There’s probably much you’ll recognise when you first clap eyes on Wildstar. The colourful, overtly fantastical world; the exaggerated characters and animations, the middle-bottom icon row; the rooted-to-the-spot NPCs proffering quests and sales…
By Carbine’s own admission, Wildstar embraces most of the well-known MMO tropes (though apparently tweaked and improved) in addition to adding its own new ideas. They might be hoping to reinvent the wheel to some extent, but they clearly reckon it still needs to be something that’s round and spins if it’s to draw a crowd.
It might look a little WoW-like, and even play WoW-like on a basic level, but there’s a ton of thoughtful and genuinely bold stuff built on top of that familiar foundation. It’s perhaps tempting to linger on
the fusion of fantasy, sci-fi and steampunk, rendered as something of a high-detail ‘toonland, but that theme and aesthetic really isn’t the major force at play here. Why we should play attention to Wildstar is its concept of playstyles, aka Paths – an additional layer of specialism on top of race, class, haircut and all that, and one that’s designed to shape the game as a whole depending on what kind of MMO gamer you are.
Wildstar Online [Carbine Studios]
Rispondi Citando
