Cyglaive had a chance to sit down and chat with Carbine President Jeremy Gaffney about content in WildStar.

PvE Gameplay: Go Fast and Alone, or Go Far With a Group

While Paths and Housing may be interesting in their own right, the majority of what your PvE progression experience will consist of is related to questing. While the game does have its share of dynamic events that spontaneously occur in various zones, Planet Nexus itself is littered with quest givers looking for a bit of muscle—or brain, in some cases—to help them with a variety of tasks. While we know questing is pretty self-explanatory to anyone who’s ever touched an MMO, Carbine has made some pretty significant changes to how the system works overall over the past few months.

Originally the game used the traditional kill, collect or activate X of Y formula for quests. However, recently WildStar questing has moved to a percentage based system which rewards quest completion based on the amount of XP received. This system has just seen its final implementation with the most recent beta update, which added more elite monsters to each of the zones. Jeremy broke down how this system works and how it’s been changing the way players view traditional questing.

“So when we shifted the bars, if every monster would be equal it would be useless. You know if it took you 10 skeech to kill before and now you’re getting 10% of your bar for each skeech kill then what the heck is the value of it? The real value of that system now is that you see the world with three new kinds of creatures. One is really weak [and] may not give a ton of xp, but is easy to kill. Two are champion creatures. They give better loot, they’re tougher and it probably really takes two people to take them out. But if you’re skilled, you can knock them out solo and feel like a bad ass. Then the third kind are like group mobs. You need to get a group of people, but they’re going to have really good loot when they drop [it] and maybe they’ll [fill] like half your quest bar when you take them out. Now that’s awesome because if you’re playing with your buddy, you’re hunting these kind of champions and you have a challenging fight still. You’re stoked when you try to take it down and have a huge chunk of your bar fill. Now you can intelligently choose how you’re going to play the game.”

With WildStar’s experience based questing system, the intent is to reward players with faster quest completion by allowing them to take on some of the more difficult monsters in the zones. If they want to go at a slower pace, they can still round of a bunch of the smaller minions and avoid the bigger guys all together. With this system the team has created, Jeremy Gaffney said he wouldn’t be surprised if another MMO comes along and takes their idea at some point. However, we’ll have to wait and see whether that day comes before we crucify the next MMO and call it a "WildStar clone".

As I said before, questing is pretty much a staple in the MMO genre, but there comes a time when, no matter how much you love it, you’ll end up needing a break from it every now and then. This is where WildStar’s instanced PvE content comes into play. There are multiple types of instanced content in WildStar, so first we’ll start with Shiphands. What’s a Shiphand you ask? Well, if you’ve ever seen any Sci-Fi movie, then you probably know that things always seem to go wrong in the deep dark clutches of space. This is no different in the world of WildStar except for that fact that the player will get thrown right in the middle of whatever chaos ensues and it’ll be up to them to fix it.

“There’s a thing called zone fatigue [you get] if you’re in the same area for a long time. Shiphands are meant to break that up, where they’re designed to be short dungeons you can do in a group; some are solo-able, but the goal is to take you out of that thing you’re doing by sending you up to a moon or space station and give you a little break.”

Shiphands definitely serve to change the pace a bit, as someone who’s messed around with them plenty during the beta, I often found myself caught right in the middle of some major conflict, getting abducted by evil alien fish people, or trying to maintain my sanity as I made my way through a ship full of toxic gas. I’d say the most welcoming feature about Shiphands is that they don’t only serve to get you off Nexus, but you can bring your buddies, too. Shiphands scale from 1-5 players and act as “mini dungeons” out in the world, that usually take about 15-30 minutes to complete.

Similar to this are Expeditions. Expeditions are instanced content that scales according to the number of players that enter the instance, similar to Shiphands. However, these are made specifically for a player’s housing plot. Expeditions are typically a bit shorter and usually run anywhere from 10-15 minutes in length, but are another great way to break up questing as you level up.

Now for the challenging stuff: Dungeons and Adventures. This is where you take all that you’ve learned and apply it to a more difficult group setting so that you may hopefully succeed in acquiring some of the really powerful gear in the game—or die trying. I’m going to be honest: WildStar’s Dungeons aren’t designed just for taking a break from questing. They are designed to be some of the toughest PvE content around, at least until you decide to step into Raiding, and they take full advantage of the game’s movement, position and telegraph-based combat system.

“Even in our low level dungeons it’s all about using that action combat to its ends extent. Going through Stormtalon’s Lair at level 17 through 20, there’s huge whirlwinds going through the area and raid mechanics in any other game, but you’ll be smacked with them at level 17. They’re very action oriented [and] all of the telegraphs have you coordinating together. You can’t just sort of stand there and mash your buttons on Grid and expect to survive. So they’re very compelling, and because they’re hard, we tend to put very good rewards in them.”

Now besides the crazy checkerboard shaped telegraphs and rampant raid mechanics in WildStar’s dungeons, the Carbine team also puts quite a bit of work into adding other random elements that vary with each run. Players tend to run these things all the time, so static gameplay is something they want to avoid as best as possible.

“We also [added] challenges and things like that, and as you get higher level we tend to put in more variation. We start off trying to keep it basic, but then very rapidly there’s multiple branching paths, random elements, random sub bosses, random main bosses, so that not every run through is just roffle stomp and do the same thing you did before. We know people replay these things a lot. Some of the replayability is group composition, but some of it should be the content itself. I think it’s a mistake that there have been so many static dungeons in so many games.”

The replayability factor really shines once we start on the path of Adventures. If you’ve seen the latest Adventures Devspeak DevSpeak Video, then you probably have a good idea what these are about. They are similar to dungeons in that they are also difficult 5-man content; however, instead of focusing on bosses, they focus more on completing objectives and player choice. One might equate them to a choose your own adventure dungeon of sorts, giving players multiple choices and options, some strategic and others verbal, as they make their way to the end.

“This type of gameplay might only exist in one area of the world where it’s cool in that area. Some of them [have] MOBA style gameplay, some are tower defense. A really fun one is Oregon Trail style, and this is a good example of branching. You have a caravan and they’ve [only] got so much water, so much energy, [and] so much food on them. As your caravan goes through the zone, you get parts where a storm hit and it blew away a bunch of your water supply. Now you’re at a branch, do you go to the lake to replenish the water, or do you try and rush through and hope the lack of water doesn’t kill your whole caravan? It’s a much more dynamic experience than a static dungeon.”

While we were on the topic of fast-paced combat, I decided to ask Jeremy how players in general have fared as they learn WildStar’s new telegraph and free-form based combat systems.

“When we first added telegraphs, we [saw] forum posts saying ‘oh, it’s like training wheels.’ Well it turns out that at low levels it made things easier. It’s an AoE based game and you’re doing mostly AoE attacks, and it’s showing you how positioning works. If we weren't’ doing that, how would you know when to use a cone attack versus a point blank attack. You’d have to do all that through learning and memorization, but we show you. Then it turned out there’s strategic elements. Now [suddenly] in PvP you pretend you’re doing one attack, they react, but then you switch to another attack and take advantage of it. It turned out that in dungeons it [not only] allowed us to do crazy bosses, but it also allowed your group to communicate. I’m putting a healing well down over here, my 10 minute cooldown ability, I’m going to do it in the center of the room. That really pays off at raids. You don’t have time to yell out ‘go stand over here!’, but you sure can with telegraphs. It is so much faster to hit a key to do that than to try and describe it in voice chat. So what was [originally just] a thing that made combat easier turns out may be the thing that makes it really complex.

We’ve got raid bosses we haven't even shown yet, especially in the 40-man stuff. There’s one boss in particular that starts shooting all these Tetris shaped telegraphs at you and then he hits you with a snake attack, so the snake starts getting longer, like the old-school snake game.  We’re really proud of that stuff. Even though it’s meant for the hardest of the hardcore, it’s the kind of thing that gets everyone excited to go try it out.”

If you haven’t seen the most recent WildStar PAX East Panel, I highly recommend that you check it out if you want to see a few of the more complex Raid bosses in the game.

PvP: Battlegrounds, Arenas & Warplots

As Jeremy mentioned earlier, not only does PvE content take full advantage of WildStar’s movement and positioning gameplay, but so does PvP. There are multiple types of PvP modes in WildStar and it’s meant to be an alternative way to level if PvE content isn’t necessarily your thing. Starting at level six, players will be able to queue up for the first Battleground, Walatiki Temple, with the second Battleground unlocking around level 15. Once you hit level 30, you can begin queuing up for practice 2v2, 3v3 and 5v5 Arenas, and upon hitting the level cap of 50 you will have access to Rated Battlegrounds, Rated Arenas and 40v40 Warplots. Open world PvP is also available, and players will start coming across cross-faction zones at about level 20+. Without throwing the commonly used term of “eSports” around, I asked Jeremy what the team’s vision was for WildStar’s PvP.

“Our vision is really to let you do PvP from cradle to grave, if you want to do it, and make sure it’s compelling. The combat system sort of makes it compelling instantly because positioning matters and strategy matters. So anything in any area that we can do that discourages “zerging” and encourages strategic gameplay are things that we want to add over time. One thing specifically from a PvP standpoint is that we want to see where things naturally evolve in the open world on the PvP servers, and then what mechanics we can add to those areas to amplify it. Tarren Mill in World of Warcraft was like a level 35 area, but somehow became the level 50 ground zero for PvP. If we’re reactive, we can respond quickly and then [figure out] what can we do to encourage where Tarren Mill is in our game. Naively people add these mechanics to the world [at launch] and [players] hit them a bit when they level and then they get past that area and [it] dies out. We want to be able to do that better. It’s also really doubling down on Warplots. The balancing in Warplots over time is to make sure there is no [single] optimal strategy and the progression for it feels compelling. You really want a huge mass of players at level 50, with legitimate characters for long periods of times, and launch is really where you need to seed that [into your game]."

It’s pretty obvious that PvE and PvP combat in WildStar are designed to be fast paced and intense. With systems like stunning enemies in short windows of opportunity, sprinting, dodging, and double jumping, all while continuously dealing damage, tanking or healing, it’s no surprise that some players may struggle with the game’s combat. However, according to Jeremy Gaffney, Carbine is perfectly ok with that.

“Being an action-based game is a plus because it feels more fun. The art of doing 1v1 combat [with tab-targetting MMOs] where you’re doing key sequences and figuring out your maximum rotation—World of Warcraft has owned that, they’ve owned it for years. The people who have tried to clone that have kind of failed in part because I don’t think you can do that kind of combat better than WoW. But other kinds of combat, it’s a bit more of a wide open field. So a lot of people really like the pace, they really like the action, but it’s not going to be for everyone. There are a lot of people who never learned to move [their character] and move their camera at the same time or do their attacks at the same time. Some of them won’t be able to and we’re ok with that. The game’s not going to be a game for everyone, but there are gamers who are kind of bored with the other stuff that’s come out there. We’ve done some stuff to make it newbie friendly, the telegraphs are a great example of that, but we’ve done some stuff to make it not newbie friendly and we’re ok with that too. We just want to have a fun game at the end of the day. We want a game that your gamer buddies can play; we don’t really want a game that your grandma can play. Not that we don’t like her, but she may not be able to strafe, move and blast enemies at the same time at level 3.”

Looking Forward >>