WildStar

Welcome, class, to MMO Servers 101! Your professor today is Carbine Studios Lead Network & Database Engineer David Ray, and he's here to give a technical overview of how MMOs set up and run their servers. Please take notes. While Ray won't reveal all of Carbine's secrets, his explanation should be sufficient if you're curious as to how an average MMO sets up its backend.

If you're expecting an article that reveals WildStar's server rulesets, specific regions, or other practical player concerns, then this is not for you. However, it is a frank and fascinating look at the guts of the ship that runs MMOs, and considering that Ray has worked on both the space shuttle and other MMOs, we suspect that there's a good chance he knows what he's talking about.

Welcome to Massively's guide to MMO sandboxes in 2013 and beyond. I've collected the essential details on all the major sandbox titles releasing this year and in the near future in one easy-to-reference article. If you're wondering whether ArcheAge forces you to PvP, or if you can't tell The Repopulation from Origins of Malu, this is your post.

I'll be updating it as game features are added, removed, or revealed, so be sure to use the comments to let me know if I've overlooked a particularly noteworthy item. Finally, I want to point out that this isn't an exhaustive list because of the sheer number of sandbox projects ongoing. For now, I'm choosing to focus on the ones that will be playable in 2013/2014 as well as the projects that have a big-name developer attached.

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Saying that "a picture is worth a thousand words," the WildStar team has posted a picture of the team with the caption of "IT HAS BEGUN" in obvious reference to beta testing.

Yesterday, the team foreshadowed the onset of testing by tweeting, "We had Chinese food for lunch today, and our fortune cookie read: The person that keeps an eye on their spam filter will surely be rewarded."

Players interested in participating in WildStar's beta can sign up on the official site.

Update: A representative of Carbine Studios emailed us saying, "We have already seen a phenomenal response from our fans and are looking to continually add thousands of players throughout closed beta test 1 to come check out the great content we've been talking about for months. Our closed beta testing process is not a typical weekend event, but instead it will last for several weeks, giving players ample time to come in and check out the factions, races and classes they may choose to play when WildStar launches later this year."

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.

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For those who love cracking open a good piece of gear to fiddle and fine-tune the insides, then WildStar is proud to present the so-called Circuit Board Crafting System. A new dev blog over at Carbine Studios explains how gear modding (and later, crafting) will take place on a special CBC interface that breaks down the item into connected components.

Each piece of gear has several slots for microchips and a power budget that is used to limit what can be put into the item. These microchips come in different varieties, from power amplifiers to attribute boosters to special ability chips.

Many, but not all, microchips can be extracted from the gear to put somewhere else or to mod directly. However, the team is preparing a number of random stat and locked microchips that will make creating the perfect item a challenging proposition. The team wants players to have to make "really interesting decisions" in their gear modding, promising more information later on as to how CBC will work with crafting.

Did you know that WildStar has PvP? I didn't, but then again I only started paying attention after the PAX East housing reveal.

As it turns out, one of WildStar's "elder games" is arena PvP. The game's latest dev diary outlines 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 matches, and it also mentions a unique wrinkle or two. For instance, WildStar arenas aren't single-elimination but rather a series of slugfests wherein each team tries to get the opponent to use up its allotment of respawns.

There's more, of course, but you'll need to head to the WildStar website to read it.

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.

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Everyone at the completely fictional Massively office seems to have some kind of schoolgirl crush on Carbine Studios' quirky upcoming sci-fi title WildStar, and I can understand why. The setting is fresh, melding some aspects of our favorite sci-fi properties (cough Firefly cough) with a a healthy dose of fantasy and a not insignificant amount of witty comedy, and the list of features the game boasts is rather extensive. I mean, did you even see that housing trailer? Holy wow, guys.

In spite of all of that, though, I was still a little cautious about giving in to the hype. After all, I'm sure there's not an MMO fan in existence who hasn't gotten super excited about a game and become a devoted fanboy only to have his hopes and expectations shattered when the game didn't live up to the hype. So I let myself be excited, but reservedly so, until I could get my hands on the game for myself to complement Eliot's earlier PAX hands-on with the game. As it so happens, on the last day of PAX East, I got to do just that. Though it was only a short 25-minute demo (thank goodness -- otherwise the lines would have circled the convention center), I think I was able to get a pretty solid idea of what we can expect from WildStar, and let me tell you right now, we can expect some great things.

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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.

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When you start following a game, you always worry that it won't live up to your expectations.

It's inevitable, really. I didn't fall in love with WildStar after years of playing; I fell in love based upon a trailer and a design philosophy that appealed to me. The game itself could be far removed from my first impressions, or it could be a cocktail of half-finished systems and unsatisfying gameplay. Without some personal experience in Nexus, all I could to do was wait for the game and hope that it matched my hopes.

Of course, WildStar hit the ground running at PAX East 2013. I wrote on Friday about my experiences with the new housing video and some of the game's zones, but that's no substitute for playing the game. So it was with a slight sense of apprehension that I found myself standing behind the demo station controls and jumping in for the first time at PAX. Would I be satisfied, or would this turn out to be a love affair that didn't survive contact with the game itself?

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Yesterday was a big day for existing WildStar fans, as it was a chance to finally take a look at the game's housing system. It was also a big day for people who hadn't previously been fans of the game, as a lot of people sat up and realized that yep, this game will have quite a robust housing system at launch. It's one thing to be told that the game will have a housing system and quite another to be told exactly what it will do, how much it will benefit you, and how many different playstyles can take part in the fun.

Of course, some people may still be unmoved. Maybe they still have a hangup about WildStar's graphics. Maybe they're not convinced that the housing video is anything more than a beautiful lie. Or perhaps they're just opposed to in-game housing. So today we ask you, dear readers. Are you excited for WildStar's housing system? Does it make you eager to play the game or just reinforce an existing eagerness?

Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!

If you've been keeping up with activity here on Massively over the past couple of years, you know that I'm pretty excited about WildStar. So I was pretty happy to sit down and get a look at the game's high and low areas, not to mention the game's housing system. I was a bit less happy that said look didn't include a chance to play the whole thing myself, but if I had that opportunity I probably never would have let go of the demo station.

While the demo was hands-off, it did give plenty of opportunity to see a sample of the game's starting areas, what the high-level regions look like, and what players can expect when they sit down to start building their homes. So let's start out at a region that's both high in level and high above the rest of the game... because it's in high orbit. (And don't forget the housing video past the break!)

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What is WildStar? A dance sensation that's sweeping the nation? The answer to life, the universe, and everything? An upcoming MMO from Carbine Studios? All right, you in the audience probably already knew that it's the last one on the list, but you probably still have questions about the game. The newest video won't answer all of those questions, but it will give you a full picture of what the game plans to be right from the ground up.

It's all here in the trailer: Both factions, all four paths, player-built houses and PvP fortresses, active combat, and an evolving in-game story. But if you're not convinced that the game can pull off everything it promises, you're welcome to swing by PAX East this weekend to get your hands on the game on the show floor. So if you're already heading to the convention, you've got something else to put on your itinerary... and if not, you can just enjoy a characteristically narrated piece on the game.

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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.

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