WildStar Preview

I’m sure more than a few of our readers are interested in the MMO market, and I suspect they’ll be interested in reading Eurogamer’s thoughts on WildStar after a hands-on session with the title. Sampling ahead:

Deradune’s gigantic, but it’s also rammed full of stuff to do – alongside personality, the team’s putting a premium on sheer density. There’s story stuff, of course, which sees you taking on hunting challenges and fighting groups of poachers, and then there are the random challenges that pop up as you wander around, too: kill a bunch of these things, kill a bunch of those things really fast.

And there are the path missions, with each discipline getting its own optional quests. Soldiers get to activate beacons that call in waves of enemies and bosses to defeat, for example, while explorers get sent off to visit hard-to-reach spots – activating doodads in the higher branches of trees, perhaps, or scaling a cliff to take in a vista. Explorers also get to open up tunnel networks beneath the map, which have their own secrets to track down as well as one big perk: they see you moving across the overworld at roughly four times the normal speed, meaning followers of this path will effectively be able to fast-travel. The final two paths, settler and scientist, will both get their own quota of tailored quests, too, but that stuff’s still under wraps at the moment. The important thing to note is that path choices stick: if you’re an explorer, you won’t be able to trigger holdouts (although you will be able to wade in when a soldier does). If you’re a soldier, you won’t be able to access those secret tunnel networks (although you might be able to follow an explorer down there on occasion).

Even with that gating in place, there’s so much to do in Deradune that it becomes a little paralyzing at first: the map’s a clutter of icons and quest pointers from the moment you’re cut-scened onto it in the back of a spaceship, and, playing as a grizzly Draken explorer, my personal communicator is soon flashing away with incoming messages and requests as I poke around. (Having what amounts to a mobile phone in a fantastical sci-fi MMO is frequently hilarious, incidentally: it’s not uncommon to check the UI and see a phrase like “Missed Call: Bloodrush!” staring back at you. I must catch up with that guy.)