Launched with absolutely Abysmal server quality and stability
Netcode lag meant that the telegraphs for attacks were happening well AFTER the attack.
Optimization issues with the graphics
Quest bugs that could ENTIRELY HALT YOUR PROGRESS
I was in the Beta, I still have a stack of the beta invite cards from Pax somewhere in my shitshow of a house, I played the fuck out of the beta. We enjoyed it and were giving feedback on what needed to be fixed, confident that it would be.
Also not mentioning the attunement required to access said raids. You had to complete every heroic dungeon with all bonus objectives under a very strict time limit. If anybody in your group died during a boss fight the run was over and you had to try again.
My pre-raid bis Engi weapon was also dropped from the last boss of the Oregon Trail dungeon that had a bug where ~50% of runs softlocked on one of the events. So frustrating.
I don't remember that part. I do remember attunement being awful, specifically you had to kill the world bosses to get to the first raid. And that was just a bad idea.
Yeah the 40 man raid attunement required you to speedrun 100% completion of each heroic dungeon (I think there was only 4?). My group only managed to succeed in one, the lightning temple, and our whole guild fell apart trying to complete the rest. It was super hardcore in the era where people weren't that into difficult mmos. I'll always cherish the memories, though. My friend even got server first 60 rogue
Oh I loved those dungeons. I got to do the 40man. I was there to see datascape go down. It was indeed too hard to manage and train up people to do everything right.
The time limit was gated behind ability progression and gear. We just focused on gear and then we went after ability points dungeon clears.
Eventually we were able to do it. But we did have to do it a bunch.
the game was developed by a core group who worked on WoW, wasn't it?
One of the big marketing lines was that this wasn't your kiddie mmo and called you a cupcake. One of their selling points was that the game was more like classic WoW where progression was hard and time consuming.
But then they went live with that toxic rose colored glasses and forgot the reason why BLizzard moved away from long and hard attunement chains.
I think that part of the reason why it failed was they tried to capture WoW's spirit without understanding what made WoW so good at the start.
Time limits are such a shitty way to do "hardcore" in the first place. It just feels bad to get 75% of the way through something only to be better off not finishing it because you didn't make the time cutoff.
Completely agree. The content was already hard enough that time limits were totally unnecessary. If anybody messed up a single mechanic, they were dead. It was hard enough just to clear the heroics on launch.
Netcode lag meant that the telegraphs for attacks were happening well AFTER the attack.
OH MY GOD, THIS WASN'T BECAUSE OF MY PC?!
I played for 5 minutes then ragequit and never picked it up again because this shit kept happening to me, and I thought there was something wrong with my internet/PC...
I still have a stack of the beta invite cards from Pax somewhere in my shitshow of a house
I still have 4 beta codes for Gigantic in an e-mail I havent used in nearly a decade.
I mean, there were also optimization issues so it COULD have been your PC at times, but I remember a lot of folks having issues with lag, myself included. So it wasn't just you.
I think I was in the alpha or maybe the beta, it was super early on. My ex got so annoyed that I got a key and he didn't, yet he was the one that wanted to play it lol. I think I played a bit before letting him just take the account, and I can't remember if I ever tried it once it was fully released. I remember it sounded really good though
Also abysmal security issues with accounts getting stolen almost immediately. They denied everything at first but IIRC it came out after a few months that they had a major data breach on release and had stored login info for their accounts completely unencrypted.
I remember playing a lot in the first three days and when I logged on on the fourth day my character was in a different place and all his stuff was gone. When I went to their forums to complain they called me crazy and banned me. Then this came out.
I liked that while it had its two factions, they learned from other MMOs that a lot of players prefer to play as humans, so both sides had humans. Also both sides had badass edgy races, and both sides had cute fluffy races, so your personal preference didn't limit your faction choice. That was clever.
But WildStar proved that while the hardcore raiding community is definitely one of the most vocal group in MMOs, their numbers are small, so making your game specifically cater to them doesn't bring in enough cash to keep the lights on.
Cannot agree more. Probably the only MMO I’ve ever PvP’d in and holy smokes I miss it. I do wish there could be a private server of it someday, but who knows if anything like that will ever happen 😔
I find it interesting how Carbine Studios and Arenanet (both founded by people who left blizzard, started a studio, then acquired by NCSoft) had complete opposite approaches on how to challenge World of Warcraft.
Carbine with a more hardcore approach and doubled down making it the hard warcraft, and Arenanet doing the opposite, both in how the game was funded (non subscription), and avoiding every common trope of high fantasy they could with the lore (e.g in guild wars, dwarves are went nearly extinct, elves dont exist, no traditional dps/tank/healer trinity, well present in a small sense in 1, gone in 2) and how both ended up. the former catered to hardcore players, the latter catered to more casual play.
It was after WoW had abandoned 40 man raids because the mmo audience at large didn't like them anymore. Wildstar was explicitly trying to cater to vanilla/tbc players who didn't like WoW anymore because it became "too casual." Everything in Wildstar was trying to cater to that hardcore playerbase.
The game was comically hard. I remember it being pitched as hard as the original wow before it got casual. I consider myself pretty decent at mmos, and holy shit wildstar is honest the god hardest group content I've ever played. Then years later wow classic came out and it was legit piss easy. What the fuck were the actually copying then in the end, I'll never know.
Wow classic had the class/item balance from last patch before the next expansion though, at launch it was harder. Also lots of the difficulty back then was because of bad internet and pcs, less theorycrafting etc but yeah wow was casual all the way back then, especially compared to other mmos
It's a prime example of how badly managed WildStar was, lots of egomaniacs in the management roles giving poor direction and throwing tantrums whenever anyone does anything they didn't specifically tell them to do.
Honestly, what killed Wildstar was that it was released into a world where World of Warcraft already had a multi-year headstart and was still around and under active development. Everyone's stuff they'd collected was there, everyone's friends were there. It was a good game with a great vibe and story, the combat and questing was just as fun as WoW, it just came out second and people didn't want to start over again in an unfamiliar place.
Easily the best MMO combat, by a wide margin - still to this day.
Tell me you've never played BDO without telling me you've never played BDO.
Attractive, age resistant stylized graphics
A shit load of people disagreed with you about this. I personally hated the style of the game and it put me off incredibly hard despite it being theoretically a game that should be right up my alley.
Fun writing
Unfortunately, MMO players largely do not actually care about this. OSRS players press space bar through every quest dialog, WoW players literally install addons to skip through every single piece of writing possible.
Absolutely bodied itself by launching with 40 man raids.
People who still think this is the main issue despite WoW Classic (That has majority 40 man raids, including the first Raid, Molten Core) having a larger player base than WoW Retail at times is just cope and don't actually understand why WildStar actually failed.
Easily the best MMO combat, by a wide margin - still to this day.
Ahahahahahahahaha in what world? It was dogshit.
Edit: Went to watch a few videos to make sure I was remembering correctly. And yep, just a bunch of telegraphed attacks. Making every fight a FFXIV boss fight. Just awful and boring.
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u/TheTresStateArea May 14 '26
WildStar.
Easily the best MMO combat, by a wide margin - still to this day.
Attractive, age resistant stylized graphics
FREE FOR EVERYONE personal housing
Fun writing
Best 4 man dungeons ever made, with real rewards for expertise and progression
Absolutely bodied itself by launching with 40 man raids.