Apparently it’s “MMORPG Nostalgia Week” here on the blog, so you’ll have to excuse me. I just feel the need to discuss one of the greatest travesties that has ever occurred in Gaming, being the cancellation of the MMORPG “Wildstar”.
Now I played WS from beta, much like “Rift”, and all in all I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Yes, it was a little too focused on large-scale PvP and raiding, and they cranked the leveling difficulty up a tad too high here or there (Carbine wanted WS to be the “Hardcore MMO”), but I did enjoy the crafting, housing, and day-to-day adventuring on my own in the world, difficult or not.
But the problem with “Wildstar” wasn’t really that NCSoft gave up on it, but that they (rightly, in my opinion) gave up on the company that made it (Carbine), then buried the IP. While I could see NCSoft washing their hands of Carbine, who seemed to be a little too resistant to change for the game to succeed, but they shouldn’t have killed the property entirely.
They threw the baby out with the bathwater, and that was a Bad Call.
If NCSoft had licensed the IP and handed over the code to WS to a company that would have brought it back to the irreverence of the Beta experience, and focused more on the playful humor of the setting, rather than trying to be the “MOST HARDCORE MMO EVER!”, I feel there was enough meat on those bones for the game to succeed. It would never have been “World of Warcraft”-levels of successful, but it didn’t need to be. WS certainly could have been “Guild Wars 2”-successful, and that should have been enough for NCSoft.
Apparently not, though.
Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way, though. Maybe it wasn’t Carbine who insisted the game be “HARDCORE!” all the time, but someone at NCSoft pushing the development in that direction? And maybe that’s why they have buried the IP ever since, rather than license it or sell it off, to at least make some money off of it?
In the end, I really couldn’t say. When it comes down to brass tacks, Carbine was the team developing the game, and they were the ones who didn’t listen to the majority of players who just wanted to have fun in the game world, as opposed to the minority who wanted “HARDCORE!”
So it is Carbine’s fault that the game died. In my opinion, anyway.
But, what’s this? I have seen there might be signs of life for “Wildstar”, no matter how feeble they might be? Last summer, there was an editorial on MMORPG.com that discussed how players are requesting that the game be revived through GOG’s Dreamlist. Now, sure, that’s an old article, but it does make some valid points. Most importantly that there seems to have been a shift inside of NCSoft to license out MMORPGs they have previously shuttered, such as “City of Heroes”.
Could “Wildstar” be next? Probably not, but there’s no reason not to have some hope. Just, let’s hope that, if it comes back, that the next team actually listens to the fans and tunes the game more towards a casual experience overall. Keep the “HARDCORE!” for the highest end raid and PvP, if they must, but make the rest of the game simply… playable for all.
Let the irreverence shine through.
