Choose My Adventure: Starting fresh in WildStar

There are times when I’ve been away from a game for a while that I’m honestly not sure if I remember something correctly. I like to think that I have a pretty good memory, and years of evidence tends to bear that out, but it is by no means a perfect memory. I forget things like anyone else. It’s always possible for me to forget one or two things as time goes by.

But then I run into something like WildStar’s starting tutorial, and there’s no ambiguity whatsoever. I definitely would have remembered this; this is downright different. This is a very new experience compared to how the starting experience on a new character used to run.

That’s not an entirely bad thing; while I liked the old starting experience, it wasn’t exactly great, and it was a lot of time spent farting about on a ship instead of actually, like, playing the game. So I think it’s worth examining on its own merits and deciding whether or not the game successfully introduces its core concepts with this version.

While it’s been a long time since I’ve played the game, a lot of my play time was immediately spent getting back muscle memory and seeing if everything still works the way I remember it. The biggest problem I found myself having was honestly forgetting that my double jump wasn’t the Demon Hunter double-jump and I couldn’t glide; that didn’t affect my ability to get anywhere, it just meant mentally kicking myself each time I tried to triple-jump.

The two biggest things that were different were the game’s new camera behavior, which can either be a toggle or just fully switched on, and the aforementioned starting experience. I’m sorry to say that the “conditional” version of the camera modes don’t seem to work all that well, but the toggle works just fine, and it definitely makes camera movement smoother than my usual habit of holding the right mouse button down. For a tab-targeting game, it’s not worthwhile; for a game like this, it borders on being vital.

Combat, as always, is smooth and responsive. It’s actually got a satisfying sort of subtle depth to it, even before most of my Stalker abilities really work with one another in any substantial fashion. Telegraphed casts can be dodged, but they can also be stunned; stunning someone out of a cast offers you a window of vulnerability in which your abilities deal much more damage, but your stunning ability is limited. You have to decide whether to stun this attack, or dodge instead and stun something that’s harder to dodge, or just stun now and take advantage of the increased damage window, or…

It feels, as it has always felt, very organic. This is helped by the smoothness of the animation. I recognize that the graphics turn some people off from the game for some reason, but the way that everything is so perfectly kinetic appeals to me endlessly. I love watching my Draken’s tail arc about as she jumps, creating a perfect liquid line of movement as she bounds along and descends.

What? Yes, I made a Draken. Not a Mechari. I know, you’re probably surprised, but I like the lot of ’em.

The new tutorial is reasonably effective at showing off what the actual game will be like, but I do miss the way that the original tutorial did a fine job of showing off the character of each of the factional races. By the time you were done with the old tutorial, you had a worse idea of the environments and likely challenges you’d face, but you had a very clear picture of what all eight races and both factions were all about. This is probably less important when you’re trying to convince people to stick with the game, but it still makes my lore-loving heart a bit sad.

Following the tutorial, you get a straight-up choice about where to go next; I decided to head to Levian Bay, as I’d gone there more often back in the day and wanted to see how that had changed. It also gave me a chance to put it under my heels as an Explorer, which is well-suited to the game’s kinetic style of movement. Much of the optional Explorer gameplay is all about scouring for different routes, asking and determining how you get up somewhere, and altogether just looking in otherwise unexamined corners of the map. No jumping puzzles in the bay, although I know they come about later.

The changes made to Challenge gameplay are also welcome; I always liked the idea of Challenges but hated the random slot machine aspect of their actual mechanics. Now, it’s a simple reward track progression; earn enough points through successful challenge completion and you can pick out a higher tier of rewards, no muss, no fuss. Straightforward and no longer requiring you to repeat a challenge four or five times for a needed bit of cosmetic flair. I can get behind that.

That’s something that struck me going through everything, really; it’s not that the game has undergone some major sea change, it’s that a lot of the more annoying parts of gameplay (at this low level) have had their rough edges filed off or just been removed outright. The parts that were always fun and neat, like the actual combat, survive more or less intact. The parts that had previously been good but flawed have gotten improved or otherwise made less obnoxious to play through.

I haven’t yet made much in the way of Omnibits, but I do like the way that the game makes those accessible for people as well. It feels very organic, like you really are just paying for convenience of unlocking some cosmetics faster and more reliably. So that earns points from me.

Of course, it remains to be seen if the game can maintain this level of positive impression over the next few levels. Right now, it strikes me as a symptom of the same problem I’ve mentioned before, that the game is something of a tragic tale. It’s got a lot to recommend it, but some boneheaded design decisions really relegate that great stuff off to one corner. If this was the whole game, or even the heart of the game, there would be no reason this game shouldn’t be an overwhelming success.

And at least the new tutorial introduces you to how great housing is. That’s worth points.

For now, I’ve been shuttled on to the next portion of the game’s ongoing progression, which doesn’t offer a whole lot of different options at the moment, but it does allow me to explore a diverse set of lore and undertake oh so many new challenges. It’s the zone where the game starts opening up, offering crafting, and otherwise introducing you to the larger wold. So as Ms. Limbwrencher ventures forth, I do in fact have a poll for you:

Look, that’s a question most of my friends have been asking, so it bears evaluation.

As always, polls will close on Friday, and I’ll be back next week with another tale of adventure for you to enjoy. Until then, leave your thoughts down in the comments or mail them along to eliot@massivelyop.com, which is something I say literally every week in every single column. Some things haven’t changed.