Do you know what's fun? When games actively stop you from playing them with infuriating stun abilities. No wait, that's not the fun part. The fun part is quitting out of those games in a despondent funk, then curling up into a ball and crying about MMO design. The latest Wildstar "DevSpeak" video is all about these crowd control effects and, as with many of the game's planned systems , how the developers hope to make a more engaging variation of traditional mechanics.
Carbine's plan is to make crowd control status effects a more active experience for the targeted player. For example, instead of disabling your weapon, the disarm ability knocks it away from you. Run over and grab it, and you'll be able to use it again. It's an neat balance between negative penalty and proactive response. The other given examples sound less elegant. Confusion changes your direction controls, which suggests the team haven't played that awful final section of Beyond Good and Evil.
I'm enjoying these videos. It's nice to see developers talk their community through traditional genre systems, and explain how and why they're planning to approach them. There's not much to suggest Wildstar will be a dramatically different MMORPG, but what they've shown confirms that its creators are happy to shake-up the norm.
Wildstar is due out next year. Its developers recently confirmed a monthly subscription, running alongside a "play-to-pay" model .
WoW's Warband system is getting a facelift soon, with new campsite backgrounds and the ability to sort your alts into cute little themed groups
Fallout's Tim Cain spent 6 years working on defunct MMO WildStar, twice as long as any other game, and thinks that might have something to do with why it failed
