iirc PVP in that game was broken and there was rigged games
raiding required a fee to pay and had a ton of other stuff to do before the raid
that is all i remember… any wildstar people here feel free to correct me
Wildstar went raid or die.
It died.
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There were a number of issues that hurt its survival chances.
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Raiding and ‘Elite’ play were over sold, discouraging a lot of casual players from even trying the game.
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Bad management at Carbine.
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Poor balancing.
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“Bugs, Mr. Rico!”
No one thing killed it. Even as a casual, I had fun with it.
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Wildstar is a good litmus test to prove what makes a good PRODUCTION studio. Example:
Wildstar has some interesting AND NEW ideas for combat. That’s good!!! This is what a GOOD production studio does! Always be INNOVATING!
The problem is that although they were interesting and new… they weren’t any good. They weren’t FUN. And a GOOD production studio should not only have realized that, but FIXED it and made it right.
The problem I just described is what 99% of gaming companies are known for. And it’s what made Blizzard FAMOUS-- because they would take all the good, but poor-executed ideas, and DID THEM RIGHT!!!
But that was the Blizzrd of 15-20 years ago. Sad to say that Blizzard has come full circle to now function like any other game studio in the past: they have good ideas, that are just HORRIBLY implemented. RNG walls, endless grinds, a complete loss of what it means to have FUN playing the game.
But hey… they stock price is up! +sad face+
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The starting experience was insanely fun.
And it somehow wore kind of thin and exhausting as you reached level 20, IMO.
Chua 4ever.
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Part of what bugs me so much about modern Blizzard is how similar they are to Carbine Studios.
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Someone at one time posted everything you needed to do to get raid ready.
Attunements are also a thing so that provide another hurdle for people getting ready
Well… Carbine WAS a large handful of the Vanilla crew, yes?
Yeah it was , could have been the best instance content game ever.
Pvp was crap though 
WildStar was developed by about 20 former Blizzard employees who wanted to do Vanilla wow “right,” which basically amounted to implementing the stuff that WoW ended up moving away from like 40 man raids.
They all left Blizzard right after Vanilla launched. Clearly WoW was no worse off for their absence haha.
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It was fun, they had a lot of cool concepts that I liked and it was a futuristic. The Housing system was one of the best I’ve seen. The combat mechanics was a little hard to get use to but once you got it down it was awesome.
Dungeons were great. However, I never went far enough into end game because I was to invested into other games. I was sad to see it go 
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Yeah I remember a blurb from them when Wildstar was in pre-pre-pre alpha, basically a mission-statement of sorts saying words to the effect of how what the MMO genre needed was more 40man style raids.
The game was still 2-5 years away from release at that point, and I was already laughing out loud at how OBVIOUS it was the game was going to fail.
Like how internet cafes in the late 90s thought people would be willing to play $10/min for internet… as long as the coffee was good. wtf are you thinking??
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Wildstar was actually a really fun game with a metric ton of character. There’s a video online that explains why it was closed down but I honestly loved having it as a backup to WoW.
DataScape (what started off as 40 man until nobody played it) actually was a great raid from an encounter design standpoint. It was fun, the mechanics were well designed, and the theme was unique. The refusal to change it from 40 man to 20 man like they should have is really what ruined it.
Even better, it funneled in from a 20 man raid… so what ended up happening was guilds would clear Genetic Archives, and then find their members poached by guilds who were trying to form 40 man teams for DataScape once they had completed the attunement to enter. This would prevent the poachees from going into DataScape so they’d go back and get more people through Genetic Archives. As this was happening, people would leave those guilds because they wanted to see the next raid, not reclear something for the hundredth time.
Basically, the systems tacked on before the second raid ended up killing the guilds trying to do the first raid. Once those guilds went defunct there was no longer a pipeline for the second raid and that fizzled out too, because people who were already doing DataScape had no interest in going back to farm people through Genetic Archives themselves.
All the while Carbine was more or less going “suck it up Cupcakes we are perfect and this is our perfect design, you’ll keep playing and paying and you’ll like it!”
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OK that’s the dumbest thing I’ve read in a very long time. 
Player Housing was one of the few things they did right.
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Said another way: It was designed for 1%ers. When it comes to those kinds of HARDCORE players, even 1% might be a high number.
Except that when you only appeal to 1% of gamers, your company goes bankrupt.
A certain political party appeal to the 1% that have all the money: THAT MAKES SENSE.
Appealing to 1% of any general audience is not really a good business model.
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It was designed by 1%ers who didn’t even want feedback from other 1%ers. Even the guilds who were successfully poaching into Datascape were saying how bad it was and getting told they were wrong by the developers.
Man, reminds me of something that’s happening in Shadowlands Beta right now…
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If it was good, people would have played it and it wouldn’t have shut down?
It got shut down because the studio pissed off the publisher by borderline stealing the publisher’s money.
When the studio got shut down, WildStar got taken out with it.
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