I think there could be a lot of aspects that they could introduce into WoW. What happened with those games and Tera/Aoin? Did they make some bad nerfs or something?
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From what Iâve heard of Wildstarâs housing system, Blizzard should hire those devs and put them to work immediately. I never played it myself.
I played Rift for a bit when it first came out, however many years ago that was. The dynamic world events were fun but I donât remember much else.
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Wildstar was just a bad game that died. The only thing worth looking at from that game would be the Housing System.
Which, if these alleged leaks about Dragonflight are true, might be coming down the pipeline.
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Wildstar was fun but tried to be like vanilla WoW with 40 man raids which was doomed to fail
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Wildstar had two main issues
PVP was awful because telegraphed combat in an MMO-RPG is a mess.
They tried to be too hardcore and alienated their own player base.
As for Rift. It was good but never good enough.
I really enjoyed the open world (I believe it was called rift system hence the name) events. WoW needs more of that. FF14 does a similar thing I believe.
Wasnât their whole gimmick âex WoW devs wanting to do it rightâ?
I enjoyed the Paths system too. At least on paper.
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On paper, sure. Otherwise, like many aspects of Wildstar, a failed execution of a halfway interesting idea.
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Rift had a really fun âclassâ system, fairly engaging world, decent dungeons and ok raids. It is still running f2p, but is kind of a shell of itself.
Wildstar had great atmosphere but everything being telegraphed was too weird.
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WildStar had a fun sense of humor (because WoW really does take itself too seriously sometimes) and great character movement. Its engine could pull off the jumping puzzles that WoW devs love to make but come out like poop. The housing system had a lot of room for creativity but it required time and focus to make anything decent.
On the flip side, questing could get boring, combat that required constant movement to line targets up in boxes could get tiresome, and the holiday events could be punishing (If you want to get kicked in the junk repeatedly by a video game Xmas event, WildStar was the game for you!).
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Wildstar was fantastic. My opinion may be the minority, but I truly enjoyed my time playing WS, and Iâm watching Nexus Forever hoping they get the private servers up one day.
Lots of innovative things in there, a lot more than I can unpack in one post.
Imagine that youâre in a zone, just messing around, and you kill a bird. Then a big pop up appears and a hyped up 80âs rocker announcer goes âCHALLENGE!!!â and it says in text âKILL 20 BIRDS IN 20 SECONDS!â and the voice goes âLETS GO CUPCAKE!â
It keeps it fun.
Then you complete it and get some XP and if you level it will say something like âOH F*** YEAH!â It had itâs own style and intruduced things like telegraphing mechanics, jumping puzzles, and some truly mind wrenching raid mechanics that are kind of the industry standard now.
Biggest flaw was that it was 0% casual.
That was so frigging annoying. Not funny, not clever, just trying too hard to be something.
Hard disagree.
Which is fine, Itâs personal taste.
It came out when WoW was still King of the Hill, drop kicking new challengers. I feel like it may have had a better chance if it came out now.
The most awesome thing about Wildstar was the housing plots. I probably spent days of game time in there building stuff.
Beyond that though, the game was not very casual or solo friendly past the mid levels. They tried to make it for high end hardcore group play, at the expense of casual content, and it cost them.
I did try rift for a bit, but never really engaged with it. The zone events were âŠdifferent, but I found them problematic as they disrupted any normal questing in that zone for the duration of the event.
Your mileage may have varied.
No rift failed because it was the wrong genre. It should have been a single player game ala dragon age. Because it was an mmo, they had to balance it, and then nerfed some really fun souls useless.
Wildstar was a fun game. And Rift is still fun.
Part of me wants to believe thatâs where the current rare system came from. Just running from one rare spawn to the next. 
Most people who never played Wildstar just parrot misinformation they heard from so-and-soâs second cousin who played it once at launch and never touched it again.
Did it have faults? Yes. Did it squander its potential? Yes! Is it still my favorite mmo of all time and has set a standard of player housing excellence that has yet to be reached by any other game (much less mmo) currently on the market? HELL FREAKING YES!
All of itâs major flaws with the #hardcore mentality were fixed some time before it went f2p. But people were still burned from its rocky launch. It was also very polarizing in its aesthetica and gameplay. You love it or hate it. The skill ceiling on the combat was also veeeeery high. Good players were godlike and it could be very discouraging to go up against them especially in pvp.
I can go on for days though. Wildstar is still amazing and I mourn its loss and eagerly await its resurrection!
What?
I can attest to this.
Wildstar failed because they focused on the hardcore, but whatever devs worked on the housing were absolute geniuses. No other MMO comes close to that housing system.
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I played both.
Wildstar, imho, was simply a mess. They threw everything at the wall hoping anything stuck. Nothing did. And casual unfriendly by design. Suicidal.
Rift was a blast. In its best moments, it was maybe even better than WoW.
Rift had three main strengths:
- The best dynamic events system ever. Rifts, invasions and instant adventures were awesome.
- The best class system ever. My Rogue had the traditional DPS melee spec, a DPS ranged spec (Ranger), a bonafide tank spec (Riftwalker, which was based on blinking and evasion and was a blast to play) and a support/backup healer spec (Bard!).
- The best player housing ever. Your instanced âhouseâ was really like a small customisable zone.
As Thallia said, the devs dropped Rift like a potato sack to pursue âgreener pasturesâ, like the abominable Archeage.
However, Rift still exists, works ok and has a small fandom of loyal players (including our Thallia here).
I advise anyone interested to try it. Itâs totally free, and it could surprise you with how good it is.
If you are feeling burnt out with WoW and want to wait for 10.0, trying Rift could be an idea.
If you want instead a completely âcurrentâ MMORPG with a thriving community, my advice is Guild Wars 2, another big, excellent game with great dynamic PvE events and great small and big scale PvP. Itâs buy to play, no subscription, and is just launching another expansion.
Just make sure you donât leave WoW for good. Old good WoW is still the best! 