Wildstar launched today (6-3-14)

[Cruci]

Originally Posted by Gogan

I'm on Thunderfoot (Exiles) at the moment which is a PvE server. No desire to play on a PvP server, but thanks for the offer.

Got to level 9 tonight after ~4 hours. It's pretty slow leveling so far, and tbh, the first impression wasn't great. Not much is very intuitive, but it's getting better the more time I spend on it. I don't think anything will ever beat WoW's character responsiveness of controls, but WS's isn't bad. Definitely better than SWtoR at release. Very similar to Tera. In fact, I'd say the whole game feels really similar to Tera in general.

I haven't gotten into the story at all yet. I intended to read all the quest text, take things slow and get immersed in the story. But there doesn't seem to be much, and it's so easy to skip, even accidentally. So I have no idea what the underlying story is. There's lots of "lore books" that you can click on to read, but fuck that. SWtoR beats it hands down on immersive story/questing. But it's early. Tera didn't hook me on story until maybe level 20, so we'll see.

The servers lagged to hell during prime time -- almost unplayably bad. But it got better as the night wore on. We'll see how the rest of the week goes.

Yea, I think the story is meant for the tl;dr generation, you get it mostly in snippets and it suffers (at least early) without any sort of exposition, but I do appreciate that you can generally follow it without having to read chapters at a time.

Yep, feel and control is one thing that no game has ever come close to WoW on in my experience, but this isn't a knock on the game like it is so many others (i.e. ESMMO which was probably the prime reason I didn't buy).

The early early game sucked royally. The starting zone is almost unbearably bad, fortunately it is brief. It really starts to get better by about the second zone on the planets though.

[Gronthor]

SW:TOR ruined text based story. At least it did for me.

[Rhun]

I never played SWTOR but I'm guessing it was like guild wars 2 for storytelling.

[Nucholza]

Asano, you still playing Hello Hero?

[Gogan]

Originally Posted by Nucholza

Asano, you still playing Hello Hero?

Naa, I stopped playing a few months ago. It took forever to enhance 5-6 star heroes if you didn't want to pay money, so I got bored of it.

[Gogan]

Got to level 15 tonight. 3 nights of playing -- 15 levels. So slow. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. Quests have been more of the same. Nothing really special or interesting. There was a solo instance that was cool to see. Took about 15 mins to clear. And I did a world event with some other random person that was fun.

Then I got my house. Holy crap did they do housing right. From what little I've seen of WoW's upcoming garrisons, WS's housing absolutely blows it out of the water. You basically go into an instance where you have several plots of land on which to build your house and other fixtures. There is soooo many customization possibilities on both the inside and outside of your house, down to the damn sky (snowy, dark, outerspace, rainbows, stormy, underwater(!), etc). It's amazing, and will be a genius gold sink (everything costs money). Just really, really well done.

[Gogan]

Level 21 now. The game is, indeed, getting better. There's still virtually no story to follow, but that's ok.

Did a world raid boss and my first 5-man dungeon tonight. World boss was kind of a snooze, but one thing they did that's kinda cool is they have a built-in dmg/healing/tanking scoreboard that shows up at the end of the event and based on how well you did, you'll get better rewards.

The dungeon, on the other hand, was not a snooze. It took quite a while since we wiped several times, and there's plenty of trash that doesn't die very quickly. The bosses were no joke considering it was the first dungeon of the game. Plenty of dodging, interrupting, and other interesting mechanics meant a quick wipe if people aren't paying attention. Gotta admit it was pretty fun.

Not sure which combat system I like better between Tera or WS. WS seems to require more interaction, but it would probably give me carpal tunnel if I was raiding for a full night. The healing in WS is *rough*. Lots of small area/cone heals means healing a raid is like herding cats. And maybe it's just the Esper class, but your healing resource (focus) depletes as you cast spells and is extremely slow to replenish. Maybe there's focus-regen gear, or maybe you just need to really ration your healing throughout the fight. Either way, I'm not a big fan. Tera healing had its quirks, but it was a lot more fun. I still find myself staring at unit frames/bars when healing, instead of the boss and the environment. (WoW's combat system sucks compared to both, so I won't even bring it up.)

Questing is still pretty bland. But I mix it up by keeping up with my path quests and gathering. If I was just rushing through the quests, I'd probably be a lot further along.

[Gogan]

Level 31 now. Not sure why people raved about mid-late game questing because it still kinda blows. I wanted to get max level, but not sure I'll make it. Losing the desire to keep playing this game.

[McGrupp]

Sad, but believable. Thanks for the updates/info

[Gogan]

Made it to level 36 before cancelling my subscription tonight. Final verdict: Wildstar is a solid game -- full featured and well polished for a new MMO -- but doesn't offer anything that you can't get elsewhere.