WildStar Interview

VG247 is offering an interview with Carbine Studios’ producer Jeremy Gaffney, focusing on the developer’s upcoming MMO WildStar. Here’s a snippet that should give you an idea of Carbine’s strategy for the future:

(Of the successful games; they’re updating weekly or bi-weekly now. It’s like this arms race for how much new stuff can you add in the game, because it turns out people crave it. Same stuff you see with League of Legends; every three weeks, cool new stuff. Guild Wars 2 has just moved to a two-week cycle and that’s brilliant. Players really reward that, but as a developer it’s very hard to do that.

(We’ve tooled from an early stage to try and have that rapid update cycle. We’ve been believers for quite a long while that frequency of quality updates is something that players really reward. I don’t know that you sell more boxes you know what I mean? It’s not going to be like a line on the box or show up in a review but by god you stay in a game that’s making more of the stuff that you love.)

It’s a common sense approach on the surface, but it’s fraught with high-strain demands for any developer. It’s lucky then that Carbine was founded by around 20 former World of Warcraft developers at Blizzard who have been steeped in MMO development for many years. They know the pitfalls, they’ve seen games collapse and there’s a genuine passion and understand of what makes gamers invest time and money into an online world.

WildStar certainly has an identity that stands out among today’s glut of fantasy MMOs that often tend to cover similar themes, races and class archetypes. It sees the imperialistic Dominion faction and a band of rebels called the Exiles fighting over the newly-discovered planet Nexus. There’s a neat sci-fi vibe at play along with smatterings of comedy and a bright colour palette, but the plot also hides a darker edge.

Gaffney explained that the Carbine has taken note of many stumbling blocks of the MMO genre over the years and ironed them out through smart design. For example, he said that it makes no sense to have a dynamic event where two factions engage in PvP battle over two strongholds when you can make the bases two giant, rampaging robots instead. It’s no secret which of the two presentations is more appealing.

(We build the whole world to be modifiable,) Gaffney explained when I asked him about new dynamic content, post-launch updates and world events. (We mark areas with plugs and sockets, and it’s what lets us do a cool housing system where you can dig gardens, mines and all that kind of stuff. It’s what lets us do war-plots where you build your fortress and walls, capture raid bosses and pin them down and all that.