The Nexus Telegraph

I like WildStar a lot. You knew from an early time that I liked the game's aesthetic and sense of humor, and as time went on it became clear that I also liked the mechanics and the approaches it has toward an endgame. When I finally got my first hands-on playtime with the game, I liked that, too. What I'm getting at here is that WildStar is currently fighting with Final Fantasy XIV for the title of my absolute favorite MMO, and they both coexist in a space of I want to play you both all the time.

But some people aren't in that boat. Some people aren't that wild about the game, even some people whom I work alongside. And that is totally fine.

Last week's events made me decide to do one of my periodic column-topic-switches to discuss the fact that there is going to be bad press about WildStar out there, sometimes even bad press that complains about things that you don't think are relevant. And the best thing you can do is be cool.

Continue Reading

When WildStar comes out, it is going to have raiding. It's going to have the sort of raiding and group content that is meant to be challenging. No facerolls intended here; you'd better bring your A-game on raid night, or you will be facedown in the dirt so often that people will think you're doing a performance piece on the Kennedy family tree.

I am not a lover of raiding. This is not difficult to find evidence of on this site because I've talked about the issues with group-only endgame antics on more than one occasion. Heck, I wrote about how raiding turns you into a horrible person. So you would think I'd look at what we know about WildStar's endgame and start facepalming, possibly whilst shaking my head and muttering obscenities.

But I'm not. I'm totally cool with what we've been told so far about the endgame because there's much more than just the raiding aspect in the game, and I'm intrigued by how it's working out.

Continue Reading

We still don't know exactly what the last two WildStar classes will look like, unless my speculation turns out to be true (and you'd better believe that I believe it). But as it happens, we don't know quite as much about one of the four we are aware of. Espers are a known quantity, but they've been... not hidden, precisely. But they're also not as visible as Spellslingers, Warriors, and Stalkers. Ironic, since they were one of the first classes we knew about.

Last week I was focused on unpacking paths from the recent preview event. This time, I want to talk about Espers. I also want to talk about leveling your character and dissecting some of the other information we've been getting about the title, while leaving out one crucial bit of WildStar discussion in anticipation of next week. Yes, I have plans. You'll figure it out or see it in the "next week" blurb. Either way.

Continue Reading

The latest news out of WildStar's new previews isn't going to quiet people who dislike the concept of the game's path system, nor will it stanch the flow of complaints about the game's art style. Those of us simply waiting at attention, however, found ourselves rewarded this week with a wealth of new information, not to mention the best look we've yet seen at how the paths will work together in action instead of concept.

And that's only the tip of the iceberg; Jeremy Gaffney has said so many things that merit unpacking that it's almost impossible to swallow some of the implications. There is, in fact, far too much to unpack in a single week. So I'm going to look at paths and start figuring out everything else next week.

I may also gush about the Mechari at some point. It's like GLaDOS, Hal, and Starscream had a kid.

Continue Reading

The downside to writing about WildStar in this stage of the game's lifecycle is that because of the very nature of beta tests, I'm going to be spending a lot of time speculating instead of talking about certainties. Last week, I speculated. I was wrong on some points, as I found out when I got a letter from Carbine clarifying some things that had previously been ambiguous enough for speculation.

The upside to writing about WildStar in this stage of the game's lifecycle is that sometimes I get letters from development staff letting me in on valuable inside information.

Aside from being able to clarify my previous incorrect speculation, I also have for you a number of other important bits of information regarding the game this week, including a brief discussion of whether or not the game will allow for flight on a regular basis. So since that's well worth discussing, let's go ahead and just make this column another dialogue about movement.

Continue Reading

Nexus is a big place. We saw last week what it's going to be like getting from spot to spot in a smaller sense with last week's overview of movement, but there's more to movement in WildStar. After all, there are a lot of zones stretched out over big chunks of land, and even if you're sprinting as much as you can you'll eventually find that you can't traverse an entire continent by foot, much less the ocean.

No, for this sort of transport you need something more robust. You'll need vehicles, both personal and otherwise. You'll need boats, you'll need ships, you'll need something that can move faster than you can move even if you can jump out of a dodge. But a lot of what you need will depend upon what the game's layout looks like, so it's time to fire up the speculation machine and ask some questions, starting with those of location.

Continue Reading

I spend a lot of time playing around with theories about lore. I can't do a whole lot more in regard to playing with WildStar at the moment, so that works out well anyway, but I do enjoy throwing out theories and seeing what sticks. Sometimes that invalidates earlier theories I had in the process, but that's the business.

This week I don't want to invalidate something I already speculated upon but build upon a previous column. People seemed to like my musings on what the deal is with Nexus, but even as I was writing that column, I noticed one screaming problem: The Luminai don't fit.

Obviously the Luminai are kind of a big deal, what with their addition marking the creation of the Dominion and all that. These guys are important, and their creation was obviously intentional. But they still prompt some questions because they don't serve an obvious purpose in the larger scheme of things.

Continue Reading

Carbine Studios is holding all of the cards for WildStar and those of us not in the beta just have to wait. Which is beyond frustrating. We have to sit back and let things slowly come out of the official PR machine, and no matter how fast we get new revelations, they're never fast enough. The temptation to look for someone willing to peel back the veil is immense because it beats pressing against the glass and waiting to find out more.

But the NDA is there for a reason.

Speaking as someone who isn't in the beta but is still talking about the game on a weekly basis, I will be the first to point out that waiting for official information is often like waiting for a solar eclipse before doing even the most basic tasks. It's frustrating, slow, and irritating. The problem is that the alternative -- wherein we just jump on every new piece of leaked information -- isn't good, and it comes out worse in the end.

Continue Reading

After I penned my last installment of The Nexus Telegraph, two things happened in very quick succession. The first is that a set of beta patch notes for WildStar were leaked to the internet by some unscrupulous individual, which prompted me and many other players to immediately shout that we wouldn't have leaked the notes if we had been selected. And there's an entire article to be written about why such an action isn't cool, how it harms the game, and why the persion responsible is a particularly toxic form of "fan."

But then the second thing happened. The powers that be over at Carbine Studios, being infinitely cool themselves, decided to save people the trouble of deciding whether or not to look at the leaks. They posted the notes themselves, which means that I can now read the notes and actually write a column about them.

Of course, as with any patch notes, we've been given an incomplete picture and can make only a few haphazard guesses about how the game will look. We also know that this is not even close to the final state of the game. But there's still interesting stuff here worth analyzing and speculating about.

Continue Reading

What do the Eldan want?

It's a reasonable question. In the backstory of WildStar, the Eldan are the progenitors and the ultimate source of all the conflict that's out there. They hold all the secrets to the planet Nexus, they are the source of the technology our characters will use, and they are the ultimate starting point. The Dominion may maintain its galactic stranglehold, but the Eldan gave them that imperative.

And they are not answering their calls.

WildStar players have been keeping a careful eye on bits of lore, and intrepid fan InnocentCivilian took the opportunity to write up a great compilation on what we know about the Eldan so far. It's enough to get you thinking about what the Eldan are all about, and it led me to ask a few questions, ones that have obvious answers that make me wonder just what we'll find on Planet Nexus.

Continue Reading

Sometimes my plans coincide perfectly with real-world events. Last time I wrote this column, I planned to talk about crafting, and then on Friday WildStar gave us a look at some of what we can expect in the system. Admittedly, we don't yet know how the whole circuit board system plays into crafting or what "one of two systems" means, but we can speculate, can't we?

Before anyone asks, let me say that no, I had no forewarning or advance preview. I'm just pleased that everything came together by coincidence.

So right now we know that the circuit board interface is the basis of one of the crafting systems in the game, and we know how the circuit boards in general work. That's enough to make some reasonable guesses. Let's start by guessing at a system in which you sidestep the entire process of finding the best stats on the best items by just making it from scratch.

Continue Reading

If you look at the path system in WildStar the right way, it's a pretty limiting system. After all, if path content makes up 25% of your content in any given zone, it stands to reason that there are three paths worth of content you'll never see on any given character. Any zone in the game is made up of 43% stuff you don't get to explore.

For those of us who are fond of alts, this is not exactly a drawback. The idea that a zone I've done three times before can still hold new secrets on the fourth playthrough is endlessly appealing. But it can also feel very limiting from the right perspective simply because it does build in some hard limitations. You will never be able to completely clear an area out on one character. If you only want to play one character, you're just out of luck.

At the same time, I think this system will grow to be one of WildStar's strengths. So even if you want to just play one character and you wind up playing a single path, there are reasons to be happy about the way that paths work.

Continue Reading

The WildStar afterparty at PAX East was a lot of fun. The part where I managed to injure myself in the process? Not so much fun.

This is not the first con at which WildStar had a presence, but this year it was not just a presence but the presence. You literally couldn't walk down a hallway without seeing some of the promo art. WildStar videos were on display all over the monitors throughout the convention center, and the afterparty consisted of approximately everyone.

For those of us who have been following the game for a while, the convention provided a lot of information. For people who had literally never known it existed until this weekend, it had a huge impact, and I think it drew in a lot of surprise converts. So let's talk about all the fun there was to be had during the event and discuss how I was dumb enough to put myself out of commission for the entirety of Sunday.

Continue Reading

WildStar got a website overhaul not too long ago, giving those of us watching the game a bit more information about the class setup. All four classes have their limitations on display along with the roles that those classes will play -- meaning we're now sitting at two healers, two tanks, and two more class placeholders that have yet to be revealed, which did nicely shoot my speculation about the class/role division in the throat, but I'm not exactly complaining.

Of course, knowing who can be what means that we have a clearer picture of WildStar's structure, and that means we can speculate about how the rest of that structure will be filled in. So with full knowledge that I might turn out to be wrong before the week is out, I'm going to guess at what's coming around the bend in terms of the game's classes and how the classes will play in their respective roles.

Continue Reading

This column is wrong. I wrote it about two months ago, and it's wrong. It contains two major pieces of speculation, both of which have subsequently been confirmed as wrong, wrong, wrong. This does not exactly surprise me, as when I originally wrote it I assumed that odds were even or better that every part of the column would be proved wrong before the week was out.

It's not the only thing I'm going to write about WildStar that will be wrong, even. I could be wrong about the Exiles. I could be wrong about the Dominion. It is entirely possible that all of my speculation will fall handily under the header of "very wrong."

Yet I persist all the same. And if you want to understand why I keep talking about things when I know they might be completely wrong, that's the subject of this week's column. I love speculation columns, I will be writing more in the leadup to WildStar's release, and I wanted to explain why I do that when I have no doubt many of them will be proven wrong.

Continue Reading