Software Rants 21: Wildstar

So I'm skipping a Plasma 5.4 rants. Only issues are that krunner is now incredibly laggy and crashes a lot due to its history feature, my displayport monitor starts slower than the others so plasmashell doesn't properly add it to the desktop set and I have to restart it after logging in most of the time, and the new audio widget doesn't have output switching. Highlights are lots of new icons, krunner history (lol), and a good audio plasmoid finally.

But on to more important things, like video games! Particularly MMOs. Particularly, Wildstar. It went free to play about two weeks ago, and I have been playing quite a bit since then (played every class a smidge, lowest is Engineer at 3 and highest is my 50 medic and 8 warrior, spellslinger, and stalker). I'm going to detail my likes and dislikes about this game, though I do like it and really hope it can succeed - amongst competition like Neverwinter and Tera, it does stand out for its setting and its housing, and the PVE is much nicer when you actually do need to use the trinity.

At that, in terms of my qualifications, I have most leveling reputations maxed, I got max level in scientist, I decked out my house quite a bit (but have not bought an expanded house because I'm cheap and hoarding plat for riding skill) and have completed most veteran adventures at this point, and have gone into a veteran dungeon to lag to death and die immediately (but the lag I'm not considering since its wholly because Wildstar cannot use any Wine performance optimization and I believe it throws a lot of rendering errors as well).

First up, the intro experience. This game lacks characters. Artemis Zin is pushed early on in both starting zones as this continuous character, but without a major introductory cutscene to introduce her shes just words you follow like every other NPC. By the end of the game when her story ends in Malgrave I think I picked up a bit on her personality but only by reading lore items and actually paying attention, something MMO players will never often do.

I'm going to make large comparisons to WoW - of course - because this game was developed by a studio founded by ex-vanilla WoW developers. In WoW, I do care about major lore characters, and there are three ways I develop an affinity - cutscenes that show them off (Varian Wrynn in the Ulduar cinematic), significantly scripted ingame actions they perform (think the duel in the wrath launch event between Garrosh and Thrall), and user generated lore hype (everyone loved the Warchief in vanilla just because of his WC3 lore and it spread to other players.

Basically, you cannot make a character great on written text in a 3d world. They need to take action. In the OmniCore weekly at the end of the game you escort a mechari called Axis Pheydra who finally gives you some character with an NPC that has voiceovers besides a bit of Artemis. Basically each race has a quest leader - Mondo Zax for the Chua, for example - that recurrs in the world, but since all they do is act as questgivers and have very limited interaction in the world they aren't really too interesting.