Not Wildman: NCSoft's MMO Wildstar Out This Year
NCSoft's next big MMO, Wildstar, has been quiet for the best part of the year, and this is of course because it's been on a fantastic voyage to the bottom of the sea, tutoring giant squid, blue whales and starfish in the ways of levelling up and crafting. Either that or they wanted to develop a load more of the game before showing it off again. I went to see and play Carbine Studios' sci-fi/fantasy mash-up, which aims to be a deconstruction and then new reconstruction of MMORPG tropes, last week, and I'll have a full report on that for you late next week.
In the meantime, today they're telling the world about one of their two opposing, tri-race factions, and pledging to get the game out in 2013.
The second, dastardly faction the Dominion I'll tell you about soon, but in the meantime here's a rather cheery scene-setting video explaining who good guys The Exiles are and what they're up to on Wildstar's worn-torn planet, named Nexus:
More than a little Firefly in there, and I am totes OK with that.
As you may already know, something Wildstar is doing in addition to mroe traditional classes and levelling is the concept of Paths, additional playstyles designed to reflect your own preferred habits within a virtual world. Soldier and Explorer are the first two of these to be shown/explained in detail (more on Explorer specifically from me next week), so here's Carbine on them:
And, yeah, we have a '2013' release date - which is a little sooner than I'd expected (given how long Guild Wars 2 gestated for) and I guess it means Wildstar is abstractly going head to head with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls Online. And they say the age of mega-budget MMOs is over, eh?
For more on Wildstar, have a read of Carbine boss Jeremy Gaffney's extensive 'state of the game' latter over here.