This week’s Massively Overthinking focuses entirely on WildStar, out of whose devs we’ve been trying to get answers — never mind reassurance about the game — for many months. But Carbine just isn’t up for interviews, and after the half year Carbine has had, I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone. But like a lot of people, I had hopes that WildStar’s free-to-play transition would turn it around. Instead, analysts lost faith, quarterly financials showed only a small bump (and a loss year-over-year), Carbine got yet another new game director, PvP servers were abandoned and merged, and the game’s former community manager told Reddit that the studio had “killed every desire [he] had to work in the industry anymore.” Last week, systems lead Brett Scheinert left the company, refusing to discuss his reasons, sending the community into further worry.
So what’s going on here? What’s Carbine up to, and what does WildStar need to do to still be alive in 2017? I posed these questions to the Massively OP team.
Andrew Ross (@dengarsw): WildStar had great visuals, great marketing, and great atmosphere, but the game underneath felt like too much of the same from all too familiar restrictive starting experience, and endgame became the stuff of modern MMO players’ nightmares. Unmitigated hype, dealt it more damage to it than anything else. I’ll admit that as a big Asheron’s Call fan, seeing Jeremy Gaffney at the helm of a new IP gave me faith that the game would be something more social than grindy, but I ultimately felt let down by the game’s forceful pushing of combat as the main source of gameplay.
That isn’t to say it’s a bad game. Even as a PvP player, I think the idea behind the PvP/PvE server merge is a fair and creative idea, but probably too little too late. MMOs generally bleed out these days, not build up. I have no idea what the Carbine has in mind. Saving an MMO is incredibly difficult, but we’ve seen Final Fantasy 14 pull it off, so it’s not impossible.
Assuming Carbine somehow had the funding for it — and made more systems accessible from the start, made paths viable as main-game content, added a space game with ship boarding or some other new, sci-fi specific type gameplay — I know I’d give it a second look. I’m not sure if I’d pay to play, as even Final Fantasy XIV has yet to convince me to jump in and sub. Sci-fi has been WildStar’s strong point for awhile now in a genre that’s still heavily elf based. Maybe pushing that would work.
Brianna Royce (@nbrianna, blog): I don’t want to dive back into why WildStar is where it is — we’ve been talking about that for so long, even since before launch, that it’s gotten almost boring. What matters to me as a gamer and observer is what WildStar does next. As I alluded to in the introduction, what WildStar’s players and even its detractors need more than anything is reassurance. Free-to-play didn’t save the game enough, and I’m no longer confident China will be much of a help either. Confidence is low. Faith in NCsoft is lower. And MMO players have proven time and again that they respond pretty well to honesty and transparency but poorly to silence. When MMO studios stop talking, stop answering questions, stop two-way communication with players outside of scripted encounters, it nearly always means something bad, which erodes confidence even more (consider EverQuest Next for another timely example), whereas honesty about the state of the game and its future — even if the truth isn’t everything we’d hope — at least allows people to rebuild trust for the studio.
If WildStar is small now, a small niche raiding themepark with a scaled-back dev team and more realistic update aspirations to match, that’s fine. There are a lot of games doing worse than WildStar if that’s the case. But silence on the topic is far, far worse. I hope Carbine figures that out before it’s too late because half a dozen years from now I’d really like to be telling the story about how that scrappy game hit rock-bottom only to turn it around while we cheered for the underdog.
Eliot Lefebvre (@Eliot_Lefebvre, blog): WildStar’s collapse upon launch is something I’ve spilled a lot of virtual ink on in the time since its launch, and I’ll probably spill a lot more over time if given the choice. The fact is that it seems to be two different games uncomfortably jostling for space with one another – a hardcore raiding throwback to the earliest days of WoW on one hand, and a sprawling sandpark on the other. Unfortunately, the former is greedy, took lots of resources, and has soured a lot of people on the game over the short term.
What the game really needed in its post-F2P transition was the ability to recover that player faith, to bring players and onlookers back to a point of saying, “Oh, yes, this looks like a thing that’s worth playing again.” And the changes it has made are very positive ones. The problem is that a lot of it isn’t much of a hook to get players back who had already written it off, and the chaos of login servers when it did transition meant that the people eager to jump back in and see if it was better kind of got blunted. Shifting design priorities over mid-stream is a daunting task, and the game is hitting an uncomfortable place wherein it’s shedding developers, leading to slower deployment of new content, leading to fewer players, leading to more developers leaving or being made to leave…
The short version is that it’s stuck in a cycle of hurting, and the fact that its first major post-F2P update has taken so long to come out has not helped matters in the least. Combine that with a combat system and customization mechanics that always were a little hard for players to wrap their minds around and the game has already lost some of its potential playerbase. Carbine’s management cannot be unaware of the problems – I genuinely believe that what we’re seeing is a result of developers being certain that individual pet visions would carry the game and then not being able to course-correct once those assumptions were proven wrong.
So what can fix things now? Unfortunately, the free-to-play shift came and went, and the developers weren’t able to capitalize upon it, but something needs to be done to get people interested in playing again. The best bet – the only bet, really – is announcing something major and exciting, like a major buy-to-play expansion that doubles down on what players are still enjoying about the game. But I think the studio is stuck in an uncomfortable spot without the resources to really pull that sort of major announcement together. Just restoring player faith would go a long way; an apology and an explanation would do better than just saying “everything is fine” while things are very obviously not fine.
I’m hoping that the game pulls itself together, but the odds seem increasingly low. Because there’s a big hill being built up, and the buzz evaporates, and the game doesn’t do anything to actually improve in significant fashions.
Justin Olivetti (@Sypster, blog): WildStar is an easy target for malcontents and industry cynics, and who knows — they might actually be right in proclaiming a sooner-than-deserved date of expiration. The problem here lies more with Carbine than the game itself, which I feel is a really solid and fun MMO (and gets far more ire than it should). We just haven’t heard enough out of Carbine over the past five or six months to know what’s going on, post-F2P, other than the aforementioned income bump and the upcoming Arcterra patch. Uncertainty about the future keeps players from getting as invested as they could in an MMO, and this becomes a self-fulfilling feedback loop of doom.
So what does Carbine need to be doing this year? There’s no magic bullet here; it’s all “marketing,” “communication,” and “patches.” The studio needs to keep promoting the game however it can and streamline its patch development process so that it can get more (solid) updates out more frequently. WildStar already has a very good F2P model that’s hopefully profitable for the studio, so I’d leave the business model alone for now. The devs and CMs need to be talking a LOT more to fans and press than they are now — this “running silent” thing they’re doing is hurting everyone and everything involved.
As I said, the game itself is really great and its fans are pretty adamant in their praise for it. WildStar as a whole needs forward momentum, and only Carbine can lead the charge on that.
Patron Archebius: WildStar never really got off the ground, did it? I never made it past the beta, so forgive me if my impressions are a little off, but… it seems to have had a rough go of things from the start. And it sounded pretty good! As far as features go, as far as new features go, it certainly seemed more dynamic and interesting than a lot of themeparks out there – add to that the well-developed (if divisive) graphical style and experienced dev staff, and a decade ago, it would have been a sure-fire hit. But the mindset and the playerbase they were targeting had already moved on, and raiding, the star of the show, never got a chance to shine.
So you have this great big thing you built, built out of hard work and years of labor, and you finally open the doors and… no one cares. No one cares that you’ve done all these neat things. It’s like building the best horse carriages ever in 1923. And so they haven’t been making much money, and I imagine that internally, frantically, everyone is trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. I’m sure it feels like someone just lit your house on fire, and you’re torn between struggling to put out the flames and just throwing the water bucket at it and screaming in frustration before you go stomping off and try to scrape together enough money, time, and talent to build another one.
So that’s what I imagine the internal atmosphere is like. Except, like, in slow motion. Over months and months. And honestly, I’m not sure if they can do anything to put out the fire. My gut feel is that most people have already forgotten about the game, or even if they haven’t, it’s not in the ESO “maybe I’ll log on and play it again some day” or the WoW “just wait till the next expansion comes out” way. It’s in the, “You remember Rickrolling? Good times” kinda way. No one’s bringing it back.
It’s sad and horrible to watch, and I really hope they can pull out the death spiral and get people back in, but that takes investment. And if you’re investing in the current game, you’re not investing in the next. And if your current game is going up in flames… well, at what point do you stop throwing water at the fire and start carrying your family photos out?
Patron Adam Babloyan (@Vagrant_Zero): It gives me no great pleasure to inaugurate my first Massively Overthinking piece with an unvalidated finality better suited to our comments section, but where WildStar is concerned I feel the writing’s on the wall at this point. Which, to be clear, is an absolute shame considering the game isn’t really lacking in content nor a loyal playerbase that’s enjoying said content. After all, there is a clear path to level-cap, some end-game material for the dungeoneers and raiders, and a decent amount of “alternative” play-styles for those at the elder game who don’t care to hamster wheel their way to purples. Could there be more? Sure! But that can be said for just about every MMORPG on the market so it’s not really saying much at all.
However, and I would further add undeniably, WildStar is the sick man of themepark MMOs. So what’s the problem then? Personally, I feel like WildStar needs to take a good hard look at its features. Specifically, features like level scaling for all zones, a horizontal progression system that subtly replaces their current vertical model (something akin to EverQuest’s Alternate Advancement), and further refinements and new play-styles geared towards gamers that eschew the purple-chase. I couldn’t rightly tell you what that philosophical shift might look like, but then it’s not my job to either. Mayhaps a cursory glance at what Bethesda is doing with Elder Scrolls Online wouldn’t go askance?
Overall, I think WildStar would benefit from a complete realignment towards creating ways to bring what’s left of its players together, making as much content as possible relevant to as many players as possible, and ensuring that there is something to do for the players that have burned that content and are in a holding pattern. Sadly, Carbine doesn’t have a choice if we’re honest. They no longer have to resources to churn out content whose cadencecy would be relative to their immediate competitors (here’s looking at you FFXIV, even if you’ve had a dip in form lately). Carbine must find a way of making what they have now more appealing and more relevant if they don’t wish to be another footnote in MMO history.
Which brings us neatly to the million dollar question. Do I think NCsoft has the vision and patience to let Carbine get WildStar to such a place?
Don’t bet your cupcakes on it.
Your turn!
