Wildstar is still my favorite MMO that I’ve ever played, but the game had severe issues all the way into its bones.
Optimization yas nonexistent. The game stuttered to a halt in cities at launch. Even years later, when it went F2P and got a huge boost in population, I had friends who literally couldnt get the game above 20fps with brand new gaming pcs.
Terrible marketing campaign. They basically told people of you werent hardcore you werent ****. This obviously alienates a lot of people, so they were basically creating put of thin air a fairly large portion of people who wanted to see the game fail and die before ot ever even launched. Public perception of a new MMO is incredibly important.
Conflicting design. The combat was amazing, but it was extremely punishing. You had to aim all of your abilities, but there was also a hit rating stat, so even if you lined up a shot perfectly, you could still miss. This is one example of a pattern of schizophrenic design throughout the game.
Terrible management. Wildstar was breaking even and even turning a profit during its content drops, but the studio heads were misappropriating funds, which in the end was what did them in.
Wildstar was a fantastic 7/10 that did some things incredibly well, and I miss it still.
But that was the entire sell. It was basically being sold has “Are you a WoW player who hates WotLK because of ‘welfare epikz’ and ‘wrath babies’? Come over to WS, where we bring the ‘hard’ back into the ‘core’!!!”. That WAS their core sell, it was their core design motivation. Without that idea that they were “WoW for hardcore players” sell, they would have just been another MMO. Yes, it was a dumb marketing campaign, but it was a dumb idea to begin with – that is, the whole idea of building an ultra-hardcore MMO was a dumb idea – once that idea was in place, it was only natural to market it that way, because that’s what it was.
Wildstar is also a reminder that you can’t cure the issues non-hardcore players have with a game by throwing housing at them (as much as some people like to claim).
although I did see a variety show on Netflix called “love,s-x, and robots” that had a show call Suits that showed what looked like the planet Nexus in the background
That’s just straight up bad. I don’t mind levels in games like that, but an entire zone of nothing but that, yeah no.
That’s not bad.
Based on this list, personally? Sounds meh tier at best.
Pretty much this. If FFXIV wasn’t good, WoW players becoming more and more dissatisfied with wow would mean nothing as players would just flock to a different MMO.
I mean, sure Asmongold brought some people to FFXIV, that’s just a fact, but to claim that FFXIV’s current popularity is only due to Asmongold is olympic levels of stretching at best.
as a FFXIV player I kind of wish they’d stop making FFXIV threads here. Or at least not so many at a time. Annoying people is not how you get people to try something.
Wildstar failed for exactly the reason that WoW is failing now. Very few players look to MMOs out of a desire to participate in e-sports. The FFXIV devs understand that. The current WoW devs don’t get that, and the Wildstar devs didn’t either.
