Ishal said:
Can you elaborate on this?
Sure.
Game is staring down three major issues for launch, along with a BATTERY of lesser ones. I'll only expand on those if you want to ask specific questions as it would take all day.
I'll list them in order of ascending severity.
3. Bugs bugs bugs bugs bugs shit UI bugs. Carbine has been making this game for ALMOST A DECADE and sometimes it feels like it was hastily thrown together in just under a year. They're working hard to polish it, but they're a month from launch and it's still buggy as fuck, and the UI they've cobbled together is a godawful Frankenstein mess. It's half finished, anti-intuitive, lacks feedback sounds, etc, etc, etc. They clearly hoped mods would do 90% of the heavy lifting.
2. The questing is really, really bad. This is a return to the most bog-standard MMO questing imaginable. I don't think there would be too many complaints if they just failed to copy SWTOR or TSW or TESO's voice acting heavy, scripted quests...those are expensive and tend to come at cost elsewhere. But this was a game that marketed heavily on humor and personality, sort of an MMO Borderlands. Quest text is 140 characters or less, delivered in a tiny font in a tiny window. Go do the thing because I said to do the thing. What's the thing? It's kill 20 of this, 50 of that, 100 of both! It's click on those 12 things. It's go talk to this guy and then come back and talk to me. Imagine the most boring, mundane, satire-worthy MMO dross imaginable, and now imagine it even more boring, and you have Wildstar questing. It's almost shocking how bad it is. The dungeon and raid content is strong, but most of your first 100+ hours in game will be spent questing. And it's *awful*.
1. The Limited Action Set/AMPs/Tiers. Like GW2 and a lot of other modern MMOs, Wildstar is launching with "action combat" and a small action set. This is fine in theory...even a tiny action set can be exciting if you've got varied and exciting abilities. Wildstar does not. They look and sound great, but in practice they all start to run together. 90% of all combat devolves into "put the mobs inside the cone". Combat lacks a sense of impact as everything is AoE spam. Even CC is just used as a damage multiplier. AMPS (talent trees) are dull as dirt, providing copy/paste stat upgrades through rigidly defined steps. Tiering abilities is basically just taking an ability and making it do what it already did, only slightly better. You'd think they'd have split abilities down two paths, or allowed you to mutate abilities into new things, to put your stamp on it. Nope. 2% more damage. 0.13% longer stun. Ooooh. The consequence of all this is that roles inside a class and even classes themselves all start to blend together. Fighting on one character feels very much like fighting on another. Put those mobs in the cone. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Don't forget to circle strafe the telegraphs. In a game that is 90% combat from beginning to end, you need to NAIL the combat, and in a game with only 6 classes you need EXTREME variation. Wildstar achieves neither. This is the most damning of all its issues, as it's going to take months if not years of patching and iteration to fix, assuming the developers EVER fix it. And Wildstar does not have the luxury of a powerhouse IP to drive month one sales.
