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Wildstar Live, First Impressions
11 years ago
General
Want to hear something insane?
Taco banana cannon down my pants.
Want to hear something insane and coherent?
Glenn Beck was once arrested for trying to pull off Obama's face to reveal that he was a lizardman.
Want to hear something insane, coherent, and true?
Wildstar may be the game that finally gets me away from World of Warcraft.
I know, insane right? But damn this is one hell of a title. Those of you who actually watch my journals well, one I'd be amazed to find you exist, and two you might notice that I did two listing some highlights of the Wildstar Beta while I was in that.
Well, since getting in I found that there's even more to like about this.
The crafting really has me going on this game for one, which I mentioned in my second journal, I'll just go ahead and copypasta what I said here:
"The Crafting System
The way Wildstar does this is really neat. You don't learn specific recipes like in other MMOs. Rather you learn a base one and can modify it during crafting.
Here's how it works in a nutshell.
Nelen the Spellslinger is a weaponsmith. Spellslingers are heavy damage dealers who use three major stats for their gear:
Finesse, a measure of how accurate attacks are (and for Spellslingers it directly affects weapon damage).
Moxie, the ability to aim for vitals in a fight and hit them accurately (read: critical hit chance).
Brutality, simply put it's brute force. For spellslingers this is how likely their shots and spells are to penitrate armor and other defenses.
Now, Finesse is the big one for Spellslingers. They need to be able to shoot accurately and rapidly in a heated fight.
Nelen wants to make a gun. He's got all the materials and is at a crafting table. Rather than just going through a list, picking the pattern that has Finesse as it's heavy stat, and hitting go for me to sit back and watch a bar fill until its done however, crafting is much more hands on.
When you go into it the crafting grid shows a circuit board, and you need to choose two things:
1. A power core to act as the base of a weapon, which determines how powerful it can be.
2. Chips, which determine what stats you can give it.
Chip slots are color coded Red, Green, and Blue.
Red Slots are for the three main offensive stats I listed above. Finesse, Brutality, and Moxie.
Green slots are for Insight, which determines how likely a character is to read the nuances of an enemy's attacks and dodge or block them (basically defense rating), and Grit, which is how thick skinned a character is and how long they can soak up punishment before dropping (Max HP).
Blue slots are for Tech, which is kind of a weird stat. Tech determines how powerful support abilities are (basically how good one is at TECHnical things). Its a main stat for Medics, but not for any other class. Tanks use it for attacks that generate threat though... but I digress.
Early recipies go like this:
You get one slot on top for the power core and one or two slots for chips (some plans have slots already locked with a specific chipset). You first give it a power core. The more powerful the core the more energy you can have going through a weapon to power the chips.
Then you put in the chips. Slot them in for the stats you want, then start setting how much power goes to them from the core. As you do a bar at the bottom will fill to show how much stress is being put on the core. Once it fills you've used the core to it's maximum... however, you CAN go past this if you want to risk it.
Lets say I can put ten Finesse on a gun without going over, but my current gun gives me twelve. I COULD put more in, but for every bit further I push it the power core has a chance of overloading when I close up the gun and turn it on. If I push it too far the power core will overload and the gun gets wrecked before it ever fires a shot, turning it into a worthless pile of scrap (and consuming all the parts I used to make it).
If you're lucky you can overclock a weapon, but its a gamble and with rarer materials its often not worth it.
Another profession I got to try was one of the 'hobbies' they had, namely cooking. This one is a lot different too.
When you start it up you pick a recipe that uses a specific type of foodstuffs (meat, veggies, fruits, or even weird things like bug bits) and it shows a crafting grid in a circular shape like a compass.
At the four compass points are four types of flavors. Sweet, Spicy, Sour, and Savory. While you can just make normal foodstuffs, you can experiment with spices and other additives to make better and tastier recipes that give you buffs!
Here's an example.
One of the first recipes you learn is Tough Jerky, which is just what it sounds like. Tough, chewy, but hell it's edible.
However, in the crafting grid you'll see that the area between Savory and Spicy is lit up. What this means is that you can use ingredients to tweak the flavor. I added a bit of this and a bit of that and lo and behold I made Spicy Jerky, which gives me a buff to insight for half an hour if I chow down on it.
You have to experiment with spices to do this, get it too far and it'll just come out plain as always, but once you find the sweet spot (or spicy, or whatever), that part will be revealed. Next time you cook it'll tell you what ingredients to use and then remaking the food is a snap.
How it works is that each ingredient adds a little targeting marker somewhere within the glowy area. Get it juuuuuuuuust right and it'll come out the way you want it. Get it too much one way or the other and it'll hint at what you did wrong (it'll say more spicy or less sweet or so on) and it'll tell you how close you were. It takes some work, but it's quite satisfying to make Tangy Bug Bites, even if I wind up selling them to a vendor because... bug bites, seriously.
Lastly, for the main professions (not cooking) you don't buy new plans for gear. You can get specific rare ones by earning points doing crafting missions, but otherwise you get a tech tree that lets you learn new schematics simply by making the ones you already know. Make enough pistols and your character learns enough to make an improved model, get good enough with novice-level schematics and a whole tier of apprentice ones are unlocked.
Cooks however still have to buy cookbooks. Oh well..."
Well, a few other additions now.
The main one is talents. As you work your way through the tech tree you earn talent points which you can spend to upgrade your crafting skills. What does this mean?
Well, Nelen is now at tier 2 of weaponsmithing, which unlocks a whole bunch more chips that I can give weapons. I can boost Critical Hit rate, Critical Damage, Health, and so on as well as the big six stats. Also, at level two each weapon I make has my mark on it. Nothing fancy there, it just says "Made by Nelen", but its quite nice.
Also, there's the housing thing. I wasn't super interested, but now I'm finding it's quite worth the effort. I have my own personal spaceship house, fully furnished too, and here's a neat little feature. The more you work on the furnishings the bigger a rested XP bonus you get when you log out at home! Also, no worries about having it in the actual world and getting in the way, Protostar thought of that. Your home is on a chunk of land floating in the air a-la Columbia. You can also add a bunch of different features to it as well. I set up a small mine so I can harvest ore without competition, a farm for growing produce to cook, a crafting workbench for using both, and a BBQ grill (just for looks, but neat!).
Some offer special challenges which you can complete for rewards (crafting goods, healing items, gear, etc), others are just for fun and offer different things while at home (a low-grav area that lets you jump halfway over your house for example) and so on.
Next, the lore. Oh good gods the lore is so rich in this game. I heard Wildstar was in development for seven years before release and dammit if it doesn't show.
You have a Galactic Archive that catalogues information about areas, monsters, VIPs, and more. Here's the entry about a creature called the Girrok:
"GirroK:
Creatures
The girrok is a large, ursine predator common in the Nexus wilderness areas such as the Algoroc region. They tend to be solitary predators as adults, though younger girrok can sometimes be found in small groups of siblings or cousins. Though meat makes up the bulk of the girrok diet, the creatures are famously omnivorous. Settlements established near girrok hunting grounds often find garbage disposal units are knocked over in the middle of the night, while small pets and children are generally kept indoors once the sun goes down. And every new arrival on Nexus has heard the famous tale of the Exile settler family who lost their newborn to one of the creatures one night - although authorities suspected the parents in the crime, the mother's insistence that "a girrok ate my baby" turned out to be completely accurate.
Subspecies
Many varieties of girrok can be found on Nexus, usually marked by small differences in the coat or body mass - two factors directly related to their territory on the planet. Certain subspecies, however, are known for their extreme ferocity or their specific diets.
Grimstone Manglers
Scans indicate the girrok subspecies known as the Grimstone Mangler has evolved an extremely territorial nature combined with a complete lack of fear where sentient species such as humans are concerned. A Grimstone Mangler will attack almost anything within its fiercely protected territory which it sees as a threat, and that includes most anything that walks/
Scanbot Analysis
The powerful jaws, thick hides, and surly attitudes of Grimstone Manglers appear similar to features of apex predators found on other worlds, indicating these features may be the result of natural forces acting on their evolution rather than Eldan experimentation. If scanbot may be so bold as to engage pithiness subroutines, scanbot would guess that it was the evolutionary pressures of Nexus itself which made the Grimstone Manglers truly dangerous, not ancient genetic experiments."
Thats for one entry, out of about SEVENTY I have so far. For a loregeek this game is insane.
Also, that scanbot thing? Thats scientist-only. You have to pick that path (out of Soldier, Explorer, Settler, and Scientist) to get those parts.
I could go on and on about it. How even with my graphics set to low that this game is GORGEOUS, how the music is really amazing, how the combat is addictive and keeps you on your toes, and so on... but eh, go play the damn thing. You can see for yourself. First month is free!
Oh, and that joke at the top? Zero Punctuation's review of Driver San Francisco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OJai9dKraI So sue me, it fit.
Taco banana cannon down my pants.
Want to hear something insane and coherent?
Glenn Beck was once arrested for trying to pull off Obama's face to reveal that he was a lizardman.
Want to hear something insane, coherent, and true?
Wildstar may be the game that finally gets me away from World of Warcraft.
I know, insane right? But damn this is one hell of a title. Those of you who actually watch my journals well, one I'd be amazed to find you exist, and two you might notice that I did two listing some highlights of the Wildstar Beta while I was in that.
Well, since getting in I found that there's even more to like about this.
The crafting really has me going on this game for one, which I mentioned in my second journal, I'll just go ahead and copypasta what I said here:
"The Crafting System
The way Wildstar does this is really neat. You don't learn specific recipes like in other MMOs. Rather you learn a base one and can modify it during crafting.
Here's how it works in a nutshell.
Nelen the Spellslinger is a weaponsmith. Spellslingers are heavy damage dealers who use three major stats for their gear:
Finesse, a measure of how accurate attacks are (and for Spellslingers it directly affects weapon damage).
Moxie, the ability to aim for vitals in a fight and hit them accurately (read: critical hit chance).
Brutality, simply put it's brute force. For spellslingers this is how likely their shots and spells are to penitrate armor and other defenses.
Now, Finesse is the big one for Spellslingers. They need to be able to shoot accurately and rapidly in a heated fight.
Nelen wants to make a gun. He's got all the materials and is at a crafting table. Rather than just going through a list, picking the pattern that has Finesse as it's heavy stat, and hitting go for me to sit back and watch a bar fill until its done however, crafting is much more hands on.
When you go into it the crafting grid shows a circuit board, and you need to choose two things:
1. A power core to act as the base of a weapon, which determines how powerful it can be.
2. Chips, which determine what stats you can give it.
Chip slots are color coded Red, Green, and Blue.
Red Slots are for the three main offensive stats I listed above. Finesse, Brutality, and Moxie.
Green slots are for Insight, which determines how likely a character is to read the nuances of an enemy's attacks and dodge or block them (basically defense rating), and Grit, which is how thick skinned a character is and how long they can soak up punishment before dropping (Max HP).
Blue slots are for Tech, which is kind of a weird stat. Tech determines how powerful support abilities are (basically how good one is at TECHnical things). Its a main stat for Medics, but not for any other class. Tanks use it for attacks that generate threat though... but I digress.
Early recipies go like this:
You get one slot on top for the power core and one or two slots for chips (some plans have slots already locked with a specific chipset). You first give it a power core. The more powerful the core the more energy you can have going through a weapon to power the chips.
Then you put in the chips. Slot them in for the stats you want, then start setting how much power goes to them from the core. As you do a bar at the bottom will fill to show how much stress is being put on the core. Once it fills you've used the core to it's maximum... however, you CAN go past this if you want to risk it.
Lets say I can put ten Finesse on a gun without going over, but my current gun gives me twelve. I COULD put more in, but for every bit further I push it the power core has a chance of overloading when I close up the gun and turn it on. If I push it too far the power core will overload and the gun gets wrecked before it ever fires a shot, turning it into a worthless pile of scrap (and consuming all the parts I used to make it).
If you're lucky you can overclock a weapon, but its a gamble and with rarer materials its often not worth it.
Another profession I got to try was one of the 'hobbies' they had, namely cooking. This one is a lot different too.
When you start it up you pick a recipe that uses a specific type of foodstuffs (meat, veggies, fruits, or even weird things like bug bits) and it shows a crafting grid in a circular shape like a compass.
At the four compass points are four types of flavors. Sweet, Spicy, Sour, and Savory. While you can just make normal foodstuffs, you can experiment with spices and other additives to make better and tastier recipes that give you buffs!
Here's an example.
One of the first recipes you learn is Tough Jerky, which is just what it sounds like. Tough, chewy, but hell it's edible.
However, in the crafting grid you'll see that the area between Savory and Spicy is lit up. What this means is that you can use ingredients to tweak the flavor. I added a bit of this and a bit of that and lo and behold I made Spicy Jerky, which gives me a buff to insight for half an hour if I chow down on it.
You have to experiment with spices to do this, get it too far and it'll just come out plain as always, but once you find the sweet spot (or spicy, or whatever), that part will be revealed. Next time you cook it'll tell you what ingredients to use and then remaking the food is a snap.
How it works is that each ingredient adds a little targeting marker somewhere within the glowy area. Get it juuuuuuuuust right and it'll come out the way you want it. Get it too much one way or the other and it'll hint at what you did wrong (it'll say more spicy or less sweet or so on) and it'll tell you how close you were. It takes some work, but it's quite satisfying to make Tangy Bug Bites, even if I wind up selling them to a vendor because... bug bites, seriously.
Lastly, for the main professions (not cooking) you don't buy new plans for gear. You can get specific rare ones by earning points doing crafting missions, but otherwise you get a tech tree that lets you learn new schematics simply by making the ones you already know. Make enough pistols and your character learns enough to make an improved model, get good enough with novice-level schematics and a whole tier of apprentice ones are unlocked.
Cooks however still have to buy cookbooks. Oh well..."
Well, a few other additions now.
The main one is talents. As you work your way through the tech tree you earn talent points which you can spend to upgrade your crafting skills. What does this mean?
Well, Nelen is now at tier 2 of weaponsmithing, which unlocks a whole bunch more chips that I can give weapons. I can boost Critical Hit rate, Critical Damage, Health, and so on as well as the big six stats. Also, at level two each weapon I make has my mark on it. Nothing fancy there, it just says "Made by Nelen", but its quite nice.
Also, there's the housing thing. I wasn't super interested, but now I'm finding it's quite worth the effort. I have my own personal spaceship house, fully furnished too, and here's a neat little feature. The more you work on the furnishings the bigger a rested XP bonus you get when you log out at home! Also, no worries about having it in the actual world and getting in the way, Protostar thought of that. Your home is on a chunk of land floating in the air a-la Columbia. You can also add a bunch of different features to it as well. I set up a small mine so I can harvest ore without competition, a farm for growing produce to cook, a crafting workbench for using both, and a BBQ grill (just for looks, but neat!).
Some offer special challenges which you can complete for rewards (crafting goods, healing items, gear, etc), others are just for fun and offer different things while at home (a low-grav area that lets you jump halfway over your house for example) and so on.
Next, the lore. Oh good gods the lore is so rich in this game. I heard Wildstar was in development for seven years before release and dammit if it doesn't show.
You have a Galactic Archive that catalogues information about areas, monsters, VIPs, and more. Here's the entry about a creature called the Girrok:
"GirroK:
Creatures
The girrok is a large, ursine predator common in the Nexus wilderness areas such as the Algoroc region. They tend to be solitary predators as adults, though younger girrok can sometimes be found in small groups of siblings or cousins. Though meat makes up the bulk of the girrok diet, the creatures are famously omnivorous. Settlements established near girrok hunting grounds often find garbage disposal units are knocked over in the middle of the night, while small pets and children are generally kept indoors once the sun goes down. And every new arrival on Nexus has heard the famous tale of the Exile settler family who lost their newborn to one of the creatures one night - although authorities suspected the parents in the crime, the mother's insistence that "a girrok ate my baby" turned out to be completely accurate.
Subspecies
Many varieties of girrok can be found on Nexus, usually marked by small differences in the coat or body mass - two factors directly related to their territory on the planet. Certain subspecies, however, are known for their extreme ferocity or their specific diets.
Grimstone Manglers
Scans indicate the girrok subspecies known as the Grimstone Mangler has evolved an extremely territorial nature combined with a complete lack of fear where sentient species such as humans are concerned. A Grimstone Mangler will attack almost anything within its fiercely protected territory which it sees as a threat, and that includes most anything that walks/
Scanbot Analysis
The powerful jaws, thick hides, and surly attitudes of Grimstone Manglers appear similar to features of apex predators found on other worlds, indicating these features may be the result of natural forces acting on their evolution rather than Eldan experimentation. If scanbot may be so bold as to engage pithiness subroutines, scanbot would guess that it was the evolutionary pressures of Nexus itself which made the Grimstone Manglers truly dangerous, not ancient genetic experiments."
Thats for one entry, out of about SEVENTY I have so far. For a loregeek this game is insane.
Also, that scanbot thing? Thats scientist-only. You have to pick that path (out of Soldier, Explorer, Settler, and Scientist) to get those parts.
I could go on and on about it. How even with my graphics set to low that this game is GORGEOUS, how the music is really amazing, how the combat is addictive and keeps you on your toes, and so on... but eh, go play the damn thing. You can see for yourself. First month is free!
Oh, and that joke at the top? Zero Punctuation's review of Driver San Francisco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OJai9dKraI So sue me, it fit.
