WildStar: Live Forum Q&A with WildStar's Jeremy Gaffney -- Begins NOW!

Akaishen · May 2013

As a Guild Wars 2 player, I very much dislike the level lowering 'feature'. I understand it's meant to allow players to experience the world and find some form of challenge everywhere. However, it makes me, as the player, feel weak when I should feel powerful (provided that I am). If, for instance, you play Borderlands and you become powerful, weak creatures from the beginning of the game will have different death animations. This makes the player feel great about his or her progression (when something once was hard to kill is now easy to kill).

Your new patch notes states you have a mentor system. How does the mentor system differ from the GW2 system. Will it be mandatory? Will you be able to go to low level areas and easily dispatch creatures that were once challenging, or will you find the world to be challenging no-matter your progression?

The Rallying system is also similar to GW2 in that WvWvW levels everyone to 80. Pros of such a system brings many players to the same PvP (less waiting) and allows players to jump into PvP early if they wish (play your way). The cons of such a system dilutes the value of progressing in the game: why gear grind / farm / and level for PvP when everyone else can have what you have for free? How will this be balanced? Or, is it intended that everyone be as equal as possible for PvP no-matter their game progression (eSport balancing)?

In addition to that last question, or to make it more clear, does WildStar intend to focus on eSports?

(Edit) Another question with the Rallying system, will this be in place for all forms of PvP (outside of open world PvP), as in warplots?

Hope these questions get answered. Thank you for taking the time and keep up the great work on what looks to be an amazing game!

Makaify · May 2013

Originally posted by tr1age
Very happy to hear you are considering alternatives to Flying Mounts. The immersion is so much thicker when on foot or mount. Frodo didn't fly to the mountain, it would have been a very short, uninteresting movie then!

I don't understand, how does flying break immersion? Forcing the player to walk to everywhere, forever, is a major annoyance, imo. I am going to assume, that you have flown on an airplane at some point - did it make you feel like the Earth is small, or that you are getting to your destination too fast? Probably not, so why would it be like that in Wildstar?

As long as flying mounts are a max lvl thing, it wouldn't be a problem, imo. At that point, you have already explored most of the game world, why force the players to go through that same area over and over, especially if they are just logging in to do some small task on their lunch break?

If I think back in time, back in Vanilla WoW, did I feel immersed in the game? Yes. After TBC came out, did I still feel immersed? Yes.

eek711 · May 2013

Jeremy,

With regards to active combat, is there movement locking during ability animations, or will you be able to strafe, dodge, jump, etc. mid-animation? Many active combat MMO's currently force you to be stationary during abilities, but most don't have the emphasis on manipulating combat telegraphs.

Thank you for your time.

Tamath · May 2013

Will PvE in Wildstar be a never-ending arms race to get the latest wave of shiny gear before it is obsoleted with a patch, or will there be alternatives? How raid-centric is the game? I'm quite excited for it but I have little desire to go through raiding hell again a la WoW.

Similarly, will PvP also be a gear arms race or will the game be taking more of a GW2 approach in keeping things more balanced?

DaGaffer · May 2013

Originally posted by TheHavok
Hello Mr. Gaffney,

My question is more on the business side of Wildstar's development and Carbine Studio's creation. It has been repeated multiple times that many of the developers that worked on Wildstar were former Blizzard developers. And there has been comparisons made between Wildstar and WoW. As somebody who greatly enjoyed WoW for many years, I'm not disappointed what so ever by this.

I would like to know who came up with the idea to start Carbine Studios. Additionally, who had the vision and led the charge of getting Wildstar developed?

Second question: So many games seem to release unfinished products, with the idea that they can patch them up in the months to come. However, you guys have stated that you will release Wildstar when its done. This is GREAT news for us gamers. I would like to know what sets you guys apart to give you the freedom to release a product when you feel its done, as opposed to games like Warhammer Online and SWTOR which were launched with a myriad of issues.

It feels like, with other games, their management (or publisher) dictates when a game is to be launched while with you guys, it seems like the developers have the final say.

Thanks!

The team was originally formed of about 20 seniors and leads off of the World of Warcraft team - but since then (we're now many years later and more like 220 people and growing) we have folks from EQ1/2, CoH, Dark Age, WAR, and probably most of the other western MMOs big and small. And a good crop of noobs on their first MMO too (new blood is good too).

I was the executive (VP Product Development) on the NCsoft side who signed the team initially (with Robert Garriott, Richard's brother). I actually retired for a year and they gave me a call because they needed exec help and design help and I have a background in both. One of the bennies of being a VP/PD of a big company is that you know pretty much all the games in development (little games want funding, and we're a cash-rich company, and big games want to go to Korea with a major partner) and honestly this was just the coolest project in the industry in my mind, so I joined here fulltime 4-5 years back or so.

Anyhoo I'm as senior as it gets in Carbine. Within NCsoft I report to our CEO and our Global CEO and they are both gamers, so making sure the game gets backed by NCsoft is a matter of making sure it's actually fun and have 'em play. Sounds simple but it works, sometimes it's really that easy, even in a megacorp.

Tsunamii05 · May 2013

Will there be a Pet Class in Wildstar? I have always been a fan of Summoners and Necromancers but a lot of MMOs these days skip out on them.

I think a robotic pet class could be a lot of fun!

PieRad · May 2013

Originally posted by kittykatdp
Originally posted by Fuel68

PS: If you have a spare Beta Testing slot for CBT2, I and my guild will buy all members of Carbine Studios baked goods as incentive---seriously!

Homemade baked goods doesn't work. Did it already, no beta invite yet.

No telling what people put in their homebaked...

People do this at conventions too, bring homebaked cakes and what have you to devs, would you eat it if some crazy, possibly smelly nerd gave you cake? lol

muskeydogbo · May 2013

HI ty for your time ..

Will there be any events to make going back to low level areas worthwhile ? to make the WORLD feel alive not just the lfg.

Demosthenes201 · May 2013

Crafting Questions-

The patch notes mentioned the tiers Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Artisan and Expert. How will these tiers work? ex.Novice will be for player level 1-10, Apprentice 11-20, ect.

Will Weaponsmithing have available all types of items in the game? Will the list of items be heavier sided so swords, claws and other weapons of that nature of will it be an even split of item types?

Can you give more details on what weapon attachments are?

What are the planned types of ways to gather more plans/schematics for crafting? Will it be the generic talk to an NPC and learn plan or will there be plans/schemtics for crafting that you can only get from the open world such as loot?

Are there any plans to implement crafting to support PvP such as crafting basic PvP gear.

DaGaffer · May 2013

Originally posted by Tamath
Will PvE in Wildstar be a never-ending arms race to get the latest wave of shiny gear before it is obsoleted with a patch, or will there be alternatives? How raid-centric is the game? I'm quite excited for it but I have little desire to go through raiding hell again a la WoW.

Similarly, will PvP also be a gear arms race or will the game be taking more of a GW2 approach in keeping things more balanced?

We've put some spin on the standard loot-grind cycle by allowing you to invest in gear over time as well as outright replace it, and having a number of different non-loot advancement cycles both during levelling and elder games (path XP, crafting levelling (a brand new system), housing advancement (fairly deep, lots of investment is tied there), warplot advancement, and probably others I'm forgetting).

So I don't promise that there's no gearing up, but we do spread the advancement across a number of areas to hopefully reward players for playing how they want to play as well as just farming phat lootz. You'll play at some point and tell us how well we did or not.

IcedLance · May 2013

Originally posted by DaGaffer
Originally posted by vagabondNord
HEY! Super excited about Wildstar!

WILL I be able to pilot a space ship? (However big or small.) I've seen them docked in the yard, for instance, in the Housing Dev!

What will your guild system be like? (I'm coming primarily from a WoW background, so I'll be comparing. ;D)

Do you have any need for a personal assistant/human slave?

Space ships: Actually we built the whole world intending for flight from day 1. But there's a bit of a backlash in the community right now around flight trivializing content/making the world too small. So we're listening to those debates right now, if I can be honest. Back when I/we launched City of Heroes flight was a big deal, so it's interesting to me now to hear the backlash. Opinions welcome.

We do guilds, haven't announced a ton of the different stuff in 'em yet. We also do circles which are guilds-lite, allowing you to more casually bond with numbers of different friends with different interests.

You could make them big, clumsy and break on collision so you have to rebuild/repurchase it. So that people only use it for long distance travels and don't pilot it in inappropriate places (cities forests etc). And maybe add some AA so people in low-tier ships don't fly over high-lvl zones. Also I've seen that you have some nice climbing puzzles and it wouldn't be nice if spaceships ruin them.

Question: one of my favorite aspects of MMOs is crafting. Do you have anything to impress with in that part?

PS: watching the progress of this game from the very beginning, have VERY high expectations, please make it as awesome as I expect it to be!

lordmons · May 2013

What are WildStar supported languages at launch? Brazilian-Portuguese plans?

Tks.

DaGaffer · May 2013

Originally posted by PieRad
Originally posted by kittykatdp
Originally posted by Fuel68

PS: If you have a spare Beta Testing slot for CBT2, I and my guild will buy all members of Carbine Studios baked goods as incentive---seriously!

Homemade baked goods doesn't work. Did it already, no beta invite yet.

No telling what people put in their homebaked...

People do this at conventions too, bring homebaked cakes and what have you to devs, would you eat it if some crazy, possibly smelly nerd gave you cake? lol

I admit we approach homebaked goods with some trepidation.

SilasJasar · May 2013

Originally posted by Bainik
I'd like to comment on the flying mount controversy if you don't mind.

I think a lot of the people bashing flying mounts are coming from WoW where they really did and continue to have a terrible impact on the world. WoW is fundamentally played on a 2D surface and while you move through 3 space going over a hill it's still just a curved surface. When flying mounts were introduced suddenly the entire game was tied to a surface, but players were able to leave that surface and totally circumvent the game world while also allowing the fastest form of travel to be totally player controlled. The world still feels large when you can take a big step somewhat quickly (flight paths between fixed points are good) but when you can take that step instantly or to anywhere the world loses its feeling of hugeness very very quickly (flying mounts and teleport based fast travel can be really bad).

I think there are 2 solutions and both are fairly obvious. The first is simply to axe flying mounts and teleport style fast travel (GW2 suffered from the latter with zones feeling like mini-farms instead of parts of a greater whole). The second is a lot more work intensive but is what you have to do if you want flying mounts and that is to really make them an integral part of the game.

You don't necessarily have to have aerial combat (I would argue you shouldn't, water/air combat tends to feel really really bad), but the world needs to feel like it needs them. An open field will never feel right with a flying mount, but a broken landscape with floating islands with interesting cracks and tunnels on the undersides to land on (and lie in wait for those that fly by later), with islands close enough together that you fly around and among them rather than over or through. Or a giant cavern with side caverns dotted across the walls and ceiling and interesting structures formed throughout by stalagmites/stalactites so the space is filled and there are things to do on all of them. Basically, don't let a flyer leave the wold, make the world fill 3 space, even if movement on it is still in 2 space. If you can do that, flying mounts would feel awesome.

And it worked well in CoHV because the world was filled with massive sky scrapers and structures and getting high up didn't get you away from everything it just put you near different things. It also didn't make getting away from the game the universal answer to getting anywhere quickly.

You sir....I like you.

kittykatdp · May 2013

are there going to be anymore ArkShip Events before Launch??

droopy · May 2013

Originally posted by Makaify
Originally posted by tr1age
Very happy to hear you are considering alternatives to Flying Mounts. The immersion is so much thicker when on foot or mount. Frodo didn't fly to the mountain, it would have been a very short, uninteresting movie then!

I don't understand, how does flying break immersion? Forcing the player to walk to everywhere, forever, is a major annoyance, imo. I am going to assume, that you have flown on an airplane at some point - did it make you feel like the Earth is small, or that you are getting to your destination too fast? Probably not, so why would it be like that in Wildstar?

As long as flying mounts are a max lvl thing, it wouldn't be a problem, imo. At that point, you have already explored most of the game world, why force the players to go through that same area over and over, especially if they are just logging in to do some small task on their lunch break?

If I think back in time, back in Vanilla WoW, did I feel immersed in the game? Yes. After TBC came out, did I still feel immersed? Yes.

Gaining flying mounts from level 1 or max level does no difference imo as the effect will be the same in the end with players just flying past content and the negative effect on us world PvP lovers and exploring in general I'm all for flying mounts if done well i.e a world with flying islands or space flight.

I'm against everything that "removes" players from the world, it's an MMO after all, on that note i fear people will camp in their housing area and queue for everything, simular what happened to WoW and they had to actually implement a mechanic to bring players into the dead world.

That's what many of us fear/complain about. I do in no way know how it will work in Wildstar btw i hope for the best.

DaGaffer · May 2013

Originally posted by aikab
Will we be informed when the beta invites stop? So we can stop the F5 spam.

We'll try to keep folks informed for sake of the F5 keys.

DaGaffer · May 2013

Originally posted by kittykatdp
are there going to be anymore ArkShip Events before Launch??

As many as we can cram in, they are tons of fun (and quite valuable to us as putting Real Players under NDA, telling them full plans on things, and sounding out opinions is actually quite useful to us, never mind that it's fun in it's own right). We'll try to do some mini-arkships at least alongside whichever shows we attend.

eaglesbaby · May 2013

Originally posted by DaGaffer
Originally posted by aikab
Will we be informed when the beta invites stop? So we can stop the F5 spam.

We'll try to keep folks informed for sake of the F5 keys.

Thank God. Mine is already wearing out

andybbtt11 · May 2013

Will we be able to interact with the stuff we put in our houses?

Chairs, minigames, etc...

and can we put gear we no longer use in our house for decoration?

Trivolver · May 2013

What will the servers look like?

Can we expect PvE, PvP, RP, RPPvP?

syklonis · May 2013

Speaking of gear, can we color or yet will our gear stand out from others. I loathe the fact in almost all games we run around and see duplicates of ourselves everywhere in the game world. Will we be able to stand out early on and not just for end game looks ?

DaGaffer · May 2013

Originally posted by SilasJasar
Originally posted by Bainik
I'd like to comment on the flying mount controversy if you don't mind.

I think a lot of the people bashing flying mounts are coming from WoW where they really did and continue to have a terrible impact on the world. WoW is fundamentally played on a 2D surface and while you move through 3 space going over a hill it's still just a curved surface. When flying mounts were introduced suddenly the entire game was tied to a surface, but players were able to leave that surface and totally circumvent the game world while also allowing the fastest form of

<clippy clippy for space>

Other alternatives include limited flight (via a gas tank on your speederplane or w/e), mounts unlocked per zone (so that you can be a badass once you've unlocked the main quests, but that might feel too game-y) and more - we actually have a meeting later today to bounce the latest alternatives off of each other.

Dyraele · May 2013

Does food give buffs? If so, does crafted food give better buffs?

Moms_Spaghetti · May 2013

Are accounts going to be faction locked?

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