WildStar Interview

Computer and Videogames has an interesting interview with WildStar’s executive producer Jeremy Gaffney, which covers a variety of interesting subjects, including raiding, The Elder Scrolls Online’s reception and the decline of the MMO subscription model. Undoubtedly, though, what will make the rounds is the team’s apparent intention to “do [World of Warcraft] but better”. Truth be told, that’s not the whole story, so here are the quotes concerning World of Warcraft in full:

How long has Wildstar been in development?

Jeremy Gaffney: Carbine Studios started not too long after World of Warcraft shipped. That was back in 2005-ish. It was about 20 or so of the senior leads off of WoW basically saying, “Hey, we want to take that game but do it right this time.”

So they worked on some of the early tools and that kind of stuff back in the day. But Wildstar as an IP has only existed for about three years, that’s how long it’s been on the current course.

The team experimented with a couple different IP treatments, and then finalized on moving this into production mode around 2011.

When do you mean by doing World of Warcraft, arguably the most successful MMO ever, right this time?

These games take a long time to make, and the [original Blizzard group had] been working on World of Warcraft for about seven years. So the team came out with two very distinct ideas, one of which was, “Ok, we’re done with WoW, we know what we did right and what we did wrong, and we really want to tweak it and do WoW but better.”

Then the other group said, “No, we want to do anything but WoW. We want to get as far from the WoW space as we can.” And you can see both of those visions show up.

From the team that wants to do just brand new stuff, it’s things like Warplots, those giant 40v40 death fortresses, it’s super-extensive housing, it’s doing the monthly updates instead of updates that happen every year or six months, building everything around that kind of dynamism, it’s having the Path system where the settlers are building up the world and making new structures all throughout the world.

From the team that wanted to take the core of that WoW experience but maybe ramp it up just a notch and do it better, it’s things like bringing back a lot of what was popular in vanilla WoW but has been abandoned since then. Taking 20-man, 40-man raids, but combining that with the crazy combat system so it’s more dynamic and more movement based and actually about playing the game in real time.

There are aspects of those visions that you can actually see now as the game’s going live that paid off strongly.