not enjoy the combat and even with the telegraphs turned off I ended up getting headaches after 10 to 20 minutes of playing. I think I made it to level 10 perhaps 11 before deciding the game was not worth my play time.

I hope they can turn things around  for the folks who do enjoy the game and wish them all the best.

Ikonis

The arrogant community that created by the Devs and their obnoxious 'hardcore' campaign.

gervaise1

Originally posted by DMKano

It was in development for 7 years - which means that by the time it released WoW clones were not popular anymore.

If WS launched 3 years prior it would have rode at least a year or 2 of the tail end of wow-era games.

This. To long in development. If you add the 2 years that Carbine - as an independent company - worked up the concept that is 9 years. Add in the year it has been out and that means the core idea originated 10 years ago back in 2006.

And long development = high development cost which will have seriously limited their options.

Total cost. In addition to development NCSoft spent over $16M on marketing; box production costs  - another $1-2M; as a first guess lets sat $200M total. Wage bill, rents, hardware etc. Then add in a profit target - EA's is high 60s - so lets say 50%. First guess recovery target of $300M. 

As a B2P game with a $60 box cost - lets be optimistic and say NCSoft / Carbine would make $30 a box. (Unknown IP etc. so probably less). $30 per box looking to make $300M means they would need 10M sales. Warning Will Robinson; doesn't take a genius to know that this wasn't going to happen.

You can play around with the target figure; allow for what the Texas tax payer will have contributed (possibly just over 20%) but the bottom line is that once you have spent a lot of money you need a lot of box sales. A bigger marketing campaign than they run means even more box sales needed etc. 

So they launched with as B2P + Sub. And done some calcs and come up with some targets. 2M sales and maybe 500k long term sub retention say, break even after 2.5 years; make a profit after 4. These are just ball park numbers but they highlight the dilemma that Carbine will have faced.

Fundamentally caused by the game taking so long to make and became to expensive  

Fangrim

People who say this monstrosity is what so called 'old school' gamers wanted are so far off the mark they should never be allowed to own a toy gun.Cartoon graphics and childish DOUBLE KILL,TRIPLE KILL! noises are not what they want.And why swoop around on a hover board only to jump off and attack mobs with a broken sword?...It's just terrible! It most likely failed because it was too hard for the casuals and too dumb for the rest.

Edit: In the games defence,I never tried the game but all I had to see were the graphics and combat on you-tube to know its a no way never for me game.