WildStar Preview

PC Gamer has published a new WildStar preview, which is focused exclusively on the title’s raid gameplay. Unfortunately, it’s not a hands-on preview:

I’d come to California hoping to try out the raids myself. Forget WildStar’s Rachet-and-Clank aesthetic and flashy 40v40 Warplots, it’s raids that have kept me coming back to it in my hunt for a new MMO to replace Blizzard’s aging beast. I admired Carbine’s cheeky disregard for an industry that tries to appeal to everyone, right down to lead designer Mike Donatelli’s dismissal of a casual player lamenting that he wants to get sweet gear without joining 20- or 40-man raiding guilds. “Then don’t play,” Donatelli had said. Ouch.

As it happens, I didn’t play either. I got to frolic through the starting zones and the new (and highly anticipated) PvP Warplots, but my initiation to the two raids scheduled for launch was limited to watching week-old footage of guilds on the test server bumbling their way to death. Oh, how they bumbled. The presentation illustrated how WildStar’s system of telegraphs which show the direction and area of an attack comes into its own in raids, where they splatter the ground like splotches on Jackson Pollock canvases and demand frenetic games of violent Dance Dance Revolution.

“We want to make sure that each player is doing something exciting for the entire encounter,” Scheinert says. “We don’t want a case where these five guys are doing something really exciting and these 35 guys stand in this circle and shoot at this thing.” It shows. Based on the videos and my own experiences in WildStar’s five-man dungeons, I could tell these weren’t going to be the fights I could half fall asleep in as I often can with ranged classes.

Roused by new footage, the 30 or so of us in the tiny ballroom inched in to watch a hapless player sprinting from a raid boss called Experiment X-89. It resembled a giant purple bullfrog. Around the raider, a circular telegraph the size of Mercury’s orbit contracted as it ticked down to the player’s doom. Boom. And so ended the player’s existence, along with that of approximately 75 percent of the floor the telegraph had covered at its fullest extent. The survivors struggled to complete the fight on the few remaining tiles, but in time, they fell as the bullfrog bounded to and from suspended titles they couldn’t reach. It looked gloriously painful, and I wanted to feel that pain myself.