14 DAY TRIAL // Carbine Studios' upcoming massively multiplayer online role-playing game Wildstar is set to launch two weeks from now, and the developers have no qualms about admitting that their game was made to resemble World of Warcraft.
Over the years, many developers have made their MMOs in response to Blizzard's one MMORPG to rule them all, and most of the other dozens of attempts have crashed and burned since. Carbine, however, is confident that theirs will not.
Jeremy Gaffney, Carbine Studios' executive producer, is the first to point out that Wildstar was made in response to World of Warcraft. He even has around 20 members that have been on WoW's development team over the years working on Wildstar as we speak.
In addition to this, Gaffney co-founded Turbine, which was responsible for Lord of the Rings Online and Asheron's Call, then worked on Ultima Online at Origin, and finally spent around a decade at NCSoft before coming to Carbine, which means that he's seen a few MMOs over the years.
In an interview with CVG, he revealed that work on Wildstar began a long time ago, with around 20 of the senior leads from Blizzard jumping ship after World of Warcraft was released, with the intention to make a similar game, "but do it right this time."
The original team worked on World of Warcraft for around seven years, and as such two separate paradigms evolved. The first group, knowing what they did wrong and what was good, wanted to make something like WoW, only tweak it to make it better.
The second group wanted to make something completely opposite, something that would get as far from everything that World of Warcraft is as possible.
The end result is easily seen in Wildstar, as both teams got to work on whatever they wanted, and as such they got the best of both worlds.
The team focused on making completely new stuff created the extensive housing system, the gigantic 40v40 PvP fortresses, the Warplots, and the monthly update system that ensures everything is up to date and that the players get to experience new content constantly instead of only once every six months or a year.
In addition to this, they also implemented the Path system, making everything revolve around the type of dynamism that they always wanted in a MMO, allowing the settlers to build up the world, to create new stuff all around the game universe.
The team that wanted to preserve the core of the World of Warcraft experience but channel it in the right direction made sure that they brought back some of the things that were very popular during vanilla WoW, but that have been since abandoned.
As such, they took the 20- and 40-man raids of old and combined them with the dynamic combat system, making things much more dynamic and movement-based, conveying the feeling that the game is played in real time and that your involvement in the world and success of the encounter is not merely a number in a DPS spreadsheet.