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.
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.
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.
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.
Everything these guys are doing is open source so getting involved is a total possibility.
Now I need someone to start to resurrect Marvel Heroes…
I thought for a while I was going to have to think of another example of “the very rare shuttered mmorpg that doesn’t have a viable emulator”, for my next post about how mmorpgs never really die. I was aware of the Nexus Forever project but it’s so long since Iheard anything about it I assumed it had folded. Evidently it hasn’t but equally evidently Wildstar remains one of the few not to have made some kind of a viable comeback in a reasonably short timescale after going dark.
I hope the NF team do eventually bring the game back in a genuinely playable format but it sounds like it might be a while yet.