14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Carbine outlined its plans for massively multiplayer online role-playing game Wildstar over the course of 2015.
The company isn't doing as well as it could be, as Wildstar, its much-hyped MMO, isn't seeing the attention everyone thought it would.
The game is pretty good but has several issues which have caused the community to slowly dwindle, with many gamers abandoning it due to its grindy nature, seemingly lacking PvP, and high difficulty of raiding content.
Wildstar promised to deliver an elusive holy grail of the MMO world, the hardcore experience of the 40-man raids that World of Warcraft became famous for. Since its early days, developer Blizzard Entertainment decided to move toward a more accessible focus, and Carbine saw a niche it could exploit.
Carbine even has many staff members that worked on the original World of Warcraft video game, so it was a match made in heaven, at least on paper. Unfortunately, it seems that many people from the former hardcore crowd can't dedicate as much time to gaming anymore, and the high skill barrier put a lot of Wildstar's fans off.
Judging from the information provided by the raid progression tracking websites, only an infinitesimal fraction of the player base can even step foot in the Datascape raid.
Carbine seeks to correct some of its errors over the course of 2015 and hopes to attract more players to its massively multiplayer online game.
A ton of stuff lined up
The first half of the year will bring a ton of new solo and group content to the game, including new dungeons, adventures, and Shiphands.
In addition to this, the company is looking to revamp its customization systems in order to enable users to add even more personality to their characters, and improving the Elder game experience with tons of opportunities to find new and exciting loot.
The next scheduled update, titled The Protogames Initiative, will come with a bunch of new stuff to do.
The Protogames Academy is a training dungeon meant to prepare lower level players for taking on the telegraphs, interrupt armor, and other boss mechanics that they will have to master in order to fare well when tackling more difficult content.
The Ultimate Protogames is an exciting new dungeon for high-level players, and They Came from Fragment Zero is a level 6 shiphand that introduces players to group gameplay at a much earlier level.
Furthermore, the company decided to alter some of its core design mantras in order to provide an easier entry to some of the adventures in Wildstar.
More accessible content
Currently, a lot of the shiphands, adventures and dungeons are hidden and need to be unlocked in order to be accessed, which unfortunately keeps many players locked out of the content. The Protogames Initiative update will take care of this, making all the content available through an expanded Looking for Group tool.
In addition to this, Carbine's intent of making the game's end level content more manageable will see Datascape, the 40-man dungeon, be reduced to a 20-man raid, due to the difficult nature of managing such a sizable roster of players, a feat which not many guilds were able to successfully pull of.
All the updates coming this year are based on player feedback and internal company data based on player activity, and Carbine has a lot of tweaks in store for many of the game's existing systems.
If you're interested to see the full breadth of the company's plans for 2015, you can check out the post on the Wildstar blog.
