[Wildstar] Wildstar Impressions

No characters = you see a space goat

Over the past year or so I’ve seen Wildstar mentioned a lot.  and of course in the past month or so the hype has gone way up.  Nothing about it really grabbed me and made me think that I’d want to play it, but with the open beta beginning this past weekend, I decided I’d give it a shot and hope to be pleasantly surprised.

Impressive tower, I thought

TL;DR – it was fine, but I’ve already uninstalled it and don’t plan to pick it up.

The good:

• Nice water effects when you swim.
• Responsive controls

The Bad:

• 800 gajillion stats with nothing in the tutorial to explain what they do for you and why you’d want them.
• The typical “you get 3 pieces of gear and unlock the ability to wear more slots as you level up” thing.  I really hate that trope.  I much prefer the trope that goes “You have X inventory slots.  If you can find the pieces for it (like from that vendor over there. . . ) you can fill them.

Nice wake as you swim

The Ugly:

• The floaty, bouncy and slow movement
• The art style doesn’t do it for me, and is WAY too visually busy
• The character models are… odd.  I typically play female avatars in any mmo, but these female ones were so awful I went with a male model instead so as to not be creeped out by the anorexia.

Faceless Mechari

I created a Mechari Engineer since they sounded a bit like a controller with a heavy emphasis on ranged AE damage and “support” abilities, and I like that kind of stuff.  And overall, yeah, I rather liked the class and the progression of the abilities that I got — even got a nice robot pet to tank for me while I do that AE damage and it was decent at holding aggro off of me.

My own combat telegraph so I know where I’m aiming

Combat-wise, the game’s quite solid, and since MMO’s thrive on combat, if that were the only factor I’m sure I’d be singing the praises of the game to high heaven.  But when not in combat while running I felt like I was moving through molasses.  Yeah, there’s a sprint button but you can only use it for about 5 seconds before you’re out of stamina or whatever they call the resource that sprint uses.  Add in that the animation was a kind of zig-zag bounce and it felt like I was wasting motion laterally when I wanted to move forward.

Damn, that’s a lot of background clutter. Most of it’s animated so it makes it that much busier.

Add in that the stylized cartoony graphics and the extremely busy background visual clutter, the fact that I couldn’t understand my stats and the tooltips for them didn’t say anything other than “this gives you 0.37% increase” which wasn’t really helpful, and well…. I’m pretty invested in ESO and will be back to TSW once Tokyo is released too, so Wildstar would need to be “something special” for me to consider switching to it, and… it was okay, but  to my sensibilities it was “nothing special” so… there’s my “impression of Wildstar.”