Wildstar had a great housing system and very fun combat. The raids had interesting mechanics. The biggest reason it flopped was it was such a buggy mess that many people couldn't be bothered dealing with it after launch. Mix in very little post-launch content and a lot of content designed around large groups of people that the game's population didn't support and you had the massive flop it turned into.
The game appealed mainly to hard core raiders. Unf they overestimated the population of hard core raiders out there and to make matters worse the bugs meant most deaths in raids happened due to broken mechanics which pissed off the one core group they were targeting.
@@Jeez001 Other issue that I remember people complaining was the way you attuned to raids. There were "challenges" throughout the game and you could complete them for Gold, Silver or Bronze rating to get rewards. Conceptually an excellent system, I think some FF:XIV Fates might even have similar mechanics. (you can only need to kill 10 Moblins to complete the challenge, but killing 20 gives extra rewards and 30 even more.) However problem was that gaining Gold rating from certain end-game challenges was part of raid attunement. This alone could be something to design around in a satisfactory way, but allegedly you could mess up the first minutes of 15 minute challenge so that Gold rating would be impossible to achieve. This would mean that many players doing the Challenge only for the attunement would leave the group, and people who would've been fine with Silver reward or just want to practice the challenge to eventually get Gold, were also screwed. Later on they made significant pivots towards more casual content. Ctrl+Alt+Delete comic commented on it like this: (Developer and Player at a convention) D: "Our game is going to be so hardcore!" P: "Cool. It's not my cup of tea though. Best of luck anyways." D "WAIT! DON'T GO! IT CAN BE CASUAL TOO!"
gamigo are probably one of the most disgusting "publishers" if you can even call them that, watching them absorb and suck the life out of games i liked in the past just for their IP/communities has been sad, glad to see someone managed to turn away from them
We told them back then not to go with or trust Gamigo. I'm in the exact same boat you are, Kira. I was an early backer of Fractured and wanted it to do well but that "Early Access" game was a catastrophe and, while I can't necessarily blame Dynamight Studios for the launch itself, the fact of the matter is that they made several bad decisions of their own afterwards. They've done a big revamp, closed a continent and added new content so we'll see how this new wipe will play but I'm not holding my breath or giving them any new dollar. (Also, every MMO is launching a classic version of their game... except for ArcheAge, despite massive demand for it from the playerbase. Absolutely hilarious how hardcore against it XLGames are.)
Wildstar had a unique visual style, world and tone that stuck in people's minds. But it did repeat the same sins of older MMOs that made it just a slog to really get through and enjoy. It could have done better, it needed its own "Realm Reborn" treatment really to update it to more modern design standards but NCSoft prefer their cashcows.
I put in dozens of hours in Wildstar's betas. But there was nothing about it that really stood out as unique from other MMOs that were out at the time. Housing was done better by EQ2, combat was done better by WoW and Rift, and questing was done better by WoW. The only thing it brought that was "unique" was the telegraphs from bosses, but even that wasn't really unique. The way Wildstar did it was adopted by other MMOs, though, even if they already had their own version of it already. I almost hit Reply when I suddenly remembered that Wildstar had that secondary progression thing. Exploring and the other two things. It just didn't stand out enough to be worth remembering... All that said, I wouldn't mind seeing it return. I doubt I'd play it, but it would be nice to see some options on the playing field.
@@skyesfury8511 Wildstar had a really striking and highly polished visual style as well as more action and movement oriented combat, strong character design and interesting playable races.
@@Toastybees Also the best housing system I've seen in MMOs, you could do anything on your plot instead of what we have in some MMOs right now that limits your building capabilities, FF14 you need to use building glitches in order to do some basic shit.
@@Toastybees Visual style wasn't unique. It was the same cartoonish style WoW uses. TERA did action combat better and came out years before. Playable races kinda blend into the background and become irrelevant in all MMOs. Not really a selling point. So again, it didn't really do anything unique to stand out. Which is the whole point of what I said before.
I first learned of Gamigo back in 2013 when they bought Fiesta Online, which was my favorite MMO (tied with Runescape) at the time. They then promptly ran the game into the ground with a combination of greed (milking the game dry with the cash shop) and sheer incompetence. I mean seriously, the people (person?) they put in charge of the game couldn't have been any worse at their job(s). The list of screw-ups they've made is practically endless, but juggling everyone's characters across servers at random (separating players, deleting friends lists, guilds, etc.) was their biggest mistake in my opinion, as that's what ultimately caused me to quit the game. I've been an MMO player for most of my life, but out of the many, many games I've tried, Fiesta had the best community by far. Heck, the game even had systems in place (Guild Academies & the mentor system) that encouraged/rewarded veteran players for helping noobs. Anyway, I'd made tons of friends on Fiesta over the years, some of which I used to hang out with almost every day. And then, one morning, I signed on and found that all my characters had been moved to random servers, my guild was gone (deleted), and my friends list was empty; all of the connections I'd made in the over 5 years I'd played the game were severed in an instant. (This was before the days of discord.) Lost_Soul01. Xiarla. Amii. The guys and gals from the guild [Heavens Republic]. And all my other friends, whose in-game names I've lost to the sands of time. I never even got the chance to say goodbye to any of them. Needless to say, I will never again have anything to do with any game- or anything else, really- that's associated with Gamigo.
What rewards did people get for the mentor system and how did it actually work? Did it work on a trust system? Did both players do a survey or speak to someone after the noob completed a milestone? It sounds really interesting and definitely doesn’t exist these days
@@Detective_L The 'Master' would get some in-game gold (I don't remember exactly how much), which they needed to claim by speaking to a storage keeper in one of the main cities. The 'Apprentice' received XP boosters (such as a 4-hour +50% XP boost), cash shop items, and untradeable weapons to train their character with. These weapons were granted every 10(?) character levels and were superior to most NPC-sold items, although not as powerful as the best weapons (typically dropped by bosses) available from other players using gold. The Apprentice received their rewards through the in-game mailbox, accessible from anywhere via the 'mail' tab in their inventory. Typically, though not always, the Master would also extend an invitation to the Apprentice to join their guild's Academy. Academy members would earn in-game gold every time they leveled up, which was directly deposited into their inventory. This gold was sourced from the guild's 'Vault' and was usually funded by the Guild Master and/or donated by high-level players within the guild. In return, every guild member benefited from a 'Guild Buff' based on the cumulative level-ups achieved by Academy players. While I cannot recall the exact details, I believe this buff usually maxed out at a +5% damage and +5% crit chance boost. The amount of gold awarded to players for leveling up was determined by each guild, with some being more generous than others. In particularly generous guilds, like the one I belonged to, a player who reached level 60 would accumulate enough gold to purchase a couple of high-tier items from other players, just from being rewarded for levelling up. Level 60, while far from the max level in the game, also marked the end of gold earnings from the academy, prompting players to transition into full-fledged members of the guild. By doing so, they gained access to the potent guild buff they had contributed to by leveling up.
@@fiddlesticks8142 damn that’s pretty cool. I’m sorry about the loss of your online friends. I also lost contact with people from other games before Skype or Discord existed so I know what that’s like. I was able to find one by posting on a games Reddit, asking if anyone want by a certain username. Maybe you might get the same luck.
Wildstar's combat system was incredibly good and I still miss that kind of combat even to this day. I played that game nonstop and it was definitely up there for a great MMORPG. The setting was fantastic, the art style was toony, the humor was great, the housing system was incredible, and the combat system was amazingly fun, but Carbine completely dropped the ball on literally everything else after. There was no end game other than like a 2-3 raids, all of which suffered catastrophic bugs that made it impossible to do certain fights, the game ran like dogshit even on high end gaming computers, and they updated the game so infrequently there was nothing to do after hitting end game. They made the raids way too "hardcore" with no revive mechanic so there was literally no way to recover from even tiny mistakes, even on the most simple of fights, which made progression way too hard for regular guilds. I wish Wildstar would come back, but it would need a competent development team to fix a LOT of core systems to make it good. The combat and universe hold up extremely well, since they went with that cartoony art style and the combat is action based, but without patches and content to do nobody is going to play it.
I loved Wild Star! I catch myself thinking about pretty frequently. I think it just came out at a time where WoW was the one and only mmo to people. I wonder how it would fare today.
Hey Kira, wildstar was a lot of fun and a genuinely good game, the problem was that the 5-man dungeons and the raids were so disgustingly difficult that the community became really toxic. You couldn't join a group and just learn. If you failed at the first boss once and wiped, everyone would leave the group. And pub groups would always ask if you knew what you were doing, and if you said no, they'd kick you out. Basically the only way to learn a dungeon was to join a "learning guild" and hope on that one get together per week friday or saturday night that you'd get into a group and be able to fail on the first boss about a dozen times before everyone quit. I would say Wildstar is a game that was ruined by the toxic community at endgame, because the content was just too difficult, and the learning curve was vertical.
Here’s my experience with publishers: Find an older MMO - fun gameplay, winds up selling the IP to Gamingo, 2 years later games on life support riddled with MTX. Find a fun mobile strategy game, games fairly fair, everything is earned - Partners with Scopley for additional funding - immediate next patch P2W. Kira - your experience with affiliate links is very common in affiliate scams, you flood your affiliates with new links to confuse them and obscure their actual referrals. WildStar was a good MMO, but is problem is it had features from all the popular MMO’s of that time, but it didn’t do any particularly better than existing mmos.
On top of that problem that WildStar had, it's design philosophy was courting a very hardcore playerbase. Mix those two together, and you have a game that had a steep uphill battle to make it's own ground, and simply couldn't find the momentum.
I played like 2 hours of Wildstar. Thought it was good and said that I will get around to actually playing it "one day". Then I heard it was dying and thought "I'll need to play more of it before it completely closes down." I never did. Only 2 hours total.
Wildstar was a very good 'vanilla' MMO' but that was it. If you played WoW or any of the myriad of other MMOs out at the time; you pretty much already played Widstar. There just wasn't anything that stood out in the game and people lost interest very quickly if it wasn't their first big MMO.
Wildstar was an amazing game crippled by bugs, some of which were gamebreaking and the devs were too slow at fixing them. Just to give an example the gunslinger class had a 45 degree long range cone channel aoe that eventually got "nerfed" by a few degree, on paper that is. In actual game the "nerf" turned it into a 360degree long range channel aoe that also hit through walls/line of sight. It stayed like that for several days
Wildstar wasn't massively popular but it did have a dedicated fanbase. Around 10k concurrent by the time it got shut down. It was run by NCSoft though, not sure if Gamigo was in the equation
I played it from start then on and off till it died, there was a huge push by mmo youtubers near the end to get the player base up. As someone who returned near the end I can fully understand why it didnt get new players, the dedicated fanbase was toxic as all hell, they wouldnt offer advice or help at all, I would ask questions on how to get gear for end game dungeons and it was like you shagged their mother they would spew such hate at you so I left as did many new people. Game wasnt hugely popular and all pushes to get pop up were knocked down by toxic old players
@@aaronschulz9739 My experience was quite different. I am still friends with 40~ people from my Wildstar guild and we play different games together. There's toxic people in every community, but you can't generalize that to an entire population. The game erred towards pleasing the more hardcore fanbase, so sure the % of toxicity was higher than other games, but it's not like it was the norm
Gamigo didnt kill Rift, they took an already dead game & milked the carcass for what was left. Trion killed Rift when they took the fun out of the game
Wildstar was good (played at launch) but made some massive mistakes out the gate with like raid atunements and stuff and being pitched wrong but the core gameplay was really good
So, as someone who played Wildstar from beta all the way up to about 6 months before its shutdown, imma post my ted talk for the dozen or so people who care... Wildstar was amazing, but it had a shit launch (lots of bugs/poor optimization) and the end game content was sparce in variety and had huge barriers to entry. Couple that with a general lack of polish, many features getting added after people had already left the game, and it was bound to fail. Not to mention it had way too bog standard of a progression system. Nothing to bring you back to old zones, repetitive daily grinds, uninteresting gear progression, basic crafting, ect. What was good? Everything else. Best MMO combat I've ever played by far. Best character controller, felt like you were playing a platformer. Amazing feeling mounts because of the awesome movement controller and smooth animations. Best dungeons I've ever played, both as a tank, healer, and dps, both due to the combat system and boss design. Best player housing I've ever seen, so much freedom with a powerful suite of tools. Beautiful artstyle, loved their world and creature design too. People look back on it so fondly because it was an amazing core experience wrapped up in outdated design philosophy and bad UX. Ditch the gear treadmill, fix its rather janky transmog system, add world zone events, horizontal progression, and level scaling ala NCSoft's other popular MMO in the west, Guild Wars 2, and you'd have yourself something real special. Most Wildstar players I knew transitioned over to Guild Wars 2.
I actually bought Wildstar back in the day and i still have the dvd. I only played the game for 2 hours or something like that and then i dropped it. The 2 main reasons that i remember were, that to me the very colorful game seemed confusing (its hard to explain) and the combat system was suuuper boring during leveling. It isnt often, that i give up a game (especially an mmo i payed money for) after basicly no time playing it, but as a healer already in early levels the enemies took ages to beat and i was clicking one or two skills and that was it.
Wildstar was a really weird release. I played it from launch, and really enjoyed the mechanics, but it was rather buggy, and the marketing was very mediocre (at least for me). I was going to pass on it, and only ended up picking it up and playing because a good friend was really looking forward to it. The game trailers and info before launch just didn't sound that interesting to me. The art style didn't draw me in, the setting and story just didn't excite me... but in play, it was good, and the combat was fabulous. Really ended up liking it, and very glad I got pushed to play it.
It's a shame a lot more companies won't drop Gamigo as their "publisher." The players of Defiance and Defiance 2050 would love for them to crash and burn. Justice for the MMOs they've killed
I think WildStars problem was it had borderline NO advertising. I only heard about it like 2 weeks before it launched. I got to level 50 (max level) on it but ran into some problems personally and haven't played it. I was upset that it closed but I don't know what they were trying to do. It was a decent enough game.
I played Defiance for years and we had a good clan and great participation. Then it was sold to Gamigo and a few months later it was just shut down. They did give us about a 3-weeks notice if I recall but BAM! it was just gone. Members of our clan still get together on discord from time to time but there would be plenty of folks back on it if someone brought it back. It certainly won't be gamigo who does and that's a good thing. I agree with the last comment in your video.
I pre-bought two years ago to help support and encourage a nice, open and enthusiastic team of MMO Devs who had some fresh ideas. Never intended to play until full launch. Still hope it happens some day
Wildstar just had the wrong financial model. Price tag up front was massive and the game needed a player population door it's content to work. If they had gone with f2p or even free to start it would have popped off but it came out before that business model eat commonplace
wildstar was appealing to way too hardcore audience and after changing to free to play to bots that ruined pvp. Game was really awesome and I miss it, it just needed some changes to systems and more casual appeal and it would do pretty good I think
I got some email for fractured and I checked it out, I was excited about it. Then I saw they partnered with Gamigo and I just laughed and ignored it. I've seen enough from Gamigo to know /exactly/ how that shit will go.
I understand you completely. My mom got in contact with the company my dad worked for several times, asking if she wasn't owed some pension after his death and was just told off. Now, a year later, she suddenly got a letter asking why she hadn't claimed her money. After calling again she now has a year's worth of back pay. They should be ashamed.
Wildomar was enjoyable, there were dozens of quests that were choose your adventure, like a dungeon where it's like the Oregon trail, you lead a group of settlers through like multiple paths, you gather resources such as food water and other things for your group depending on where you go, if you take the wrong paths you won't have any food the people die and the dungeon is done you failed. There were also 3 different bosses you get to fight depending on where these people settled. Buttttttttt the game was extremely freaking buggy most boss fights and events would cause invincible units and you had to make the correct choices cause the sniper boss glitches out.
with Wildstar for me, by the time I heard about it, it was already shutting down...and for the record, a private server is already in the works, though it'll be some time till they have anything worth playing on that front
I would have loved to play Wildstar when it came out but it seemed to have really high system requirements, it ran horribly on my computer and many other I knew.
I don't think you missed out. The game could've been great, the artstyle is dope and they clearly had a lot of talent but it wasn't all that fun. I'd love to see it rebooted or a similar game though.
Wildstar WAS an amazing game... everyone who played it including me loved it.... The reason wildstar did NOT do amazing in player retention and revenue was because it served a really small niche of PvE hardcore players. Its content was really hard and challenging but really well thought in design. So the majority of the players quit because the content was so hard they couldn't even attune to experience it in the first place.... This is the reason World of Warcraft gradually became more and more easy to appease the casual gamer.
I played wildstar, it was pretty good unironically. Good soundtrack, good community although small... unfortunately the raid content was kinda ass because t was just so many red circles on the ground you literally didnt see anything. At all.
I always heard wild star was good. But I didn’t care for the aesthetics and it was too similar to wow. But I imagine if it released at a different time period it might have done better. Ironically it released at a time there wasn’t the appetite for a new mmo like there is now
4:55 Was an interesting story of real world business. You've come out fine fom this dickery. The crap people have to go through because someone wants to abuse them.
Josh Stryfe Hayes had a video on Gamigo. They apparently gobble up IPs with the sole intention of changing it for maximum monetization until the game dies out because nobody likes said monetization then shutting the game down. At least IIRC.
I'd really enjoy if you'd make longer videos, even hour or two videos of just talking shit about stuff like this. Makes my 3D modeling work and gaming sessions much more relaxing. Thank you.
Now I am really interested in the game. I wonder if my package is active that I got at the start of the kickstarter, because I have not merged it over to Gamigo.
Wildstar was an amazing game. There was major mistakes from the team. They put all their eggs in the raid basket, had very limited post launch content and didn't have much content for casual players. Lets not talk about how they fucked up pvp right before launch and never fixed it. I had a blast as a raider but people dropped to play other games and no casuals were ready to raid yet so many of my raid groups died and had to merge with other groups that died too. RIP Wildstar.
i quit playing it in the early access due to it being terrible and rushed but now im back playing it on the special weekends for the server tests and enjoying it again.
I'm still hopeful for the game even though I'm not into the whole isometric mmo thing because of the unique features (at the very core of the design) and world. But let's face it, the hope has as much base in reality as my hope that there's an afterlife, and a pleasant one at that >< Or am I actually confusing games? XD
Wildstars only downfall was it was too hardcore, it basically had mythic raids before Mythic existed in WoW but didnt have the playerbase to fuel the meat grinder, had some really awesome times in Wildstar PvP and PvE but unless you had a super coordinated group, you would get dicked hard.
I played Wildstar. It wasn't amazing. But it was different, and I enjoyed it. But that was enough to get it shuttered since at that time if you weren't a WoW clone or a Korean skinnerbox, you just didn't succeed.
I'm not saying Wildstar was the best, it wasn't. It had too much of that "oh cater to the hardcore boiz" but the leveling process was fun and, at least, novel and something new. It was just a great mix of aesthetic, lore, and something new that it was a lot of fun to just experience. Endgame? Not really. But just playing it as a new game? Great fun.
man. I'm so fucking thirsty for a good isometric mmorpg... like ultima online, but in 2023 with even more customization, updated engine etc.... so fucking thirsty i tell you
Wildstar was fun. It was basically an MMO with Ratchet and Clank style animations and world. The housing was amazing. What happened to that game was a blasted tragedy.
8:58 Its 100% people that have never played it talking out of their ass. Or rose tinted glasses from the newbs that played for the last 12 months before the game closed. Edit: Wrote the bible thrice. Felt like the single sentence was enough.
Wildstar was fun but endgame wasn’t. The huge raid groups needed was too much. I believe they were 40 man groups but not 100% sure. Even when I was in the alpha I kept telling them to keep the raid group to 10 man instead. Since that was easier to manage but they were too hardcore and didn’t listen.
Its like if you really have to stick your whole limb deep into a pile of shit, the least you could do is prepare and use protection. In the case of Gamigo it would be a clear set of lines/rules in the contract, like having the last say about putting the game on Steam.
several times when I wanted to buy something already I tried to use a youtuber or streamer link and 9/10 the longer link is replaced by an ultra short one that you don't even get when regularly browsing had zero trust in that potential sale going to an influencer's balance so bought elsewhere
Thank god for the revival for Guild Wars 2, after playing WoW for like 17 years I thought my time with MMOs had come to an end. But GW2 has been great to me. Anyways, F*** Gamigo.
I would find it funny if you set out to go through some quick stories again tomorrow and end up only talking about the one topic again. I also wouldn't mind that happening whatsoever.
Gamego once again proving they're the EA of MMO publishers. Gobbling up up-and-coming studios with something promising, then run it into the ground with their greed and ineptitude.
