For the biggest reward, there are Prime monsters, denoted by their menacing red sheen. Attempt the larger, tougher variants, and you'll get a more significant boost towards your goal. Kill smaller enemies, and it builds slowly. Instead, a percentage bar increases as you carry out your task. While many of the quests ask you to kill a particular category of enemy or monster, they don't ask for a set amount. It's not in fact its here that Wildstar starts to stand out for more than just its tone. Such highlights would be useless if the general questing was an enthusiasm-sapping churn of endurance. But then there are the moments when the game's penchant for silliness kicks in, and you're chasing a naked rabbit around a town, attaching a rocket pack to a cute, cuboid pig-thing, or hunting down erotic fiction in a spider-filled woodland. You're going to be killing a lot of things, and, when you're not, you're probably going to be activating or collecting a set number of objects by running up to them and pressing F. Questing, similarly, has its stand out moments amid a basic set of objectives. You can instead use what's come before and, through a systematic and rigorous examination of every system, make it better. Wildstar's biggest lesson is that you don't have to fundamentally revolutionise the genre to make a great MMO. But from that, Carbine have built, tweaked and created something distinct. The World of Warcraft DNA is unmistakably present-you can see it in the questing, the structure, and, more than anything, the chunky, expressive cartoon style. I don't know the circumstances that led to Wildstar's creation, but, having played it for more than 50 hours, what impresses me is that it feels less cynical in its approach and less insecure about its inspirations. Rather than start with an earnest wish to give people expansive, varied worlds, deep systems and engaging lore, they were instead conceived with the realisation that having millions of regular subscribers would look good on an annual earnings report.
The problem, for many, was a fundamental misunderstanding of what that magic was. There's no word on a release date yet.In the nine years since World of Warcraft's release, plenty of other MMORPGs have tried to capture Blizzard's magic. WildStar will be released exclusively on PC. Rock, Paper, Shotgun had a play of the Soldier and Explorer at Gamescom, reporting that combat is more involved than auto-attacking, boasting active dodging, and rewarding bonuses for "efficient and rapid" fighting. Which is how the playable races of plain old Human, rabbity Aurin, and hulking great Granok end up on Nexus. Its hyper-advanced inhabitants, the Eldan, have vanished without a trace, causing the rest of the galaxy to rush in for a spot of plunder and mystery-solving. On the story side, WildStar's set on the planet of Nexus. Lastly, Scientists are more collectors, uncovering the game's story by yoinking artefacts. Settlers will be builders, though it's not yet clear how exactly this will work, whether it's player-placed buildings or something else. Explorers will be off roaming the landscape, climbing peaks and delving underground. You can still just go around hitting stuff if you fancy, by playing a Soldier.
On top of a regular class system, the four playstyles will determine what you'll be doing in WildStar. The sci-fantasy MMORPG is coming exclusively to PC. Building, exploring, and collecting are playstyles intended to be just as valid as hitting monsters until they fall over in Carbine Studios' WildStar, announced today at Gamescom by publisher and parent company NCSoft.