Buyer's remorse so badly, still in a daze when it comes to Wildstar...

User Rating: 1 | WildStar PC

Two deluxe-edition pre-orders at $150, well before game released, so much faith in the game... two accounts to level 50 and end-game... and what the hell happened... like seriously -- to everything!?!? (Game should be rightfully titled MildScar -- considering it's mild as !@#! and DEFINITELY leaves a metaphorical scar; worst entrant into MMOs ever in history -- community, devs, and admin are 200% TOXIC from top to bottom... which is a shame, considering I'm a die-hard for sci-fi *and* MMORPGs... and STILL want to see Anarchy Online rebooted and/or have a sequel!)

Not even sure where to begin honestly. Game was hyped and in development for the longest time; myself and the wife have had worlds of faith since the original announcement/launch. What was shown looked great... the blurbs in the dev-speaks looked great... what was described sounded great.

The wife and I were in beta for several months... there were so many issues (some of which are still present to this very day), but yeah, it's a beta, that happens. During the beta the white-knights and fanboys kept going on, "it's a beta, they'll fix it", and anybody that did beta MUST recall the "magical patch" that was foretold by Carbine to be coming at the end... Carbine even said it literally was to fix something in the neighborhood of over a thousand glitches/bugs, etc -- it was supposed to pretty much bring the game straight up to the triple-A quality they promised. Wow, that was a swing and a miss for sure.

EDIT/SIDE-NOTE: This is obviously a negative (and brutally honest/direct) review... so will toss in the only real PRO here, so it can be seen this isn't meant to "just hate and blast on the game" -- the housing in this game is fabulous. Granted the housing in FFXIV: ARR is better... but the housing in this game takes a solid second place to it. Now if only they could make the item limits more logical... 300 maximum items outside your house, 800 inside. With the size of the lots (which FYI are isolated and floating in space, you don't have neighbors directly next-door sadly), 300 fills up in no time... missus and I have both maxed the outside... and doubt we'll ever hit 800 inside the house... what were they thinking!?!?

For starters, one of the biggest things that was all over the forums was system performance! So many had high-end rigs that were getting 10-20 frames per second. I'm pretty old-school, so 20-ish or so isn't that uncomfortable for me typically, but even I was noticing it, especially in the telegraph/twitch-ish combat. What was so odd about this game, seemed (usually) the older/lesser system typically seemed to run the game better. I originally started beta on an old single-core I was running (AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.5ghz), with 2gb ram, and an older nVidia 9600 video-card with 512mb DDR2 vram. Took a bit of tinkering, but eventually got the game on low settings going fairly smooth at 25-30fps. About half-way through beta, upgraded rig, not just for Wildstar, but because obviously it was time for an upgrade. Upgraded to a 6-core (FX-6300 3.5ghz), 8gb ram, and an AMD R7 250 /w 2gb DDR5 vram. After getting the new rig setup, completely optimized, tuned and squared, with a Ubuntu Linux (14.04) virtual-machine AND dual-boot... one of the very first games put on it, Wildstar, and run right after -- being somewhat old-school, usually decide to play it safe and notch up settings slowly... started by jumping the game to medium settings, and framerate was about the same, and in some places worse than, the old single-core rig. Even now, after all the "supposed" updates and optimizations to the game, with a completely custom settings setup, somewhere between low and medium, closer to low, that new rig manages to push 27-35fps, and now and again can dip all the way down to 15-ish fps. WHAT!? (Tried everything too, the -dx9 video-switch, which runs even worse... using Catalyst Control Center to override the game to push everything to performance over quality, etc... and it still is chuggy at best -- not even the latest AMD/Catalyst beta drivers helped; many still believe NCSoft forced Carbine to release before they were ready, and believe the game should have had at least a Winter release instead.) The game also has this strange issue of "acting" like there's a memory-leak -- after about an hour or so of gameplay, the entire thing just bogs down and barely moves (if I go into task-manager at the start of the game and dumb-system down to only use four cores and emulate quad-core, doesn't seem to happen as much)... the memory-usage looks fine, the CPU usage looks too low to be honest, GPU usage is fine, nothing overheating, etc... but even trying to exit and relaunch the game, or /reloadui, or even use task-manager to force-close the game... it seriously locks the system up for a good 5-10+ minutes... can only get to desktop by ctrl+alt+del, and even then can only right-click Wildstar and click "close window", but it's a lot like continually pressing the button for an elevator... doesn't make it go any faster, just makes you think it does.

The missus has a quad-core laptop, with hardware a bit under what's in my newer tower-rig, and it even runs the game a bit better/smoothly. Even more hilarious in Wildstar, the ongoing view/impression is everytime Carbine fixes one issue, they break three other things. Doesn't help that they made the entire process a pile of plugins, which even core-functions are accessible by the users. As an example, at one point, to eliminate gold-spam that was being abused via arena-invites, I went in and disabled "ArenaTeam", which actually kills the ability for any arena invite to pop up and be seen. A user can actually turn on and off core-components in the game... as well as manipulate them externally (or at least that's the most logical theory) to allow botting, cheating, etc... which the game is rampant with!!! (Also worth noting, according to both forums and in-game chat... accounts are getting hacked left and right in this game... so much so that the elitist fanboy white-knights keep throwing in everybody's face that "if you don't have two-step, you're stupid"... or here's a thought, keep your system secure, password tight and original, keep your email secure, and you won't have a problem.)

Okay, so all that aside, headstart finally comes, wife and I are playing the game -- then day one of headstart, there's gold-spammers already, which hey, happens, but is noteworthy. Didn't help that for some oddball reason, for the entirety of headstart, clicking "report spam" actually closed a user's game completely, no error, etc, just dropped straight to desktop. Obviously, many were using /ignore, but right off the bat, spammers gung-ho like a half-hour after launch, no way to report, game still clunky as ever -- even after the "magical patch" came about. A bunch in zone chat decided to blow off some steam, and were just having a good time, chuckling and joking about how "omg, spammers on day 1"... oddly, somehow, the "powers that be" took one of the lines I said, yanked it completely out of context, and put me on a seven day suspension. It was, I believe, the second hot-fix of the day, about 2 hours into headstart, wife and I sign out so they can do their thing, go to sign back in, and there's this "fabulous" BS message waiting for me upon my attempt to re-enter saying something along the lines of "suspended for 170 hours". Not sure what's going on, I submit a ticket to support (other MAJOR issue with this game as seen on their very own forums!). Six days go by (of a seven day suspension!!!)... someone finally gets back to me and long story short says, "whoops, some of our people got overzealous and didn't completely understand what you were saying, they've been better trained now so this shouldn't happen again, the suspension has been lifted and you can play again" -- fine and dandy right? I write back and said, "okay, any chance of getting any compensation for the six days I lost, especially considering head-start was supposed to be a PERK of pre-order?" (worth noting, that the HEAD of customer-support actually said on Reddit that they WOULD compensate ANY accidental suspensions that occurred, have it as well as their responses screen-shotted)... someone else writes back (after bouncing me between two or three other people), not only pointing out they wouldn't be refunding anything, but with thinly-veiled finger-waggling while at the same time tossing the EULA and ToS in my face, like I'm some sort of criminal, and in not so many words informing me that I should be thankful to have the privilege to be able to pay them to play their game... WTH kind of customer-care is this!?!? 34 years of gaming, and NEVER been treated like this EVER in my life!!! (When this POS so-called game finally has the plug pulled, you can bet your ass I'll be right there, front and center, pointing and LAUGHING at the audacity and arrogance of the devs/admin, all DUMB ENOUGH like rookie hacks to fall for the typical new-game-trolls shouting "The-only-thing-EVERYBODY-wants-is-PvP" and "make-it-shinier-that's-all-that-matter", HAHAHAHA Carbine/NCsoft, SUCK IT, biggest FAIL ever... next time you try to reinvent rip-off the wheel, don't make it square and out of glass you brainless reject morons! Hope you're all loving scraping the bottom of the barrel and the massive cuts in your salaries -- most well deserved FLOP ever in history!!! PS - Go ahead and pull a chip-on-the-shoulder approach again and kick a few people for NO REASON because you think your egos can cash those checks... few more and the game WILL be a GHOST TOWN! xD)

Even worse, the original suspicion against me was RMT (Real-Money Transactions - aka: gold-selling)... I can not *stand* the idea of RMT, it kills so many games... so not only am I accused, kicked out and locked out, along with treated like a criminal... but I return to the game to see the spamming worse than ever, bots all over the place... unable to farm any resources because bots are teleporting left and right stealing anything they can... great job Carbine... pick off the innocent, let the guilty run the asylum.

At least it was mildly poetic... most the crafting in the game is clunky, some straight up broken, and others just an RNG (Random Number Generation) nightmare! So by the bots stealing all the mats/resources, unless a person wanted to buy their mats off the player-exchange, crafting wasn't really screaming to be jumped on right away... also didn't help that most (not all, but most) crafted gear was equivalent or sub-par to the gear you got from questing. Which says something even more, since in every other MMO I've ever played, I'm typically nuts for crafting, and am a crafting machine... in Wildstar, I cringe at crafting!!!

So the wife and I, do the only real thing left to do (at least near the beginning of the game) and work the storyline. Doesn't take long for each of the "starting zones" to merge into each other, and everything to become even more linear than SWTOR. We stick to questing... but omg, some of the driest, most boring, grindy, obnoxiously tedious questing ever. By now most know that there's something like five standard types of quest, TotalBiscuit said it best, think he calls them the 5 D's -- "Deliver, Defend, Drop, Destroy, Discover"... Carbine barely goes out of their way to "gussy up" the quests to hide this fact, which most every other developer at least tries to do. The best they do to attempt to cover the grind, is replace straight up numbers with percentages, oh yeah, because most of us can't do simple math -- start a quest where you have to kill so many of a type of creature in a small space, each kill seems to bump the meter 1-2%... gee, wonder how many that means I have to kill *facedesk*. So missus and I finally make it to level 50... where most games there might at least be some fanfare, etc... no, instead we get a call on our little intergalactic cell-phone (which is interesting at first, but becomes almost as obnoxious as a cell-phone in real-life as it pertains to an electronic dog-collar!)... in summary, "okay, your max level, now go get yourself a genesis key and get to work". Not a whole lot of explanation, thankfully we finally figure out we have to talk to the elder-gem vendor... we see a Genesis Key listed for 150 elder gems. Okay, we start working at grinding elder-gems (dailies, and such... dry, boring, meh).

Now, anybody wanting to RAID in this game, this next part you definitely want to pay attention to. Was bad enough to find out the elder-gem cap for the week was 140, meaning you have to wait a whole week just to GET the Genesis Key... but then, once you have it, it's one of the craziest most insane attunements ever. One of the most controversial bits to the game still debated daily on the forums. I wouldn't have even minded it if they allowed each step to be a checklist you could do in whatever order... but it's a straight and linear 13 step MASSIVE grind, with each step having sub-steps... like one step tells you to go kill 12 specific world bosses in a very specific order, where another says to get silver on all veteran dungeons (I believe also in a specific order, not certain), etc. But even more mind-blowing that you can't even attempt to raid WITHOUT having full attunement. I've played several games with some sort of "attunement" process, and they're fine, usually they're a slight bit flexible, with lower starter raids, and other such things, or the ability to tackle them in your own order, etc... but to bust your butt all the way to end-game, to not really get so much as a pat on the back, and then having to prove yourself all over again, like most MMO veterans have done for the last 10+ years in gaming!? *facedesk*

That did it in for the wife and I... we've done a lot of serious raiding in other games, we've done the dance, proved ourselves... and can even understand having to prove ourselves in Wildstar -- it's not like every single person playing the game is old-school and/or not brand-spanking-new... but to that extent, after already being bored to death to max level!? *facedesk*

Also, if you plan to "go the distance" with this game, as I originally planned to do (completionism is a curse!)... should note this game is the most time-gated I've seen to date... current estimates and calculations are pointing out that it'll be anywhere in the ballpark of one year, or more, of constant grinding/repetitive dailies gameplay before a person has enough elder-gems to unlock the remaining amp and ability points... yeah, sounds like a blast doesn't it? (This game has the driest, and most boringly repetitive dailies EVER!)

Oh, but never fear, for those that didn't know, this game and its developers also happily support the "pay to win" playstyles. They have this "currency" called CREDD... a user can buy a CREDD from Carbine for $20 (after paying $15 for their monthly sub), then they can turn around and sell it in-game for gold/platinum. Considering most everything in end-game that drops is resell-able on the auction-house (yes, including the extra amp and ability POINT drops)... a "wallet warrior" can pay their way all the way to end-game if they wanted. At least CREDD has its pros I suppose, if not for buying CREDD in-game with currency, the missus and I wouldn't still have access to the game... thanks to CREDD we're now paid up to almost Christmas I believe (all we ever do really is log in each day for five minutes or so to get a boom-box, harvest our trees and mines on our properties, and once in awhile tinker with our houses, that's it [-- thank goodness for CREDD too, because after what we've experienced, seen, played, we're never dropping another dime on anything NCSoft/Carbine; NCSoft had plenty enough mis-steps and screw-jobs in the past, this is the final nail in that coffin!])... which seems to be true with most on the forums... several have stated they've used CREDD to pay up until summer of next year... leaving one to wonder how little income Carbine is making compared to what they imagined they'd make!?

Oh, and be ready to massively money-grind. The first content-drop, THE STRAIN, had a hoverboard in it for 100 platinum, all its flairs together cost 50 platinum... highest riding speed, 80 platinum... and that's just the tip of the iceberg... the developer-set in-game prices of so many things in this game are mind-blowing insane. It takes awhile just to grind ONE platinum in this game... even doing dailies, you only get a couple platinum a day at best. So to go back to the whole "wallet warrior"... a CREDD was selling for about 4 platinum each in-game... last I saw, think they're up to 6-ish. Feel free to take the numbers above (100 platinum, 50 platinum, and 80 platinum), and figure out just how many $20 CREDDs a person would have to sell just to get that much together... to figure out how many dollars a person would have to dump ON TOP of a subscription and ON TOP of a box-purchase... sadly hilarious considering all the hell and taboo f2p games get for their "cash-shops" and how "expensive f2p games get"... the "pay to win" setup in this game is one of the worst I've ever seen... could probably make Perfect World say, "haha, at least we're not THAT bad".

On a side-note, I don't typically PvP, but this game from what I've seen, heard, read... has the wost attempt at PvP ever... excessive telegraph spams in PvP, a bad idea... who could have foretold that coming, LOL! Oh, and also, as far as combat goes, be it PvP or PvE... don't believe the hype about how "only those with skill can truly excel" or "this game requires so much awesome-sauce skill"... it's face-roll city... seriously, outside of certain skills that you have to press the button multiple times (usually 3 at most) for different phases of the ability, most times as a player you don't even pay attention to what you're hitting... you just nuke everything with everything you've got and win. Dodging the telegraphs just makes it that much more annoying... faceroll and ballet dance through battles... highly recommended to externally jury-rig a gamepad or joystick. I eventually ended up playing with my PS3 controller (using the Windows 360 drivers, XPadder, etc)... because mouse/keyboard was just killing my wrists/hands massively! Wasn't until I started using a gamepad and mapping each attack to a specific button that I even slightly paid attention to which attacks were what, but even then, it was just spam when the cool-down wore off.

Also worth mentioning, be ready for this game to annoy the living hell out of you... there SO needs to be a way to MUTE or TURN OFF the graveyard-narrator (yeah, there's the ability to turn down voiceover volume... but it'll mute everybody sadly). When you die, there's a graveyard-narrator that truly adds insult to injury more than anything I've ever seen... and when you're trying to do something that's hard and not that far from a graveyard, it's die, be mocked, run back, die, be mocked, etc... seriously, after being insulted by the graveyard narrator something like 5-10 times inside of 30 minutes, or even an hour... you seriously want to throw the controller and rage-quit!

And don't get your hopes up on group-play... this game has some of the most idiotic group-play ever. Collection quests, even when in a party, make the credit ONLY go to the person that collects it, not the entire group... same typically with kills. So once all items are collected, and all creatures killed... everybody else has to sit around twiddling thumbs until the respawn. With a small party of 2-3, might not be bad... but if you thought you were going to breeze through with a large group of friends... think again, cupcake!

Now, due to so many bugs, errors, glitches, time-gating, and just about every other mis-step an MMO could make, the people are leaving in droves. When the game first launched there were queues lasting several hours, almost to the tune of a full day... then less than a month to two after, every server when checked at any time of the day, any time of the week, are typically "low", sometimes a few might hit "medium". Observation inside the game, is it's a ghost-town already... Thayd used to be packed with people at each of the Auction Houses, now a person is lucky to see 5-10 at each, if that... housing zone chat is typically either dead, or most drivel/nonsense if active at all.

What's even more confusing is all these game sites came out giving Wildstar solid reviews of anywhere between 8-10... many saying it's the best MMO they've played in a long time, that it's the type of MMO they really missed playing etc. But then right after those stellar reviews... hardly any touch or follow the game anymore, can't be bothered to keep playing it, hardly report on it, barely mention it unless it's to hype the next content-drop, etc... what gives!? This game, even as bad as it is, becomes more and more of an enigma still!

So the TL;DR version: Horrible support, buggy/broken game, botters/spammers/cheaters galore, boring/grindy linear quest-line, stale-atmosphere, horribly toxic community (one of the most toxic I've ever seen... there's even a video on YouTube about it, search "Why I Won't Be Playing Wildstar" on YouTube -- and no, that lady is NOT me, I'm a guy) -- however, toxicity is getting a slight bit better, considering a large number of the die-hard fanboys and white-knights are moving on to other games with this one so dead... but a decent amount still hang around), low & dead populations, time-gated and monotonous/tedious end-game... AVOID THIS TITLE AT ALL COSTS. That's $150 we're never getting back... and no, we didn't get it in return from our "enjoyment"/"experience" with the game... after that experience, feels more like Carbine should have been paying US... at best it was more like a Q&A session/testing pre-launch... problem is it was post-launch and it was public. We realize they boasted the game to be "hardcore", along with saying there'd be something for everybody... but when most heard "hardcore", they assumed it was like how most developers say hardcore these days and mean a pretty solid and action-packed playstyle... didn't realize they actually meant they were bringing back all the "hardcore" issues most were vocal about back in the day, to the extent most developers have removed those annoyances and made MMOs more open to everybody and more fun to play. >_<

(Seriously too, [otherwise I wouldn't have even cared/bothered to write this entirely long-winded thing to detail all the disappointments and mis-steps from the game], the missus and I BOTH wanted this game to succeed... one of the first posts I made on the forums was giving props to Carbine for what I thought was awesome optimization considering I got the game running on a massively outdated single-core processor... was hoping the game would have a vibe of Anarchy Online meets Space Quest... whatever we hoped for, this is the total opposite -- the impression was almost like the experience of playing Duke Nukem Forever in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game.)

PS - Out of all of my reviews, this is probably the only one that I truly wish I could score a ZERO to!!!

** NOTE: Due to issues in other areas/websites, have client-side disabled viewing comments via custom user-script; therefore won't be viewing/reading/responding to comments on this review.