14 DAY TRIAL // Carbine is preparing to launch the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Wildstar on June 3, a title using the good old-fashioned monthly subscription business model, an increasingly rare choice among MMO devs.
The developers have done a pretty good job of showing what their game is about up until now, by releasing a steady stream of videos highlighting various aspects of the upcoming role-playing game.
The latest installment in the Wildstar DevSpeak series of videos talks about raids, a feature that has been talked about at length, but never shown before.
Wildstar's 20- to 40-player raids are huge and chaotic, and Carbine's approach is to constantly surprise gamers by making them completely insane. As such, one of the raids available at launch features seven bosses, sixteen minibosses and two rooms, "which are also bosses," the devs say.
Wildstar uses a sort of hybrid combat system, falling somewhere between action combat, where your weapon has to physically connect with an adversary in order to score a hit, and tab targeted combat, where as long as you're facing the highlighted enemy you're pretty much guaranteed to hit, with no relation to the character model animation.
The game uses a system of telegraphs in order to highlight attacks, for both players and non-playable characters such as mobs and bosses, allowing a ton of tactical choices and making for a very coherent and engaging experience.
As the video shows, the telegraphing system highlights areas that you shouldn't be caught dead in, or rather areas that will make you become dead, should you get caught in them, letting you know what went wrong and making you better prepared for the next attempt.
The video also shows Carbine's understanding of what makes raiding fun, keeping the traditional raid structure intact and working within that structure in order to make raids as complex and challenging experience as possible.
The upcoming MMORPG is currently in open beta until May 18, which means that anyone can simply head up to the game's website and register for a free account and try out the game ahead of its launch. Granted, there are some limits imposed on the amount of content you can go through, but it still offers a good sample of the experience that players will get in the final launch.
Wildstar is coming out on June 3, and pre-orders for the game are available, granting early adopters access starting May 31, a head start of a full three days before the masses invade the world of Nexus.
