Carbine Studios’ WildStar is gaining more and more steam in the hearts and minds of expectant MMO gamers as it drives through Closed Beta on its way to launching later this year. Mixing the traditions of theme-park MMOs with the sensibilities of play-how-you want sandbox MMOs, WildStar seems like it’s poised to please a lot of gamers when it finally does launch. That is, if they can make good on all of the design principles and promises they hold so dearly... because lordy, if they do pull it all off? Carbine’s flagship title is going to be a world rife with fun for just about every MMO player out there. We caught up with Executive Producer Jeremy Gaffney to find out how Closed Beta 1 has gone, and what’s coming up in Closed Beta 2 and beyond.
WHAT’D WE DO IN CBT1?
Jeremy began by telling us all how their first Closed Beta phase went. They had two thousand people invited to the test, running around the game world alongside the friends and family testers for the first time. Testers only had access to the Exile ("Good Guys") races, with three early zones opened up, and a level cap of 22.
The goal of this test from a gameplay standpoint was to see if the game stuck with people, if the newbie experience was compelling. The resounding answer was YES, and that combat was hitting all the right notes. The housing system was also in-game during this stage, and people responded very well to how in depth you can design them, how much freedom you had to make big or small houses, and how "housing" doesn't just mean a place to store your stuff, but also a place to play and entertain your friends. But more on that later.
They also had some PVP in the game, and the team organized fights against the players... Jeremy was quick to admit that the devs were destroyed by the players. Apparently, they picked the right testers. They'll be raising the cap to 30 in the nest test, and more PVP options will be available, but again... more on that in a moment!
In terms of tech, they really used this test to see how the servers would handle that many people at once. How optimized was the client in crowded areas, how was the performance over all? They even set up a live "Rapid Response Team" that met from week to week and day to day to recount the issues in beta and how to get them fixed.
One such bug? There was a wrong flag in the game data that had taxi drivers giving out gold instead of taking it from players. It got fixed quickly, but not before some guy repeated this process for five hours and earned a ton of free gold. Jeremy's not sure why this one guy would waste five hours collecting gold during the beta, but well... There you have it.
But what does all this mean for the next phase of beta? We are thrilled you asked, because Jeremy went off on a massive wall-o-words about just that. Prepare to be blinded by information.
ONWARD INTO CLOSED BETA 2
Like stated above, the CBT2 cap will be raised to 30, and the focus will be shifted from the Exiles to the "Bad" Dominion races. The Cassians, Mechari, and Draken will all be available to play. Four zones are also going to be open, including Auroria (a really cool zone with some giant alien bees, honey, rocket-packs and more), and the first cross-faction zone of Whitevale (a snowy region that’ll play host to some epic world PvP). They’re wiping the Exile characters and only enabling the Dominion, but this all leads into CBT3 about six weeks or so later, when both factions will be enabled and the first open-world PVP zone (Whitevale) will be opened up then as well.
A scene from Stormtalon’s Lair, the first dungeon in WildStar.
There will also be a new dungeon opened up. In CBT1, there was just Stormtalon: a level 17 newbie dungeon. But in CBT2, the Ruins of Kel Voreth are opened up, exploring the Osun race and more on the lore of Nexus and the Eldan themselves. Like all the dungeons in WildStar, it’s a changing and dynamic experience that’s different each time you go into the place. Hard content is for the groups, is the Carbine philosophy. They want the solo and open world game to be approachable by just about anyone, but they have made a firm decision for group and raid content to be the toughest content in the game. These first dungeons, while for lower levels, reflect that.
There’s also going to be the first Battleground in-game: Smash and Grab. Let me just pull the info from the patch notes:
“The objective of the Battleground is to capture 5 Moodie Masks at your faction’s base camp. At the start of the match, a Moodie Mask will spawn in a random location at the center of the map. You must take the mask to your camp’s totem to capture it. Once captured, another mask will spawn in the center after a short delay. Protect your captured masks! The enemy team can steal a mask from your camp.
A total of 3 masks can be in play at any one time (a neutral mask, a stolen Exile mask, and a stolen Dominion mask). If a mask is dropped, players have 30 seconds to pick it up before it is either recovered (if it is a stolen mask, see the below note) or despawned (neutral mask). If a neutral mask is despawned due to a drop, it will respawn in the center (after a short delay). Once a stolen mask is dropped, the recovering team only needs to protect the mask from being picked up. After the drop timer has expired, the mask is teleported back to the camp totem.”
It’s a nice blend of both capture the flag, and defend and hold. With lots of different paths, levels of terrain, and so forth to make things interesting. The first team to five masks wins, and the team-size is 10v10. What’s important to note about Battlegrounds, and other content in the game, is the Rallying System. If you’re level 3, or anything below the level 30 cap, you’ll be rallied up to level 30 and given stats, and even gear appropriate for that level for the PVP match. It sounds similar to Guild Wars 2’s system. Your gear won’t be on par exactly with a level 30 player if you’re level 3, but it’ll be close enough to keep you competitive. And this mechanic is also usable in dungeons. Discover Kel Voreth at 15, but don’t want to wait until 20 to do it? Rally up! It’ll be tougher for you, but you can at least do the thing.
But Rallying isn’t the only cool feature that’s designed to help players keep playing together in WildStar. Like any good game, it will have a Mentoring as well. You can mentor down to your friends’ level at any time to join them, get XP, and appropriate rewards. Old content is never obsolete this way, and unlike ArenaNet’s system, you can choose when to do it, much more like the old CoH system, or even Rift’s current one, in this way. If you want to just power your friends through a dungeon? Go for it, but the rewards for all of you will be hampered. If you do it with Mentoring turned on, everyone can get rewards, but it’ll obviously be harder.
Now, let’s talk for a minute about attributes and Attribute Milestones. Stats are big deal in any RPG or MMORPG, but they’re often too simple or too complex, without really giving players much choose beyond “what kind of gear do I want”. Carbine’s designed a system that has your character gaining extra boosts in attributes, and even extra skills that change the gameplay of your character, simply by gaining enough of certain stats. Note that WildStar’s stats are named in a “WildStar-y” fashion: moxxy is stamina, grit is magic, brutality is strength, etc.
So let’s say you’re building a Warrior, and you’re stacking Brutality. If you hit a certain number in Brutality, maybe you get some boosts to secondary stats that compliment it: damage boosts, chance-to-hit, and so forth. But then there are the major milestones in your attributes, that might even give you a brand new skill to use in combat. Conversely, you might also see some great boosts and skills in other attributes, and it’ll be your choice as to how you build your character’s attributes and how it will affect your gameplay. A Warrior will always want Brutality, but maybe he can get some killer boosts and useful skills from stacking a little moxy too. It’s a min-maxer’s dream.
Crimson Isle is filled with plenty of places to explore and climb to.
Jeremy mentioned that even now, it’s fun to watch these early testers find a lot of their hidden content, called Discoveries. Little dungeons, shrines, buffs that attract monsters and give side-missions, and even little micro dungeons. There’s a lot of cool stuff in every zone that’s up to the player to explore and find. He mentioned again the Ore Worms that have a chance of spawning when you go to mine some ore. You kill it, you get to go inside its dead carcass and mine ore from its insides before it collapses in on you. The team assumes that players coming into WildStar have kind of seen it all at this point in their MMO career, so they throw as much variety and cool stuff at you as they can to ensure you’re entertained from your first step into Nexus until your last... and they hope you never take your last. But Jeremy said, along with the raids, Warplots, and more, they’ll be detailing their big plans for the elder-game in the coming months leading up to launch.
Another thing the Gaffer noted was that Houston will be opened up to players in CBT2 as well. Houston is what they’re calling their add-on and mod creation tool, and the team believes player mods are exactly the sort of thing an MMORPG should allow, because the games are all about community, and why not let that community help make the game better?
Speaking on the paths (WildStar’s sort of secondary classes that focus on killing, exploring, achieving, and so forth), Jeremy mentioned that Settlers seem to be a wildly popular path. They expected the settlers to love working on Infrastructure aspects: building towns, adding shops, and so forth. But what they didn’t expect was for people to love “Min-frastructure”: the act of keeping the cities and towns at full-tilt by turning on street lights, fixing broken fences, and signs, and so forth. It really taps into the OCD mentality of players, which spells my own doom in this game. The Scientist is another path that will be something for the completionist, as they have these sort of bingo chart of checklist full of things to research in each and every zone. Some are easy, and some are difficult, and achievers will fawn over them.
Illium is also making into this phase earlier than Jeremy and the team expected. The capital Dominion city, run by none other than Mr. Malvolio (see below). The entire city wasn’t supposed to be done, but rather just a “placeholder”, but the team came in while others were away at a preview event and did it in time for CBT2. Shows what you can do when your staff is passionate about a project. It reminded Jeremey of another feature they haven’t yet revealed (but he felt like doing so for us): HOUSING DUNGEONS.
Housing Dungeons are little things you can gain through various means to add to your housing plot. They can be solo or mini group dungeons, and are only accessible from your own private land. The team’s already designed eight, and more are coming before launch. They expect them to be a thing of pride for players to have on their plot.
Raidframes are also in testing internally, as the team preps to open up raids to the testers down the line. Raids will be dynamic experiences each week, and Jeremy wasn’t shy to say they’re designing raids for the raiders of the world. They feel like the Raider has been forgotten ever since WoW came out, and Carbine believes they can do the raid game better than anyone. To that end, the design and challenges of the raids will change weekly, and you’ll have guilds of all walks fighting it out to see who can beat it first, who can beat it fastest. One week, maybe only the elite guilds will tackle a Raid. But then the next, maybe a smaller more casual guild will have the right build and groups to get it done before anyone else. They don’t want people using walkthroughs on Youtube to beat their Raids, and the changes they’ll make to Raids each week, combined with the active nature of combat, will make sure of that. You won’t beat their dungeons by gaming the UI or following some set group build and rotation...you’ll actually have to be good at the game and work well with your teams.
Jumping over to Crafting, Jeremey talked a little bit about Coordinate Crafting and how it relates to cooking, which ties exploration into the act of finding and improving your recipes. Maybe you make a great sandwich. But then your crafting UI will let you know that you can make a better one if you find other ingredients, and it’ll act like a treasure map showing you a vague area where perhaps even better ingredients can be found... and it won’t be the same for everyone. Again, they do this because they don’t want you to just go to the internet and find a walkthrough. They want you to do it on your own, or at the very least get advice from others. But no “do A, then B, and succeed”.
The Architect, as another example, can make cool stuff for housing, quest nodes in the open world, hedge-mazes for housing plots, stuff for PVP Warplots, etc. But it’s not just decorative. Everything the Architect makes, or almost everything, is about active utilities for the game. It has to do stuff. Just like the mining with the Ore Worms, they want players actively playing the game, not watching the UI.
There will also be tons of new abilities for each class in this beta, as seen in the video on movement below. One thing Jeremy noted about the Stalker class specifically in PVP battlegrounds, is that they can’t just hide in stealth. What fun is that? So they made sure that the people spectating in Smash and Grab will throw beer cans at the stealthed Stalkers when they stay stealthed too long doing nothing. It’s like a Cleveland Browns game, I guess.
Warplots will be a diferrent story though. When the team’s ready to show them off fully, you’ll get a DevSpeak video, press demos, beta players, all of it. They’ll probably be put in around CBT3 or 4, five to twelve weeks from now. A Warplot, for those not in the know, is a giant flying fortress you design with your Warplot team. This team doesn’t necessarily have to be your guild, either. Think of it a like a guild specifically for Warplots. It’s a 40v40 PVP experience, and your team can have alternates for those times when it’s hard to have all forty online. Just the same, you can bring in “mercenary” players to fill out your team as needed. The whole thing levels up, gains weapons, facilities, buildings, and so forth that you add on it. Warplot battles will have you land your plot by another team’s (and they will be different from each other), in order to sort of raid the opposing fortress and loot it for resources and equipment. It’s construction, plus fighting, plus crafting, plus explosions and giant lasers all in one. Your Warplot will start small and grow bigger as your team gains more and more to add to it. As for how it will all work together? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
THE END... FOR NOW.
Jeremy ended our extremely informative chat by saying they’re adding a few thousand more people to CBT2. But they’ll also have a big stress test shortly after, with 15,000 more added for that test. After the test, anyone who logged in and was there to help break the servers will be added in slowly but surely to CBT2 and 3. As quickly as the team feels the servers can handle it.
WildStar is into information-spreading mode, folks. They’re building deep into beta, ramping up to launch. If this little gem was off your radar before, I sincerely hope it isn’t anymore. Unrevealed classes and races are still coming, as is information on the elder-game, Warplots, crafting, and more. Carbine hopes to make this the Summer of WildStar, and it might be working. Their flagship title, long in the making, seems like it could be a excellent blend of themepark traditions and sandbox experimentation. If everything they’re aiming to do hits the mark, WildStar could easily knock us all off our feet and in the best way possible.
WHAT’D WE DO IN CBT1?
Jeremy began by telling us all how their first Closed Beta phase went. They had two thousand people invited to the test, running around the game world alongside the friends and family testers for the first time. Testers only had access to the Exile ("Good Guys") races, with three early zones opened up, and a level cap of 22.
The goal of this test from a gameplay standpoint was to see if the game stuck with people, if the newbie experience was compelling. The resounding answer was YES, and that combat was hitting all the right notes. The housing system was also in-game during this stage, and people responded very well to how in depth you can design them, how much freedom you had to make big or small houses, and how "housing" doesn't just mean a place to store your stuff, but also a place to play and entertain your friends. But more on that later.
They also had some PVP in the game, and the team organized fights against the players... Jeremy was quick to admit that the devs were destroyed by the players. Apparently, they picked the right testers. They'll be raising the cap to 30 in the nest test, and more PVP options will be available, but again... more on that in a moment!
In terms of tech, they really used this test to see how the servers would handle that many people at once. How optimized was the client in crowded areas, how was the performance over all? They even set up a live "Rapid Response Team" that met from week to week and day to day to recount the issues in beta and how to get them fixed.
One such bug? There was a wrong flag in the game data that had taxi drivers giving out gold instead of taking it from players. It got fixed quickly, but not before some guy repeated this process for five hours and earned a ton of free gold. Jeremy's not sure why this one guy would waste five hours collecting gold during the beta, but well... There you have it.
But what does all this mean for the next phase of beta? We are thrilled you asked, because Jeremy went off on a massive wall-o-words about just that. Prepare to be blinded by information.
ONWARD INTO CLOSED BETA 2
Like stated above, the CBT2 cap will be raised to 30, and the focus will be shifted from the Exiles to the "Bad" Dominion races. The Cassians, Mechari, and Draken will all be available to play. Four zones are also going to be open, including Auroria (a really cool zone with some giant alien bees, honey, rocket-packs and more), and the first cross-faction zone of Whitevale (a snowy region that’ll play host to some epic world PvP). They’re wiping the Exile characters and only enabling the Dominion, but this all leads into CBT3 about six weeks or so later, when both factions will be enabled and the first open-world PVP zone (Whitevale) will be opened up then as well.
There will also be a new dungeon opened up. In CBT1, there was just Stormtalon: a level 17 newbie dungeon. But in CBT2, the Ruins of Kel Voreth are opened up, exploring the Osun race and more on the lore of Nexus and the Eldan themselves. Like all the dungeons in WildStar, it’s a changing and dynamic experience that’s different each time you go into the place. Hard content is for the groups, is the Carbine philosophy. They want the solo and open world game to be approachable by just about anyone, but they have made a firm decision for group and raid content to be the toughest content in the game. These first dungeons, while for lower levels, reflect that.
There’s also going to be the first Battleground in-game: Smash and Grab. Let me just pull the info from the patch notes:
“The objective of the Battleground is to capture 5 Moodie Masks at your faction’s base camp. At the start of the match, a Moodie Mask will spawn in a random location at the center of the map. You must take the mask to your camp’s totem to capture it. Once captured, another mask will spawn in the center after a short delay. Protect your captured masks! The enemy team can steal a mask from your camp.
A total of 3 masks can be in play at any one time (a neutral mask, a stolen Exile mask, and a stolen Dominion mask). If a mask is dropped, players have 30 seconds to pick it up before it is either recovered (if it is a stolen mask, see the below note) or despawned (neutral mask). If a neutral mask is despawned due to a drop, it will respawn in the center (after a short delay). Once a stolen mask is dropped, the recovering team only needs to protect the mask from being picked up. After the drop timer has expired, the mask is teleported back to the camp totem.”
It’s a nice blend of both capture the flag, and defend and hold. With lots of different paths, levels of terrain, and so forth to make things interesting. The first team to five masks wins, and the team-size is 10v10. What’s important to note about Battlegrounds, and other content in the game, is the Rallying System. If you’re level 3, or anything below the level 30 cap, you’ll be rallied up to level 30 and given stats, and even gear appropriate for that level for the PVP match. It sounds similar to Guild Wars 2’s system. Your gear won’t be on par exactly with a level 30 player if you’re level 3, but it’ll be close enough to keep you competitive. And this mechanic is also usable in dungeons. Discover Kel Voreth at 15, but don’t want to wait until 20 to do it? Rally up! It’ll be tougher for you, but you can at least do the thing.
But Rallying isn’t the only cool feature that’s designed to help players keep playing together in WildStar. Like any good game, it will have a Mentoring as well. You can mentor down to your friends’ level at any time to join them, get XP, and appropriate rewards. Old content is never obsolete this way, and unlike ArenaNet’s system, you can choose when to do it, much more like the old CoH system, or even Rift’s current one, in this way. If you want to just power your friends through a dungeon? Go for it, but the rewards for all of you will be hampered. If you do it with Mentoring turned on, everyone can get rewards, but it’ll obviously be harder.
Now, let’s talk for a minute about attributes and Attribute Milestones. Stats are big deal in any RPG or MMORPG, but they’re often too simple or too complex, without really giving players much choose beyond “what kind of gear do I want”. Carbine’s designed a system that has your character gaining extra boosts in attributes, and even extra skills that change the gameplay of your character, simply by gaining enough of certain stats. Note that WildStar’s stats are named in a “WildStar-y” fashion: moxxy is stamina, grit is magic, brutality is strength, etc.
So let’s say you’re building a Warrior, and you’re stacking Brutality. If you hit a certain number in Brutality, maybe you get some boosts to secondary stats that compliment it: damage boosts, chance-to-hit, and so forth. But then there are the major milestones in your attributes, that might even give you a brand new skill to use in combat. Conversely, you might also see some great boosts and skills in other attributes, and it’ll be your choice as to how you build your character’s attributes and how it will affect your gameplay. A Warrior will always want Brutality, but maybe he can get some killer boosts and useful skills from stacking a little moxy too. It’s a min-maxer’s dream.
Jeremy mentioned that even now, it’s fun to watch these early testers find a lot of their hidden content, called Discoveries. Little dungeons, shrines, buffs that attract monsters and give side-missions, and even little micro dungeons. There’s a lot of cool stuff in every zone that’s up to the player to explore and find. He mentioned again the Ore Worms that have a chance of spawning when you go to mine some ore. You kill it, you get to go inside its dead carcass and mine ore from its insides before it collapses in on you. The team assumes that players coming into WildStar have kind of seen it all at this point in their MMO career, so they throw as much variety and cool stuff at you as they can to ensure you’re entertained from your first step into Nexus until your last... and they hope you never take your last. But Jeremy said, along with the raids, Warplots, and more, they’ll be detailing their big plans for the elder-game in the coming months leading up to launch.
Another thing the Gaffer noted was that Houston will be opened up to players in CBT2 as well. Houston is what they’re calling their add-on and mod creation tool, and the team believes player mods are exactly the sort of thing an MMORPG should allow, because the games are all about community, and why not let that community help make the game better?
Speaking on the paths (WildStar’s sort of secondary classes that focus on killing, exploring, achieving, and so forth), Jeremy mentioned that Settlers seem to be a wildly popular path. They expected the settlers to love working on Infrastructure aspects: building towns, adding shops, and so forth. But what they didn’t expect was for people to love “Min-frastructure”: the act of keeping the cities and towns at full-tilt by turning on street lights, fixing broken fences, and signs, and so forth. It really taps into the OCD mentality of players, which spells my own doom in this game. The Scientist is another path that will be something for the completionist, as they have these sort of bingo chart of checklist full of things to research in each and every zone. Some are easy, and some are difficult, and achievers will fawn over them.
Illium is also making into this phase earlier than Jeremy and the team expected. The capital Dominion city, run by none other than Mr. Malvolio (see below). The entire city wasn’t supposed to be done, but rather just a “placeholder”, but the team came in while others were away at a preview event and did it in time for CBT2. Shows what you can do when your staff is passionate about a project. It reminded Jeremey of another feature they haven’t yet revealed (but he felt like doing so for us): HOUSING DUNGEONS.
Housing Dungeons are little things you can gain through various means to add to your housing plot. They can be solo or mini group dungeons, and are only accessible from your own private land. The team’s already designed eight, and more are coming before launch. They expect them to be a thing of pride for players to have on their plot.
Raidframes are also in testing internally, as the team preps to open up raids to the testers down the line. Raids will be dynamic experiences each week, and Jeremy wasn’t shy to say they’re designing raids for the raiders of the world. They feel like the Raider has been forgotten ever since WoW came out, and Carbine believes they can do the raid game better than anyone. To that end, the design and challenges of the raids will change weekly, and you’ll have guilds of all walks fighting it out to see who can beat it first, who can beat it fastest. One week, maybe only the elite guilds will tackle a Raid. But then the next, maybe a smaller more casual guild will have the right build and groups to get it done before anyone else. They don’t want people using walkthroughs on Youtube to beat their Raids, and the changes they’ll make to Raids each week, combined with the active nature of combat, will make sure of that. You won’t beat their dungeons by gaming the UI or following some set group build and rotation...you’ll actually have to be good at the game and work well with your teams.
Jumping over to Crafting, Jeremey talked a little bit about Coordinate Crafting and how it relates to cooking, which ties exploration into the act of finding and improving your recipes. Maybe you make a great sandwich. But then your crafting UI will let you know that you can make a better one if you find other ingredients, and it’ll act like a treasure map showing you a vague area where perhaps even better ingredients can be found... and it won’t be the same for everyone. Again, they do this because they don’t want you to just go to the internet and find a walkthrough. They want you to do it on your own, or at the very least get advice from others. But no “do A, then B, and succeed”.
The Architect, as another example, can make cool stuff for housing, quest nodes in the open world, hedge-mazes for housing plots, stuff for PVP Warplots, etc. But it’s not just decorative. Everything the Architect makes, or almost everything, is about active utilities for the game. It has to do stuff. Just like the mining with the Ore Worms, they want players actively playing the game, not watching the UI.
There will also be tons of new abilities for each class in this beta, as seen in the video on movement below. One thing Jeremy noted about the Stalker class specifically in PVP battlegrounds, is that they can’t just hide in stealth. What fun is that? So they made sure that the people spectating in Smash and Grab will throw beer cans at the stealthed Stalkers when they stay stealthed too long doing nothing. It’s like a Cleveland Browns game, I guess.
Warplots will be a diferrent story though. When the team’s ready to show them off fully, you’ll get a DevSpeak video, press demos, beta players, all of it. They’ll probably be put in around CBT3 or 4, five to twelve weeks from now. A Warplot, for those not in the know, is a giant flying fortress you design with your Warplot team. This team doesn’t necessarily have to be your guild, either. Think of it a like a guild specifically for Warplots. It’s a 40v40 PVP experience, and your team can have alternates for those times when it’s hard to have all forty online. Just the same, you can bring in “mercenary” players to fill out your team as needed. The whole thing levels up, gains weapons, facilities, buildings, and so forth that you add on it. Warplot battles will have you land your plot by another team’s (and they will be different from each other), in order to sort of raid the opposing fortress and loot it for resources and equipment. It’s construction, plus fighting, plus crafting, plus explosions and giant lasers all in one. Your Warplot will start small and grow bigger as your team gains more and more to add to it. As for how it will all work together? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
THE END... FOR NOW.
Jeremy ended our extremely informative chat by saying they’re adding a few thousand more people to CBT2. But they’ll also have a big stress test shortly after, with 15,000 more added for that test. After the test, anyone who logged in and was there to help break the servers will be added in slowly but surely to CBT2 and 3. As quickly as the team feels the servers can handle it.
WildStar is into information-spreading mode, folks. They’re building deep into beta, ramping up to launch. If this little gem was off your radar before, I sincerely hope it isn’t anymore. Unrevealed classes and races are still coming, as is information on the elder-game, Warplots, crafting, and more. Carbine hopes to make this the Summer of WildStar, and it might be working. Their flagship title, long in the making, seems like it could be a excellent blend of themepark traditions and sandbox experimentation. If everything they’re aiming to do hits the mark, WildStar could easily knock us all off our feet and in the best way possible.