Gaming & Culture —

Impressions: WildStar revels in its old-school MMORPG rigidity

Classic design is better off for being unforgivingly difficult.

Don't expect battles like this one to be a cakewalk like in other MMORPGs.
WildStar does not care about your genre-centric whining. You know the stuff. “Oh, massively multiplayer role-playing games are just so poorly designed. They’re all about grinding and raiding and I can’t just sit down and play them for 20 minutes a week.” That whining.

For a decade since the explosively popular release of World Of Warcraft, MMORPGs have acted like all these complaints are valid. It’s been a nearly straight line from there. Every rigid class distinction has been blurred, every tough raid has been made easier for smaller groups of people, every group quest can now be done solo.

WildStar says “screw that.” Or, more politely, WildStar would like to suggest that it was those rigid boundaries, the parts of the games that were supposed to be “inaccessible,” that actually made the old MMORPGs great. Year after year, gamers and critics have declared that the genre needs to be easier for them to get into. WildStar says that the genre is failing in part because developers are listening to that line of thought. These games work because they’re so restrictive, WildStar proudly declares. Catering to fans demanding convenience has led developers to pursue a portion of the market that’s unlikely to stay at the expense of alienating diehard fans.

WildStar isn’t wrong. It's certainly true in market terms that there are large numbers of fans who miss the rigidity of games like World Of Warcraft and Everquest. It may be true in qualitative terms as well—the repeated failure of MMORPGs to capture WoW’s early magic could be easily explained as an unwillingness for these follow-ups to be as rigid and difficult as they should be.

Genre tropes, but moreso

Everything in WildStar is a cartoonish exaggeration of the tropes of the old-school MMORPG genre. It’s the same single-character, cooldown-based combat; the same five-person dungeons; the same quests to kill a dozen enemies. You’ve probably already decided if you love or hate that system. But every aspect of the formula gets some form of exaggeration.

In addition to quests to kill a handful of certain enemy types, WildStar also offers pop-up “Challenges” to slaughter as many baddies as possible in five minutes. Each character class has a distinct combat method and rhythm, adding layers of complexity to every fight. Most MMORPGs have run away from requiring group quests in normal player zones, but WildStar adds half a dozen to each.

And then there’s this beautiful/hideous beast of a raiding progression quest chain. If you see that and think, “That’s horribly inaccessible game design,” WildStar may not be for you. If you see that and think, “Man, I miss being the first in my guild to be prepared for Magtheridon’s Lair before they let all the rabble in,” WildStar wants you feel at home.

In my first five-person dungeon, Stormtalon’s Lair, I went through about as much adversity and challenge as my first 25-person raid in the World Of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade days. Every group of regular enemies was enough of a challenge to require my full attention. Every boss fight required an introduction from an expert, a few learning attempts, a few tweaks, and a few more attempts before defeating it. There were breaks to repair equipment that grew increasingly busted from all the failures. There were multiple replacement players as people ran out of time. In the end, we'd find success, but only after multiple painful failures that made something that could have taken 45 minutes end up taking two and a half hours.

And this kind of difficulty is what WildStar actually wants. It wants to force players to have to work for everything. In this sense, it absolutely understands, more than almost every other recent MMORPG (except perhaps Final Fantasy XIV), that these games are at their best when they force players to work hard for their rewards. In a sense, they’re simulators of puritan capitalist ideals: work hard, don’t mess up, and you’ll be rewarded. WildStar firmly believes that the harder the work, the more rewarding the game—and it’s tougher than its peers in most ways.

Mature players, immature world

The amazing thing about this design is that everyone in my groups understood that this is just how dungeons in WildStar work—and this is a good way for them to work. Nobody got mad about the constant wipes and ruined groups; every new player understood that this was a process.

Even outside my group during two weeks of play, the WildStar playerbase has been generally mature and helpful. This maturity parallels WildStar’s position within the MMORPG genre. Early experimental games like The Realm and Ultima Online were the genre’s infancy, while Everquest and World Of Warcraft brought it into adulthood. The sign of maturity is when the tropes of the most popular games—which came to exist as accidental responses to design limitations, like the cooldown-based combat or quests with massacre quotas—are specifically embraced as a critical part of the genre. Final Fantasy XIV did this to a certain extent, but WildStar far surpasses it in its celebration of the genre’s quirks.

You're gonna fight space zombie robots!
Enlarge / You're gonna fight space zombie robots!

While it may be mature in its social position, WildStar itself is paradoxically and deliberately juvenile in tone. Much was written about the game's female character models even before it was released (talk about cartoonish exaggeration!), and the insane, hip-breaking animations are even more notable. The game’s humor seems deliberately over the top, in a way that makes its ostensibly serious lore impossible to take seriously. One minute, I’ll receive a batch of quests in order to prevent an outbreak of corrupted Mordesh, an important, playable mechanical race fighting off a deadly virus that could lead to genocide. The next moment, WildStar will have its announcer shout how awesome it is that I’m going to fight space zombie robots.

Meanwhile, virtually every quest involving the two game factions—the rebel Exiles and the imperial Dominion—seems to involve a war crime. As an Exile, ostensibly a good guy in the world of fiction, I had quests involving poisoning first aid kits intended for Dominion wounded. A few hundred yards away, I had to call in an airstrike to destroy a priceless archeological site for a brief tactical advantage. Then I gained a level and the game shouted “OH S**T, YOU LEVELED UP!” as a sexy rock alien ran by, her butt animated to move inhumanly with every step.

The best way to mentally resolve this paradox is to understand that WildStar is a game that only cares about being a game. It makes no effort to present its game world as a coherent whole—even though the lore is detailed enough that it could. Nor does it act like “you” are represented by your player character. That avatar is simply the tool that you use to manipulate the artificial game world.

A weak start

Once the world opens up, simply exploring it is a treat.
Enlarge / Once the world opens up, simply exploring it is a treat.

Focusing on those cartoonishly exaggerated challenge mechanics works for WildStar overall, but it also leads to some of its greatest weaknesses, which are most evident at the start of the game. First, the character classes, which are chosen before starting and cannot be changed, each have their own distinct rhythms of play. That's a good idea in theory, but it makes the game feel terrible if you try a class that doesn’t click for you. That's what happened with my first character, a ranged attacker called a Spellslinger. When I switched to the magic-using Esper, I felt far more comfortable.

Likewise, each character has one of four professions (Explorer, Settler, Scientist, or Soldier) which grant access to side missions that flesh out the game’s newly discovered world of Nexus. But picking the wrong one can lead to annoyance. I liked the Explorer immediately, as exploring the game world is generally my favorite part of leveling up in MMORPGs (being rewarded for climbing to the highest vantage points was my favorite part of Guild Wars 2, for instance). But when I tried a Settler, I found the game bombarding me with items to pick up all over the place, relentlessly triggering my worst completionist tendencies and bringing the game to a screeching halt. There's no way to change this except by starting over.

The Settler issue was exacerbated by the fact that the starting zones in WildStar are, as far as I’ve played, the worst part of the game. They’re overly busy, offering no room for players to breathe, learn, and explore at their own pace. The combination of information overload with constraining spaces means that the opening areas offer almost none of the things that make this style of game worthwhile. I only really started to get into the game when I hit level 10 and the first open questing region helped me remember why I like MMOs.

WildStar deserves a certain level of respect for being so certain about what it wants to be, and executing that vision from its inception (its launch has been shockingly stable) is a laudable feat. But while its love for all the tropes it thinks it should follow is generally positive, there are notable negative side effects, primarily in its unfriendliness to new or more casual players. It’s almost certain to be a stable success with an intense core group of players, however. Just watch out for the twerking robots.

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Channel Ars Technica