Have any of you seen the movie Contact? It’s a sci-fi film about an alien radio transmission that contains instructions to build an interstellar portal device (and it also happens to be a really smart piece of sci-fi cinema). I bring up this metaphor because a GitHub link has offered up the pieces needed to put together a WildStar emulator, it’s just up to someone with the resources and knowledge to put it together.
According to the link, pretty much everything needed to get an emulator of WildStar’s 16042 build is there, along with a link to a website and a related Discord. All that’s required is Visual Studio 2017, a MySQL server, and a 16042 client of the MMORPG. Also, of course, all of the relevant costs associated with keeping a server running. There’s also the requirement of the players to follow some extremely sage advice.
As of this writing, there hasn’t been any peep about a running WildStar emulator right now, but given that the LEGO pieces have been effectively laid out, perhaps it will be a matter of time, particularly since the aforementioned website hints that “your transport ship to Nexus will be departing shortly.”
I can’t think of Contact without thinking of Trixie and Katya now.
I will not Jodie Foster this kind of behavior
I’m glad for the few folks that played this game, I think all dead games deserve to have a private server option with fan made patches like Skyrim Mods. That said if NCSoft starts seeing private servers pop up for two of it’s dead games they might get legally motivated.
So let’s just forget about any new MMOs… let just re-zombify/rehash old, dead and failed ones that died for a reason, or just re-package existing ones as “Classic” versions.
All I can say is.. thank God for consoles. I’d go crazy if not for them.
Considering the blighted landscape of traditional MMOs that are on offer, all I use my computer for now is email, chat and news.
For all its faults, much like CoX, Wildstar had some redeeming qualities.
Downgrading from WS to FF:XIV housing is depressing. Frankly, there’s quite a bit that WS did better than FF (Costuming, UI customization, storage, custom chat channels, not nearly as alt hostile, etc.)
Well true, no game is “100%” bad. There is always something to be taken away from a game that failed as ‘redeemable’. That’s not really what I meant; it’s that all these old rehashes don’t speak to (most) people’s desire to play old and dead MMOs, but because of the desert we find ourselves in they seem to be the most attractive for older players.
I’m kind of the other way even though I know new “real” MMOs are few and far between now.
I fail to see how Wildstar’s costuming & customization was better than FFXIV’s in any way at all, there are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more options in FFXIV in each aspect.
I loved WS, too but these are two areas I actually found to be profoundly disappointing in that game.
Housing in WS was absolutely amazing, though.
FF:XIV is a very alt-hostile game. Sure you can pick up every class/job on a single character and hate life while you struggle for armory space.
Costuming:
I’m not saying WS’s was perfect, far from it. Dye application had a ridiculously expensive per-use cost at high levels. While it didn’t have the exclusions above some pieces had faction differences. The biggest sin was the gutting they did to crafting. I made a tidy profit selling pieces that were in-demand due to cosmetics.
I think there’s something to be said about people anxiously waiting to get back into the old games (or “old” as it were) that says far more about the current landscape of MMOs vs. the genre from before.
Sure there’s some nostalgia and rose colored glasses – but there are also 60k people busting down the door to play a game that’s been dead for years. I think WS would have a sustainable population.
And as a friend of mine said, playing on the CoH server has reminded them how modern games have the ever-loving shit monetized out of them, and we let all but the most egregious bits slide.
So … yeah. This trend says something more about the games today than it does about the games of yesterday.
From what I’ve seen playing older games where there is a Classic version, the servers are jam-packed on opening day and even queues. The feeling is euphoric, people are playing it like it’s the first time, or playing it as quickly as they can since they know all the things to do and stay away from.
Then over the course of a couple of weeks, people start to remember why they left it in the first place, kind of like an old romantic other (“OH that’s RIGHT! His feet smelled bad! Phew!”) and then the population starts to drop off.
Then after a few months, all but a handful are still playing that great old game anymore. I think it will happen here and for me it’s like being served stale bread that was briefly warmed in the microwave; sure it’s good for 1 minute after but you better eat it fast or it will be worse than it was before you re-heated it.
This isn’t a commentary on people who choose these old games and rehashes, it’s just how I view it as a waste of time instead of advancing the genre for short-term gain.
I guess I view it as less “the players left the game” and more the “game left the players.” CoH was profitable when it went down. WoW classic has every potential of being profitable because it’s not like people quit vanilla WoW, WoW just evolved. Same thing with EQ progression servers – I do think that Rift progression server faceplanted … but overall, legacy/progression servers seem to do rather well?
I think we should also understand what success looks like for these things. Success is not a blockerbuster 1million+ players — it’s a small to medium community who’s costs roughly equal income from the community.
“CoH was profitable when it went down. WoW classic has every potential of being profitable…”
===============
First EVERYTHING has ‘potential’. Everything. But that’s not how things work out. WildStar “had potential”. Fallout ’76 “had potential”. Warhammer Online “had potential”. EQ2 Classic “had potential”. It’s such an overplayed/overused word talking about videogames like people throw around the word “hero” for someone who just did some small thing that it loses it’s meaning.
True, but CoH wasn’t “very profitable.” Sometimes that’s enough for a company that makes ANY product to get rid of.
Many times you’ll watch a TV show, go to the supermarket, or a car dealership, or a clothing line and wonder “What happened to X? You guys used to sell that. It was good.” and then told “Yeah, it sold but not well enough so we moved it for Y”. This is common and I don’t understand why the NCSoft hate for doing it because even when it was running, most people were eager to play “something else” and left to do so.
It wasn’t NCSoft that killed the game, it was all the players who played it sparingly… subbed and then quit to play something else that killed it.
Success (as far as companies define it to stockholders) is not small increments of profit, those are for small to medium companies which NCSoft was and is not. CityState will be happy to get a small solid base because they don’t have the expenses, legacy costs for employees and everything else so being “in the black” but not making huge profits will be fine.
For a company like NCSoft with fiduciary responsibilities, that kind of small CoH profit just wasn’t worth the outlay of resources to justify.
But Classic WoW.. its gonna be the best… the biggest release
The phrase “Stop liking what i don’t like” comes to mind.
Not at all. Just a point of view regarding stagnation in the industry which now mostly consists of a lot of Soylent Green.
If you say so. In my point of view, a lot of the new releases are failing, which means that games that were released 5/7 years ago, while this industry was under a transition from older MMO models to newer, are having to pick up the slack. Some are able to do it, like ESO and GW2, altho i’m of the opinion that GW2 does that on a thread, since they have one of the worst balancing i’ve ever seen in a MMO, and some tank hard and shut down, which is Wildstar’s case.
But all in all, your main point isn’t really wrong. Pservers ARE graveyards for older games. Playing a Pserver IS necromancy. But that doesn’t mean those games shouldn’t be played. The parallel with necromancy is good, to an extent: Necromancy is a craft that in itself directly messes with human morals and ethics. The only ethic that a pserver messes with is the grey area of IP ownership, but the game itself doesn’t.
Pretty much driven me back to being more active with tabletop rpg’s. I’m in the middle of design and set up for a GURPS campaign currently. Hopefully it will be ready for me to run within the next couple months. I get a bit perfectionist and need to reign that urge in. lol
So in a word, it’s driven me to really go back to old school gaming. lol
Oh, that game where you make a roll to shave.
lol, good one.
Man, i don’t know if i love or hate GURPS. The little i’ve read about it, the manual is something you can adapt to ANYTHING. If you want to play a cyberpunk RPG on Storyteller, you’re going to have to change quite a lot. But Gurps? It has everything.
That being said…IT HAS EVERYTHING. It’s too much. I’ve never seen a game that was so near EVE levels of Excel Spreadsheet.
Figuring out what you want to use and what you don’t can be daunting as a GM. I just have always preferred skill based game systems over class/level based ones. Add to that that I love a parry/block, dodge combat system for players versus hit/miss systems and armor that reduces damage.
Its also nice that it does allow you to do pretty much anything genre wise. That’s a very flexible tool to have even if it can be overwhelming at times. :)
This has been a thing for months.
please… no more sir
Already in gaming bliss thanks to emu’s, but i can’t help to think how F’ing amazing Wildstar would be when operated with emu dev passion, ummm yea, like hell yeah!
This article is so misleading and wrong…
Please ask people that know what they do before writing…
Please explain the misleading and wrong parts before posting a shitpost.
The title is already wrong. NF is already an emulator…
And the wrong stuff continues through the whole article.
Joining the discord and asking instead of just looking at the website and github would be an idea before writing it
So, the link to the github is correct in all the “all the pieces” bit – but if you read the discord you’ll also understand that while you can stand the rogue server up, much of the pieces to actually play aren’t there yet. So when you consider that most people log into an emulator expecting a fully-functional game, the Wildstar emulator isn’t in that place yet, nor is there a public-ready emulator.
The rest of the piece is, objectively correctly as it’s just a recitation of pieces that are in place.
Would like a WS EMU with a slower exp rate.
I am extremely confused. As I know, this emulator is a work in progress and in development. There is no server code leak as it was for CoH. This emulator is already known for months and they are years away from a working full version. So what is the news exactly here?
I dont want to be negative, I would be the happiest person if there was a WS private server.
Same. You’d think someone would have leaked all that is necessary by now.
Curiouser and curiouser…
No matter how hard a studio tries to kill a game, the community around that game will keep it alive.
Good luck all you WildStar fans! :D