PAX Hands-on: WildStar

Ready to talk about the other world you checked out, Med?

Indeed. While I may not have been able to try out Tyria due to someone pulling rank, I did have one other world I was interested in. The week before we left for PAX I heard reports of a new potential world to investigate.


So what's the name of this place?

Well, the world is called Nexus, but all of the information I found was labeled WildStar. A codename perhaps, because honestly who would name a planet WildStar? Name aside I looked for information about this new world. The main feature was the trailer included below, but they gave a few details about the world itself.

Guessing man-eating plant dragons and hordes of robots weren't in the travel brochure

I'll discuss the world when I get into my demonstration, but suffice it to say I was intrigued and put it on my list of places to check out on our trip. Like your Tyria expedition, mine was also 40 minutes so I actually had time to work. It's still early, so the only race/class combinations available were those shown in the trailer: the Granok Warrior, the Human Spellslinger, and the Aurin Esper. I chose the Esper and began exploring Nexus.


*chuckle*

What's so funny?


Oh nothing, just the idea of you running around as a bunny girl. For some reason that's amusing.

Sigh, if I could've chosen male, I would have. I thought about trying the Warrior, but I was actually talking to someone working at the show and when I asked for a recommendation, he suggested the Esper. I believe he said he was the lead combat designer or something like that, so I assumed he knew what he was talking about. Nice fellow by the way - he was pretty much talking to me the entire time I was waiting for my turn and he answered quite a few of my questions.


The demo began with me in the middle of a crashed spaceship. Before you say anything, no I didn't cause said crash; it was like that when I got there. I was resuscitated by someone else on the ship, then sent off to begin the normal adventurer process of running items around and killing the indigenous population for quest givers. There was one small difference in that though and that would be the path I chose.


You mean your class?

No, that's separate. In addition to choosing a race and class, you also have to choose a path. Basically a path is somewhat of a supplemental way of gaining experience and treasure. You still have the normal quests that everyone does and there's always monsters and the like around to slaughter, but you can tailor it a bit to reward you for how you would prefer to work.


The four path options are Soldier, Explorer, Scientist, and Settler. At the demo only Soldier and Explorer were active, so I don't have first-hand experience with the latter two though I have seen reports of how those are supposed to work. Starting from the top though, Soldier is pretty self-explanatory: you like to kill things. The Soldier path will support this by giving you the opportunity to prove yourself in combat. Everyone has some opportunity to do this: there were experience bonuses for kill chains and some pseudo-quests popped into my log while I was working that said, "Hey, you're good at killing these monsters.  Think you can kill another eight in two minutes?" The Soldier however can take this one step further. At certain points he can basically drop a challenge flag and waves of monsters will come towards him. If he survives the waves, he'll then have to fight a mini-boss of sorts and should the Soldier survive that, he'll be rewarded.


I chose the Explorer path since Scientist wasn't available. I'm not normally the explorer of the group (that's more Lokaja and Daikaja's preference), but I enjoyed myself with the few explorer missions I was able to accomplish. Basically you'll be running around and every so often you'll receive a call over your radio asking you to place a beacon somewhere or investigate an anomaly. When you go to the spot on the map where the quest is marked, you'll see some sort of environmental obstacle.


The first one I found was a mountain with periodic landslides that I had to either dodge by hiding behind rocks or I had to time my double-jumps to leap over the waves of snow. For the second one I ran into what looked like a sheer cliff face, but when I inspected it further I found a secret path that led to the top of the rock where I could place the beacon. Finally the third one had me following a strange energy signature. When I reached the first spot where the floating energy ball had been sitting, I was infused with power that allowed me to leap to great heights which allowed me to follow the energy ball up to the top of the rock spire it had flown up to. In each of these cases, I received treasure and experience for doing something that many of us would've done on our own simply out of curiosity or boredom.


Yeah, I remember my old wall-walking days back in Vanilla when I had nothing to do in-between raids other than sell Lionheart Helms and Stronghold Gauntlets.

The other two paths are similar from what I've been told. Scientist examines things out in the field and they can unlock bonuses like extra damage against monsters or finding items in the environment to heal their party members. They also find out more about the world itself since the path is all about digging in for more information. Settlers are a bit more social - you get tasks like using an item to buff nearby people or to fix something that's broken in a settlement. I still believe I'll be going with Scientist when I get another chance to work with this, though I did have fun with the few Explorer missions I was able to work on. Would've actually liked to finish the last couple I found, but I had priorities.


Not enough time to do all the quests?

For more than one reason. Back to my demo though. Combat was somewhat of a mix between what we're used to in Azeroth with a little from Tyria. The Esper was a caster class like I'm used to, but it had combo points and finishers like rogues. The nice part about the combo points though was that pretty much every ability that wasn't a finisher generated combo points, so you didn't feel like using heals or self-shields was a waste of a GCD. There was a bit more standing around than in Tyria since my main combo point building attack had a cast time, but it was significantly more mobile than Azeroth due to the dodge mechanic. It operates similar to how the Tyria dodge works, but it had an additional bonus. Remember how I said there was an experience bonus for kill streaks? There's more bonuses like that and not all of them were limited to experience. If an enemy was charging up for a big attack (for example, the yetis had a cold breath attack you didn't want to be hit by), you could dodge the attack completely. When you did this, the enemy would be vulnerable for a few seconds and you could do bonus damage to him during that short window. This worked two ways though: if you didn't dodge that attack, it would probably knock you prone and it would be you that suffered all that extra damage.

Since I couldn't really play and film at the same time, watch TotalBiscuit's video

All in all I probably did a bit more stationary work than your druid friend that was trying the Warrior, but it was probably something like 50-50 and most of the movement was me dodging. A nice change of pace from the raids we've seen where it's "stand still until this happens, then run to the other side of the room and stand still until the next movement trigger".


Sounds pretty good so far. Shame you didn't have enough time to do everything though.

Depends on how you look at it.


I thought you said you couldn't finish the Explorer missions.

Yes, but those were side missions. There was a main storyline through the bulk of the missions and that's what I focused my time on.


Story was that good?

It was good, but it was less because of that and more because of what the people at the demo said.


Which was?

Well someone at the booth mentioned extra swag, so I asked that combat dev I'd been talking to about it. He said that everyone got a shirt, but that if you were able to finish the demo before the timer expired, you'd get something extra. I took that as a challenge.


Were you successful?

What do you think?

The closest we're ever going to get to "beating" a MMO

Back from PAX: Guild Wars 2

Well, that was a fun trip and we finally got to try some Tyrian combat.

Correction: you got to try Tyrian combat. I got to do the rest of the work since there was a bit of a line and you called 'dibs' on going first.

Oh come on, that's not fair! We were both at PAX to check out some possibilities for places to move after we leave Azeroth. We had to hit everything we could, so it just made sense to split up the tasks and not have both of us trying the same thing at the same time. It would've been nice if you could've had a little hands-on time, but unfortunately it felt like every other adventurer in Azeroth was in line with me there.

I would have an easier time believing the sincerity of your words if not for your attitude after you finished trying it out. The sight of a giddy Tauren gushing over combat techniques and dodging is not a pretty one.

What? I had fun. It's important to enjoy one's work after all and I was certainly enjoying my time in Tyria.

I take it that means it was everything we've been hoping for?

Well, I wasn't able to try everything I wanted since I only had about 40 minutes before I got sent back, but what I was able to try was great. I chose to go in as a Charr warrior for obvious reasons. In that 40 minutes, I got to help fight back a ghost that possessed a giant statue (at level 1 no less!), help out at a forge and a junkyard by gathering tools and defending it from invaders, and help out at this lake thing by slaying giant lizards. There was also some giant thing that hurt like a truck that I took down with the help of some other adventurers wandering about. The last eight minutes or so centered around myself and a group of three or four other adventurers, all below level 4, trying to push our way into a cavern filled with fire turrets and level 6 Flame Legion Charr. It didn't end up going in our favor, but we managed to hold our own for quite a while.

Sounds thrilling. What about the weapons themselves? How did the new mechanics you mentioned work out?

They felt great. Switching weapons on the fly was quick and learning new techniques went fairly quickly. I think it was something like three or four minutes with my starter sword skill until I learned my second one and maybe six or seven for the next one. I didn't test the fourth and fifth techniques because I was trying other weapons, particularly the rifle. It's still not entirely natural to me to fight at ranged, but I was starting to get the hang of it during our epic struggle to enter the cavern.

Dodging is going to take some getting used to. It's easy enough to do, but you can only dodge so often until you need to let your energy regenerate. It's fairly quick, but it does mean that you need to pick those moments when you need to move.

Since you mentioned swapping weapons, did you get the chance to look at equipment?

Indeed and compared to what we've been working with all these years in Azeroth, it'll be a nice change of pace. You've got four attributes to work with: Power makes all of your attacks hit harder, Precision increases your chance of getting a critical hit, Toughness reduces the damage you take from physical and magical attacks, and Vitality gives you more health. No haste or hit rating to cap, no dodge or parry to balance against one another - just four numbers to work with.

There were upgrade slots in most of the equipment I found, but I didn't have anything to put there so I can't give a first-hand impression, but I don't believe anything's changed since last week's crafting post so that should still be valid. I also didn't have any procs to play with, but since I was in the Charr starting area, that's to be expected. An associate of mine got the chance to try an Asura engineer in one of the later zones, so I might ask him if he can write something up when he's not busy.

Really? An Asura? He seriously chose one of those overglorified technomages over the Charr, the proven masters of engineering and war machines?

I know, I know, it's weird but it's what he wanted to try out. I certainly wasn't going to follow him in his madness, but to each their own. Now lemme think if I've forgotten anything...

Oh yeah! All those public quests I was working on? Pretty much every time I did something to further the goal, whether it was killing Flame Legion or just gathering tools for the forge, I earned some Karma. Now we already knew that there was going to be a currency for the events, but I didn't realize it was the same currency. I got quite a bit of karma from doing that event and the one with the lizards, then found my way over to the karma vendor by the forge. There was also one out in the fields that sold some armor I would've liked, but the one by the forge had all of the different weapons and honestly that was more important to me. I had to try out the rifle after all.

I think that's about everything from my short excursion into Tyria. Definitely looking forward to spending some more time there though. I did find a few other contenders that we'll be considering though, but those are for a later post. You have any luck, Med?

Indeed I did. While I may not have been able to try engineering in Tyria, I was able to get some time in with two other worlds that suited my tastes for all things technological.

Sounds good. We'll save those for next time since we've already run a bit long. Well, that and nobody's gonna want to ready about two different worlds in the same post. You want to tease people with something before we head out?

I believe I may have something to pique their interest until next time: