WildStar will launch this year, developer Carbine Studios and publisher NCsoft announced today, and the developers continued to discuss the ways in which they're attempting to improve on what they see as faults with the MMO genre.
NCsoft originally announced WildStar was in development on Windows PC in August 2011.
With WildStar, said executive producer Jeremy Gaffney, "We are setting out to solve some things that have dissatisfied us as gamers with many MMOs at release." In Carbine's case, those complaints center on elements such as the typical MMO level grind, repetitive combat and poorly planned endgame content.
Carbine is attempting to make the world of WildStar a more varied place than other MMOs offer. Unique situations like low gravity or robots destroying the ground will provide players with challenging, interesting environments that don't just look different, but feel different when it comes to traversing them and fighting in them.
Combat in WildStar will be skill-based, said Carbine, and each enemy will offer a different type of threat; some will even engage with the environment to mix it up further. "We feel like if you’re getting bored while you're working your way to the top tier of the game, we're not doing our jobs," Gaffney said.
Carbine's complaints center on the typical MMO level grind, repetitive combat and poorly planned endgame content
And Carbine promised that once players hit the level cap in WildStar — a section the studio calls the Elder Game — they'll have some "radical" new systems to interact with and "an interesting set of innovative content." Solo players will be given frequent updates with new story content aside from typical quests. Co-op players will enjoy "epically hard raids" and fantastic rewards for those battles, and to make them more dynamic, Carbine has developed technology that allows the studio to alter the game world's terrain.
In addition to changing up the look and feel of the world, the tech gives players the opportunity to join together and create their own battlefields called Warplots, areas in which PvP fans can begin "creating truly epic persistent fortresses to take to war."
Carbine and NCsoft will run a closed beta "in the upcoming months," and will allow interested parties to get their hands on the game at PAX East in March. The studio also released three new videos today. The first introduces the Exiles faction, and the other two focus on the Soldier and Explorer paths. You can watch them below.
