![\"Khaoshek.140321.181523\"](\"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Khaoshek.140321.181523-1024x536.png\")
\n<\/p>\n
When the first videos and images of Wildstar surfaced, I was skeptical. The art style is too cartoonish for my usual tastes. I had the brief thought it looked like yet another WOW knockoff. I had concerns about how well the joking tone of the teaser videos would hold up during gameplay. But the more I watched, the more the game’s sense of humor and the newness it brings to an often stale genre really started to lure me in. In the first beta weekend I got to dig into the game for the first time, and now I see what it has to offer. There’s a lot of potential here<\/p>\n During short beta openings I become a bigger magpie than before. I chase after shiny things, often with little or no clear direction or goals. I want to try all the races and classes. I want to play with character creation options for entirely too long. I’ll get six characters to level five and then bounce back around to them at random, picking up new skills, testing them out. I didn’t get far with any character – my Drakan warrior is level eight – so there’s a lot I haven’t seen yet. But in these early levels I’m already seeing some great things that are really hooking me, and others I’m put off by to varying degrees.<\/p>\n The look of the game has grown on me immensely. Two of our Magpies have been able to place the game’s style, and I think they’re spot on: it’s like Treasure Planet and Jack and Daxter had an MMO baby. The world is vibrant and colorful. The cut scenes are lovely. Character customization options are limited (no height or body type slider bars, egad) but not as sparse as some I’ve seen. I made several Dominion characters and one Exile, and I like both: the Exiles have a sort of Firefly feel, and most of the Southern and Western accents aren’t too cringeworthy. Female characters tend to be a little prancy and floaty when they move. The Chua and Aurin were both much cuter than I’d dared hope. Their gestures and facial expressions are adorable and show a lot of emotion. Chua are entirely gender neutral and can have mustaches and beards! They’re perfect little furry dwarf analogues and I love them. :3<\/p>\n The first time I leveled, I laughed out loud. I hate to spoil anything, but in places this game has a lovely Spinal Tap, tongue-in-cheek metal kind of vibe. It’s over the top and ridiculous in the best of ways. So have your sound up when you level; you won’t regret it.<\/p>\n My largest concern is the difficulties I face when in a party. It’s incredibly hard to find one another on the map, and harder on the minimap. The Secret World uses green arrows to show you where your party members are, even when they aren’t nearby; in Wildstar, you briefly get a small white arrow on the minimap, if you’re lucky. It’s easy to get separated, and from there, to fall behind. I’ve also had some difficulty adding secondary characters of players I’ve added to my friends list via their email address. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but for now I’ve had to add each character that player has, even when I can see them online on any character once I’ve added their account. MMOs being a social game as they are, I’d like to see this addressed.<\/p>\n But by and large I’m really pleased with the game, and glad I preordered. I’ll be back on Nexus for the next beta weekend!<\/p>\n I’ve been excited about Wildstar from jump. The humor in the videos made it stand out from other MMOs. It had a fresh feel to it that I liked from the start. With the videos and screengrabs the devs seemed to give us just enough to get us interested in the game without being oversaturated with information. (Grats to their team for that!) I have my eye set on a few main characters I want to try at launch; for the beta weekends I want to explore things I didn’t have an initial interest in.<\/p>\n Small confession: my name is Kaloni and I am an altaholic. I started out with a Drakan stalker. Targeting uses a telegraph system, which I find really fun and engaging compared to most tab-target MMOs. It makes combat feel like your character is actually hitting things instead of ‘two calculators fighting,’ as I saw one player comment in the Advice channel. I only got him to level five, so I have yet to experience the full awesomeness that is the stalker, but I’ll pick it back up next beta weekend. Next I tried a Chua spellslinger. It was a ton more fun than I had expected. Being able to quickly and efficiently dispatch enemies while remaining mobile made it a lot of fun to play. I haven’t delved into healing yet, which is my primary interest with the spellslinger, but I’m looking forward to trying that next time. Next up was a Chua esper, the first class I was disappointed in. Wildstar is all about movement. You have to be able to get out of telegraphed attacks. For most of the esper’s skills, you have to have your feet planted; otherwise you interrupt yourself. This may change in higher levels or with more points put into certain skills, but at these lower levels you pay for choosing damage over mobility. I love their range, and I can see where they would be valuable party members. I’ll have to give them a second chance next weekend. The last class I got to was a Chua medic. (I see a pattern forming.) Medics are medium armor healers but also fantastic DPS. I got to level 12 with it, the longest I stuck with any one character this weekend. I liked being able to take on three and four mobs at a time, getting double and triple kills on my own. Kind of an ego stroke. I enjoyed what little healing I did. I look forward to running dungeons with my medic, hopefully next beta weekend!<\/p>\n Overall I really enjoyed the feel of the game. While discussing the game with the other Magpies, we came to the conclusion that even though your character is one of a million others like it, the game often breaks the fourth wall to make you, the player, feel like a bad ass. I have to say, playing with my wife (Alzbeta)\u00a0 and hearing her level up for the first time, and subsequently laughing for a full five minutes, was one of the best moments I’ve had in MMO gaming. I had hidden that little part of the game from her and sat waiting for her to level up just to see what she would say. (I think she quite liked it.)<\/p>\n Is it possible that people can be like baby ducks? \u00a0I feel like I\u2019m like a baby duck with MMOs–my first one–The Secret World–has become forever (mommy. No, kidding, kidding. It\u2019s become) in my mind as The MMO to measure the others. I know, I know–TSW has its share of problems, most notably bugginess, and at its core, it\u2019s not all that different from other MMOs.<\/p>\n But I mention this because the more I try other MMOs, the more I\u2019m realizing TSW has set me up with the wrong impression of what an MMO should, at least, look like\/be on the surface. I keep expecting the rather, in retrospect, minimalist display–quests and sidequests in a neat small stack under the map, collapsed to only show the title and icon; casts and healthbars equally small; dialogue rendered in little cut scenes with minimal reading. \u00a0Instead, in nearly all the MMOs I\u2019ve tried since, there\u2019s a whole lot going on on your screen. \u00a0Tutorial popups. \u00a0Leveling popups. \u00a0Giant cast bars and uncollapsed quest lists. \u00a0Dialogue popups.\u00a0 To the uninitiated (like me) it can feel a little overwhelming.<\/p>\n And in TSW you\u2019re pretty up close to your character at all times. I mentioned to my sister that TSW is more like to third-person action RPG in terms of how close you are to your character, how well you see your faces\/the faces of those you interact with, etc. \u00a0Whereas most MMOs are a bit more–or, in Wildstar\u2019s case, a whole lot more, should you choose to scroll out so far–zoomed out, to the point where you and the characters you interact with are much less intimate.<\/p>\n OK–but enough TSW vs. the World. \u00a0This is about Wildstar, and my first impressions. \u00a0Knee-jerk, out of the gate impression? \u00a0I enjoyed it, but I\u2019m not in love yet. \u00a0Lots going on, lots of great, humorous stuff (especially voiceovers) and some fun puzzles\/minigames mixed in with other, regular quests.<\/p>\n My absolute favorite thing is the combat. I really liked the combat, even though it was a little less action-y than I\u2019d first imagined from the descriptions. \u00a0The telegraphed attacks, the aiming, those were nice new touches to the \u201chit 1, 1, 1, 1, 4, 5\u201d kind of fighting that you can easily get trapped into in the MMOs I\u2019ve played. I mean. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I was still hitting a lot of 1, but at least I was aiming and moving too.<\/p>\n The art style was cute if not entirely my thing, and at first, the sheer bounciness of everything\/everyone made me crazy. But I actually got used to that and OMG the double jumping everywhere. \u00a0That was super fun. \u00a0I\u2019m terrible at jumping\/jump puzzles so being able to double jump straight out of the gate = happy. \u00a0Although I did double jump my way off the map at one point… Fortunately I was able to double jump my way back in.<\/p>\n I tried out a Mechari engineer, a Cassian stalker and a Draken spellslinger. \u00a0Racial choice as far as I could tell was more of an aesthetic thing than anything (though you did limit what classes you could be), so by far my favorite race in terms of looks are the Draken, though I could\u2019ve done with a little less ass wiggle on all the females (Yeah yeah. The games are aimed at boys blah blah blah whatever etc etc). \u00a0All the classes I played were pretty fun, though I think I prefer a fairly mobile class, as I kept feeling grumpy about having to stand still for the Spellslinger\u2019s charged attack. \u00a0The Stalker\u2019s invisibility is great fun and it\u2019s a very fast class, and the Engineer\u2019s builder move can be a little slow (see mashing of the 1 key hoping it\u2019ll go faster) but is powerful. I think I\u2019ll probably end up playing a Draken engineer if I get the game. \u00a0I reached level 11, which meant my engineer had a couple of bots and was beginning to get some tanky utilities (I think he got \u2018tank stance\u2019 which, I\u2019m not fully sure how to use yet, seeing as I\u2019m only familiar with TSW aggro situations; GW2 didn\u2019t seem to have that.)<\/p>\n My biggest frustration was with the party stuff. \u00a0I don\u2019t know if this element of the game simply wasn\u2019t refined yet, but it was maddening that I could barely find my other party members (I had to go to the map screen, or squint at the minimap for a white dot), and in a crowd, with the onslaught of names on screen in a petite font, the minor color change of their names could still get lost. Worse yet, sometimes their names were the same green as everyone else\u2019s. \u00a0There was no way that I figured out to just meet up with my group (\u2018warp to leader\u2019 put you in the same instance if you were in the same world–if you weren\u2019t, eg. half your party were in two starter areas, you had to do funk things like swap who was leader briefly). \u00a0Getting from one area to another was a bit mysterious in general–I think there was a teleport-from-place-to-place system, but I never got a chance to use it, and if there was a central city\/hub where you could reach everything (a la Agartha or Lion\u2019s Arch) I never reached it.<\/p>\n And since, at least as far as I played, it didn\u2019t appear that quests were repeatable, if you were playing with people far ahead of you in the questline, they just had to follow you around helping you if they wanted, without being able to track your objectives, getting only kill XP. \u00a0(Again maybe this is just me knowing TSW best\u2026) That said, the ability to \u201cMentor\u201d a lower player seemed cool. \u00a0As far as we could tell, it kept you from stealing all the XP from your lower buddy. \u00a0That was a nice touch.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve noticed in both GW2 and Wildstar, there\u2019s little incentive to be grouped and to stick with your group out in the open world. One thing we\u2019d always have happen in GW2 was that even though we\u2019d start as a group, everyone would wander off and end up doing their own thing. The same thing happened in Wildstar. \u00a0Kills or step completions didn\u2019t always seem to count for everyone which meant each player wandering out for themselves. \u00a0I mean maybe this is on purpose–maybe you\u2019re meant to solo until you hit dungeons, adventures, team PVP and that sort of thing. I\u2019m not sure.<\/p>\n Overall, I think I\u2019d like to reach the adventures and dungeons and other higher level stuff before I really form an opinion. \u00a0Rambling around the world grinding kill quests is a mindless sort of pleasure\/distraction, but for me the biggest enjoyment comes from things like dungeons and scenarios and raids.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The second half of our Wildstar beta players sound off on their first experiences with NC Soft’s upcoming MMO!\u00a0 Here’s what Alzbeta, Kaloni and Pluto thought. Part one<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[52,45,59],"tags":[61,54,55,53,60],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mmo","category-review","category-wildstar","tag-first-impressions","tag-mmo-2","tag-mmorpg","tag-review-2","tag-wildstar-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4aAGK-50","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":342,"href":"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Untitled2\"](\"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Untitled2-1024x593.png\")
Alzbeta:<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Nrygoth.140322.215628\"](\"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Nrygoth.140322.215628-1024x536.png\")
Kaloni:<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"Morkeleb.140321.200859\"](\"http:\/\/www.thatdamncat.com\/magpies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Morkeleb.140321.200859.png\")
Pluto:<\/strong><\/p>\n