Revisiting Wildstar

Loading Screen from in-game on Emulator Server

Friends I did some nonsense this weekend and I am going to talk briefly about whether or not you should also do some nonsense. Wildstar is a game that I genuinely feel was ahead of its time. Had it launched today, I think that it would be far better received than it was in 2014. Admittedly there are a lot of reasons why I would say that today, not the least of which has been the steady stream of players leaving World of Warcraft and looking for other options. Additionally, I think Wildstar in its combat style is very compatible with what Genshin Impact and Tower of Fantasy have distilled into a very fun action RPG formula. Wildstar was the slightly awkward pupa that eventually evolved into the glorious hack-and-slash butterfly that is the modern action combat MMORPG. If Wildstar could have launched as a hybrid game on both mobile and desktop today, it would be phenomenally popular.

Screenshot from Wildstar when it was still active

I liked Wildstar quite a bit, but never really managed to engage with it fully. I don’t think I made it past level thirty on any of my characters, and there was a snowy zone where my forward momentum would always die. That said… I had a ton of friends who were super engaged with this game and as a result, I stuck around and kept poking my head into it. I was saddened like so many were when it ultimately shuttered in November of 2018. Starting just before the shutdown of the server was a project called Nexus Forever, with the goal of trying to create a robust server emulator to allow the game to continue to live on after its ultimate demise. While I never fully attached to Wildstar, it was an extremely important game to my friend Ace, and as a result, I have been trying to keep loose tabs on the progress of a potential server emulator. I am not exactly certain when I joined the Discord community, but I believe it was at some point in 2019.

Like so many other things in my life… the pandemic largely caused me to lose touch with the Nexus Forever project. Like most of the discords, I am a member of… I’ve had it muted because the way discord works are extremely bad for spamming you with notifications. Scan forward to this weekend when the YouTube algorithm decided to deliver me the above video from the Lazy Peon. It turns out that not only is the server emulator progressing along nicely, but there is actually a test server where you can log in and play around with the game. Since I am the one of my friend group most likely to do stupid things for minimal enjoyment… it was left up to me to sort this out and determine if it was actually worth playing.

Character creation from in-game on Emulator Server

It turns out that the process as a whole is relatively straightforward. You can see above that I was able to recreate the warrior version of Belghast Sternblade that I played around with on the retail servers. I am not going to post specific links to how to do this thing, because I get the general impression that the community would rather have folks engage with it through Discord. However, for sake of understanding, I am going to outline the steps required to get everything set up and play.

  • Join the Nexus Forever Discord
  • Check the pinned topic in the #help channel for links
  • Download the client patcher and begin Wildstar downloading
  • Download the custom Game Launcher
  • Sign up for an account on the Test Server
  • Hum to yourself while the client finishes installing
  • Open the custom Game Launcher and point it at the Wildstar64 executable.
  • In the launcher, choose the test server you signed up on
  • Launch the game and play Wildstar

While that is quite a few steps, when it comes to getting up and running with emulator servers… that is honestly relatively simple. I remember the first time I started playing around with the Everquest emulator server it required me to set up a Linux server, download the source code, figure out how to compile said source code on Linux, and manually create content in MySQL to populate my own server. Basically, anything that has automated installers for setting everything up and getting running feels simple compared to those early days.

Screenshot from in-game on Emulator Server

Now we get to the “should you do this” part of the post, and I am afraid my answer is going to be no. The emulator team has made some massive strides in getting this game playable. It was fun to run around and experience this game again, but if you are hoping to be able to legitimately play it… like you might play a World of Warcraft emulator… we likely have a number of years before that could be a reality. The game is wildly incomplete and based on my understanding the only content that is really functional is the original starter areas. You can roam and explore freely, and the server has a number of slash commands to allow you to do some things that you would not be able to do otherwise, but it is far from a “complete” experience.

However, if you just want to get in, create a character and revel in the nostalgia of the excellent level-up voice lines… then by all means download away. I do want to spend a bit more time exploring the limits of this experience, and honestly should probably see what sort of help they might need. I used to write code for one of the World of Warcraft emulators back in the early days, so I have minimal experience. Nonetheless, I thought I would present you with the process and let you make your own decisions if you choose to go down this path.

Wildstar Thoughts

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I am having one of those mornings when I am not entirely certain I have thoughts that are worth sharing.  However because of the ritual that I have built up for myself I am going to share something anyway.  I consistently have a chorus of “no one wants to hear about that” running through my head as I write most of my posts.  I think that is in part why I struggle so hard when someone says something nice to me about my blog or any of the other things I do.  I feel like I really have no clue what I am doing and even more so why anyone would care about it.  I am super appreciative that people do seem to care, but I feel like one of these days everyone is going to pull back the curtain and realize what a boring person I am.  Worse I have an unshakable fear that I am a fraud and that some terribly clever person is going to write a lengthy essay on medium pointing out this fact and cause you all to hate me.  Medium feels like it is a site entirely about writing lengthy essays about exposing harsh truths about the things we love.

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Sometimes I start writing and things just veer wildly off course, and I have a feeling that is precisely what is happening this morning.  Yesterday afternoon at 2pm pst Wildstar went dark as a game and I have some weird feelings about it.  This was not an important game to me personally, in fact I struggled to figure out why everyone liked it so much.  That said I realize that it was a very important game for an awful lot of the people who I care about in my life.  This is in part why I kept trying to unlock the puzzle about what made it feel good to play.  Probably the happiest I was with the game was when I was playing my Chua Engineer and even then…  largely because of the adorable bot army that I drug along with me.  The core problem there is… that the vast majority of the friends I had playing the game on the regular were Exiles not Dominion.  Sure this eventually changed so that you could cross faction until your heart was content… but I think by then it was too far past that golden time in which a game really has to hook me on its charm.

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There was something about the game that caused me to struggle with it.  There was a certain sensory overload that I felt each time I played, with too many things going on with the UI and the telegraphs that just left my eyes feeling immensely tired after playing it for a short period of time.  I realize this is weird given that I have always been one of those people who prefers to have a massive number of UI elements on screen in World of Warcraft, but the combination of this and the action combat proved to be more than I could handle most of the time.  I am regretful that I never managed to make it to the level cap or really experience any of the endgame content.  I had multiple characters largely fall off the face of the leveling curve in Whitevale…  and I am not entirely certain what specifically about that zone caused me to lose all forward momentum.

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All of that said I have to tell you that Wildstar had quite possibly the best housing system I have seen in a game, namely the way you could set up your little pocket dimension to be whatever you wanted it to be…  along with interesting minigames to play.  It also had an excellent cosmetic gear and dye pot system that I hope going forward more games pay attention to.  It was a game that gave its players so many nice systems, and I think that is in part why it had a generally thriving social structure.  There are a good number of people that I met through the game that have become fixtures of my Twitter feed in a daily basis, and I am thankful that I got to meet all of them.  Said feed was completely breaking my heart as I watched so many emotional posts scrolling by in the last hours of the game before they finally shut things down.  I think what probably makes this worse… is the fact that Wildstar lasted far longer than anyone actually expected it would given NC Soft’s track record of shuttering still relatively popular franchises.

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At this point however I am not entirely certain which is worse.  Watching a game get shuttered, or having a game purchased by a company that you are almost certain is going to do bad things to the game.  I watched Hellgate London be bastardized by Hanbitsoft and then get regurgitated back onto Steam in a form that is at times barely recognizable to the original.  Recently Trion Worlds was purchased by a company that has games in its stable with literally temporary inventory bags that expire after seven days.  So I have nothing but the worst fears about how Rift is going to change under their stewardship.  So I am not sure if it is worse to see a game completely close its doors, or to watch it flop around in a zombie state for awhile muddying your memories of it.  As I have said before when this sort of thing happens…  these MMO games that we love are fleeting.  Grab on with both hands and enjoy them while you still can, because eventually…  they are likely going to shut their doors either replaced by something shiny and new or because the players disappeared over time.  In the case of Wildstar we can only hope that a Server Emulator is far enough along to be able to create a fan run server like the thriving Star Wars Galaxies community or the Age of Reckoning Warhammer Online community.

 

 

Random Screenshots #3

This is another one of those mornings when I feel like I don’t have much of anything to talk about.  Work encroached upon my gaming time, first with a meeting that I did not get out of until 6 pm…  when I normally get out of the office around 4/4:30.  Second when I did get home I had a bunch of things that I needed to look into given that we are still ironing out the issues with a brand new website launch.  As a result by the time I finished up I largely just crashed on the sofa and watched some Black Mirror as I had not touched season 3.  That show is extremely creepy, but also something that I cannot really stop watching.  It is a sort of technological tales of the crypt, and if you have never watched the show…  be prepared for some disturbing content.  That said it is still very much worth your time and the latest season has at least one gem scattered among the digital nightmares in the form of the San Junipero episode.  Anyways this morning is going to be a random screenshot post morning because I am not sure what else to really talk about.  I am still fairly groggy and probably shouldn’t have finished the 4th episode last night, and instead just headed on to bed.

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I am not entirely certain of the context, but this is of course a screenshot from Wildstar.  I believe it is from the moon mission where you have to figure out what happened to all of the miners.  Even though I have long struggled to really click with this game, I cannot deny how much of an interesting vision it really is.  The art direction was on point and everything feels like it exists in the same shared technicolor delusion.  For whatever reason I never really liked how spastic their flavor of hotbar combat felt.  Most recently I paid a little money to be able to create a Chua Warrior and I found it enjoyable…  but still not really clicking as hard as I would have liked.  Honestly this game and Guild Wars 2 sort of exist in the same space for me…  where they are equally interesting to visit but not exactly the same of place I want to call home.  I will say though that the people who do play the game regularly are amazing and I am super happy to have a whole bunch of them occupying my social media streams.  This is one of those games that I root hard for…  just from a distance.

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We go from a game that I don’t really get fully, to one that I absolutely do…  but still don’t end up playing that often.  I believe this screenshot is from one of the opening shots of Makeb which was the sequence of content I last played during a December 2015 binge of the game thanks to Force Awakens Star Wars hype.  I honestly thought I would similarly return during the Rogue One hype machine but it never actually materialized.  I realize I am missing so much great content, and I keep saying that one of these days when I hit a lull in whatever other games I happen to be playing that I will swoop back to Star Wars the Old Republic and gobble up all of the goodies I have missed.  I still have yet to start any of the Shadow of Revan content…  let alone Fallen Empire or Eternal Throne.  I did have an active sub, but I let that lapse at some point…  they keep roping me in with offers of “subs get X shiny bauble” and then I never actually end up playing.  I should in theory pop back in before this last bit of sub time lapses and I am stuck playing in freemium hell.

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On to yet another game that I have really fond memories of but never end up playing.  This is I believe a screenshot from one of the betas for The Secret World.  To the best of my knowledge this was me creating my very first character.  To be truthful I never was a huge fan of the character creation system in TSW, as it always felt like I never could create exactly the character that I wanted to create.  However on so many levels I loved this game, but the biggest problem is attempting to return to it.  Since you can repeat almost every quest it becomes extremely hard to see just what you have completed and what is new and something you should focus on.  When they release an issue I find it hard to actually track down all of the things that have been added and given that I last actively played during “Last Train to Cairo” which was issue number six… and they are currently on fifteen there is a ton of content I have missed.  I just find it extremely hard to get back into the game after being gone for so long…  and given all of the systems that they have seemingly loosely tacked onto the base experience.

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I don’t have an awful lot to say about this screenshot other than I thought it looked cool, so I decided to post it.  This is of course from Farcry 3 Blood Dragon, which is this insane 80s movie romp.  If you took every 80s sci-fi film and distilled it to its campy roots, then dumped all of that pure essence in a blender…  you wind up with Blood Dragon.  If you have never checked it out, you probably really should given that it regularly dips down into the $5 territory.  It is a completely stand alone experience and does not require Farcry…  nor does it really have anything to do with the Farcry Franchinse at all other than modeling some of the open world roaming gameplay.

 

Bad News Day

Goodbye Everquest Next

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Yesterday the MMORPG industry received a couple of really bad bits of news.  Firstly Daybreak Games has officially announced that Everquest Next is no more, and that they would be rushing Landmark into “launched” status this spring.  Firstly it really should not come as any surprise that this is happening because in truth we have not had any substantive news about “Next” since SOE Live 2014.  So when Storybricks parted company in February 2015 and SOE was sold to the holding company that renamed it to Daybreak… I fully expected we would never see anything further from Next. Storybricks was going to be the guts of this new approach at how to create an MMO and allow it o almost center around procedural interactions with he various factions and NPCs in the game.  With that core gone… I could not reason how the game would function, and deliver even half of the lofty promises it had made.  The other huge concern was the fact that Daybreak now seemed like a company desperately trying to survive under the yolk of evil overlords.  When a company known for grooming technology for sale purchases a game company…  it seems like creative freedom and the broad daydreaming that got SOE where it is today would be the firs thing to go.

The concerns I have is that it feels like Landmark is getting foisted upon us, in an unfinished state.  It had been a couple of years since I last played the game and I popped in last night to see just how different it is.  In truth it still feels like the prototype game that it has always felt like.  I roamed around and collected items and then logged back out because I wasn’t really drawn to stay. The thing I love about Landmark is the community, and I am just hoping that through all of this transition they can manage to keep that intact.  The problem I have with Landmark is that it is a fun sandbox that lets you build really interesting structures…. but I still wouldn’t really call it a game but instead more of a toybox.  Sure you have the trappings of combat now, but while wandering around in the zone the game dumped me in…. there was actually nothing to fight.  Maybe I need to dig down to find that, but the only thing I actually encountered that was potentially damaging were some exploding shrooms.  I am hoping that in the few months left before the official launch that they can somehow pull together some of the ideas from Next and make Landmark a proper game experience.

Wildstar Falters

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The other concerning news from yesterday is that roughly sixty employees were laid off in a “restructuring” within Carbine.  This has honestly been a topic among some of my friends for awhile now, but we were dreading some form of action to be taken.  Wildstar has not been performing amazingly well… in fact they are performing far worse right now than with City of Heroes was shut down by NC Soft.  As a company goes they are notoriously brutal when it comes to closing titles that they deem are not operating as well as they expected.  Wildstar is a significantly better game today than it was at launch, and the Free to Play conversion was more than just a payment model change, but an entire reworking and re-tuning of some of the game concepts.  The game felt fresh and new and was exciting…  for a period of time.  The problem is, that Wildstar is just not my game.  I have good friends who love it above all others, and for them it hurts a lot to see the company struggling.  Every now and then there is just a game that does not for whatever reason “click”, and that was this game for me.  On paper it sounds and looks like everything I could have wanted in a game, and I still think it has one of the best implementations of player housing I have ever seen.  Unfortunately I just don’t ever have the desire to play it, and always seemed to prioritize playing something else over it.

The scariest statement about the whole press release is this line. “These cuts are directly tied to WildStar’s evolution from a product in development to a live title“.  That right there seems to be signalling the end of active development on Wildstar and shifting the title into maintenance mode.  An MMORPG cannot thrive without fresh dose of new content, and while you can do things like add new quests and script events without a lot of active development….  you can’t do things like roll out new zones and raids.  Admittedly the game is getting fresh content with the release of Arcterra, and hopefully this will not effect that.  The other worrying statement is that apparently there were statements floating around that the employees were told to expect more layoffs in the future.  So much happens when layoffs are announced, and there is an internet dog piling of bad blood towards a game.  I have nothing but love for Wildstar and its community and I want it to weather this storm and somehow bounce back stronger.  I am clinging to hope because I know a lot of people who really need this game to succeed and thrive.  All of that said… the cynic an realist in me still keeps saying that this is not going to end well.