WildStar Preview

The folks at IncGamers offer an “eyes-on” preview for Carbine Studios’ MMO WildStar, which also includes a slew of videos coming from the presentation offered by the developers at PAX Prime. Here’s a sampling:

Questing is an area that the development team has been looking at with interest. The usual ‘kill ten rats’ scenario really doesn’t cut it any more. Carbine want to up the up the ante by offering side chalaneges to even the most mundane of quests. For example you may need to kill 10 rats but there’s extra goodies up for grabs if you can do it in a certain tumeframe or in a different way depending in which Player Path you have chosesn. These side challenges are what Carbine call layers.

Ultimately you still have to kill ten rats, or yetis in the case of the demo, so we’re not talking massive changes to the standard MMO quest mechanics. We’re not entirely sure that these challenges, or ‘layers’, push the boundaries of MMO questing, players usually just want to level fast so these could be merely a distraction for some. Completionists will love the layers idea and there’s always the extra loot to look forward to.

There are some neat ideas being introduced but we’re still not quite sure if everything that is being touted is really that far removed from the current generation of MMORPGs. Wildstar appears to be a slightly different take on the more popular game mehanics we see in today’s MMORPGs. Will this be enough to take on the big boys of the MMO world though? That remains to be seen and a lot depends on when the game is actually released.

Having said that, the game does stand out visually; the small section of the game world we tried does look fantastic and it appears to play very well. Carbine have the developer experience to have created an easy to use interface that is pretty much pick up and play for anyone familiar with the genre.