WildStar Preview

After the flood of information following its announcement at GamesCom it’s been relatively quiet for Carbine Studios’ MMO WildStar, so this new preview from PC Gamer comes a bit as a, pleasant, surprise. Here’s a sampling:

Explorers carry a tracking device. Any time they’re near an area of interest, they can use it to point them to a spot where they can place a beacon. Sometimes it’s just a high point, other times it’s to analyse an anomaly, and in some cases it can help out local allies by providing targeting info for some AI-controlled snipers, for example.

All they have to do is place a beacon in the right spot to complete the quest there’s no combat involved so the spots are accordingly tricky to get to. I found one near a gravitational anomaly that temporarily gave me super-jumping, letting me leap up to a series of high platforms. Another was only accessible via a secret route up a mesa: certain rocks are only visible to Explorers, so only they can clamber on them to reach the top. Once you’ve got there, placing the beacon gives you the same kind of reward as an ordinary quest in any other game: a chunk of experience.

Soldiers have a similar tracking device, but it locates outposts: areas that need to be defended from attacking enemies. Sometime’s it’s just a strategically important area, other times there’s a group of civilians to be protected. Either way, you choose when to trigger the onslaught, and you then have to fight off wave after wave of enemies. It’s not as hard as it sounds: each time I did one of these events, the attackers were much lower level than the roaming mobs of the area. You don’t have to fight them alone, either: everyone in the vicinity can join in your heroic stand against the hordes, and help you survive it.

The Settler is the social path. It wasn’t available in the alpha version of the game I played, so I don’t know much about how its premise of ‘˜social challenges and social rewards’ actually relates to other players in the game. But only part of this path is dependent on other people: you’re also helping the non-player characters of this world build villages and establish a society here. It’s a path for those gamers who treat their MMORPG as a second home, and want to see that place grow and have a hand in shaping it.