• WildStar developer Carbine Studios lays off 40% of staff
    16 replies, posted
[url]http://www.pcgamesn.com/wildstar/wildstar-developer-carbine-studios-lays-off-40-of-staff[/url]
Owch.
Every time I hear news about this game its something tragic. It's a damn shame, it had SO MUCH potential and a lot of it that I really loved, but they just mishandled it all time and time again.
That's what happens when you design a game for 2004 and not 2014.
As someone who really dislikes most MMO's due to how boring I find them, some friends of mine insisted I try Wildstar because "the combat is a lot of fun and not like most MMO's." I go in and give the game a try and they completely failed to inform me that the questing is still the same absolute boring garbage. WildStar is visually a very cool game but it's boring as hell.
[QUOTE=ejonkou;49918888]That's what happens when you design a game for 2004 and not 2014.[/QUOTE] Wildstar was an interesting experiment to me in what happens if you give the marketing team all the money and the art direction and then just throw peanuts at the dev team, there always felt like a massive difference between what i was presented and the trash i played.
I tried it for a bit, combat was fun but I immediately came back to Guild Wars 2. I dont know, Wildstar didnt catch me at all because of the way questing works. I found Guild Wars 2 to be a much more fun game to level up in, unlike Wildstar, and I prefer SciFi scenarios over Fantasy and stuff like that, but I just couldnt get myself to enjoy Wildstar at all. It wasn't for me, even though I was hoping it would be :(
PvP was a mess in Wildstar, the entire arena was just covered in telegraphs. Defeated the purpose of this "skill based combat" when you can't even get away from the millions of telegraphs everywhere.
[QUOTE=gbtygfvyg;49922473]PvP was a mess in Wildstar, the entire arena was just covered in telegraphs. Defeated the purpose of this "skill based combat" when you can't even get away from the millions of telegraphs everywhere.[/QUOTE] The telegraphs were ok, but the matchmaking was hilariously bad. It's almost always pugs vs premades with full set/class runes and voip. The botting problem in battlegrounds was also so bad that at one point, matches were 90% useless bots. At least the raids are ok.
Maybe it was the class I played, Medic, but the combat in Wildstar just totally put me to sleep. I loved the world they built and the art and I tried really, really hard to enjoy it but I seriously got to somewhere in the mid-20's and just couldn't do it anymore.
[QUOTE=kenji;49919193]Wildstar was an interesting experiment to me in what happens if you give the marketing team all the money and the art direction and then just throw peanuts at the dev team, there always felt like a massive difference between what i was presented and the trash i played.[/QUOTE] That's pretty much modern game design, period. Marketing has positioned itself as too valuable to ignore, and after a decade of pushing it worked, and we've had overmarketed underwhelming titles ever since, for about 12 years.
[QUOTE=27X;49923032]That's pretty much modern game design, period. Marketing has positioned itself as too valuable to ignore, and after a decade of pushing it worked, and we've had overmarketed underwhelming titles ever since, for about 12 years.[/QUOTE] That's the trend for everything these days, even outside of gaming. Increase the marketing budget, decrease development, and create an entire marketing campaign before the product even begins to exist. This was pretty much destined to fail. I remember before there was much info released, there was the idea of it being very similar to a "sandbox mmo" and other things about how different it would be. Then as more and more gameplay was shown, it looked more and more like a typical, boring MMO. Same kinda process happened with ESO if I remember right.
[QUOTE=ejonkou;49918888]That's what happens when you design a game for 2004 and not 2014.[/QUOTE] No, this is what happens when you push a product out the door when the end-game content is entirely non-existant outside of a very hard attunement questline (that literally every single player complained about and they didnt nerf until after 80% of people had quit) in order to get into the one and only very difficult raid. If they had as much end game content as RIFT, or WoW did when they launched, wildstar would have faired much, MUCH better.
I saw some videos of PVP and the telegraphing was so dense in many cases that there was literally no way to distinguish some of the abilities, especially in the short time you have to dodge them. Jamming that many people into an arena with huge flashy abilities and then expecting coordinated dodging is just a disaster. They put some effort into making a combat system a little above the garbage hotkey stuff you usually get but they didn't put nearly enough thought into how it would actually work
Some of them should go to ArenaNet. They had good relations I think.
[QUOTE=Elspin;49944673]I saw some videos of PVP and the telegraphing was so dense in many cases that there was literally no way to distinguish some of the abilities, especially in the short time you have to dodge them. Jamming that many people into an arena with huge flashy abilities and then expecting coordinated dodging is just a disaster. They put some effort into making a combat system a little above the garbage hotkey stuff you usually get but they didn't put nearly enough thought into how it would actually work[/QUOTE] [video=youtube;1IgVS9yNFGg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IgVS9yNFGg[/video]
[QUOTE=Meladath;49943553]No, this is what happens when you push a product out the door when the end-game content is entirely non-existant outside of a very hard attunement questline (that literally every single player complained about and they didnt nerf until after 80% of people had quit) in order to get into the one and only very difficult raid. If they had as much end game content as RIFT, or WoW did when they launched, wildstar would have faired much, MUCH better.[/QUOTE] I think I read that a bunch of ex-employees explained that they did fix stuff like this as fast as possible. However, due to inexperienced / bad management, they had a weird way of patch branches that cost them weeks to even integrate the patch files. Because of that, they had a terrible cycle for patches, sometimes taking as long as 6 months for simple changes to get into the game. Not sure if it was confirmed to be an ex-employee, but here's the quote: [quote]Pretty much. Right up until content lock for a patch, everything would be going into the main branch - including stuff for the patch and stuff that people were working on 3, 6, 9, 12 months out. Which meant that the patch branch would end up a giant clusterfuck for weeks, if not months, and one of the reasons that content would get locked 3 months prior to release. (The reason this is bad, is that you can't respond to player feedback when nothing but critical bugs make it to the live environment for minimum of 3 months, sometimes 6 months. It absolutely killed our community to have to constantly tell them we're aware of an issue and there's a fix coming, but not for half a fucking year.)[/quote] Honestly, I feel bad for the devs. When you saw the early streams before it released, you could really see how passionate they were about it and they just enjoyed being able to talk about it.
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