What went wrong with Wildstar in your opinion? And now that it's f2p, does it have a chance, or will it fail as a f2p game as well?
It may have a better chance as free to play. It's got an interesting art style, but the problem that I saw with it when I was interested was that they were already combining servers. The game seemed interesting enough, but admittedly I didn't get far in it. I got a trial and then stopped playing when I discovered that it had such a low population as that. Being free to play gives somewhat lower expectations and people like me may even give it a second chance.
Wildstar missed the zeitgeist totally at the beginning. It started with the wrong business model. You cannot use a subscription model and say "We want no barriers for new players.". It offered too less variety for different players groups. It was not and still is not casual enough. It has still a bad PvP system.
It was in development for 7 years - which means that by the time it released WoW clones were not popular anymore. If WS launched 3 years prior it would have rode at least a year or 2 of the tail end of wow-era games.
IMHO, i think players just didn't want the work or effort. Why play a themepark that takes time and effort when i can play so many that requires not much of me. All i can say is when people say on here, games are too easy these day we need effort, don't believe them xD
If you ask me there have been too many artificial placed barriers in Wildstar stuff u had to wait a day and another day and another day and so on to get it done... max faction per day ...which bothered me alot ..its like if you play our Game along time you can get that item if you log in every day for a month and kill 50 of these ... kind of very very boring. Super easy to get but you need to log in every day and farm that crap = Major Turnoff. That along with todays soloability and the pickupgroups often suck Major too ...since everyone just solos anyway + as usual Team play didn feel worth it ..soloing was better ..and to me i need content i want to do in a group hard content ...that does reward me . If there is raid equipment i want it ...in order to show off in a group situation like look i got that item from that boss ..not in order to do a even harder raid + i need grouping to be worth my time like Advancement even at max lvl ..that what Games today dont get. To me its kind of boring to just run after gear at max lvl .Group up kill millions of things for a chance of gear only instead of advancing my char even further. Dont tell me thoose million of kills didn make my character stronger.
What's really upsetting is that it's not really doing great even at the f2p level. Not many returning players have come back according to the stats as well as not many new people are trying it out. Even if the game is much improved, it's very hard to break a first impression.
Wildstar did so many things wrong, and too few right. The game lacks interesting or engaging content that distracts the players from the grind. The gameplay mechanics have an eerie sense of F2P mobile monotony to them, and it doesn't help that the immediate switch to F2P gave players a bad impression. It's almost like the developers and publishers did no market research to figure out what works when they launched. As other have said, the game was in development for so long that it seems like it was assumed that their ideas worked, and they just went ahead without testing them.
I think, that at launch, the developers of the game tried way too hard to cater to a niche audience, the hardcore, endgame players, without realizing that a subscription based MMO is not sustainable without a casual userbase. Even then, the hardcore players got turned off by the games insane attunement process. (Which I believe, has since been nerfed heavily..) In the end, I believe they simply released a product that feels like it was designed for another, past era of gamers. It's not a bad game, it does some cool things from a gameplay perspective, so my hope is that the transition to free to play gives the game an active community.
Pretty much what qag said. A lot of WS was based on catering to the vanilla WoW players, ect because a vocal minority kept bitching about how casual WoW and other games have gotten. That being said, the bulk majority of players who grew up playing WoW, EQ, Ultima Online, ect grew up, got jobs, families and responsibilities. Lots of us used to be hardcore when we could afford the time and effort, but that was in the past. Even today's teenagers don't have as much free time anymore between more and more hours spent on homework and competitiveness to get into colleges with extracurricular activities according to lots of studies. Casual is here to stay as time becomes more and more of a precious commodity.
Bad game is bad. The developers are rude and have a "learn to play" attitude towards people. The game caters to much to a segment of the MMO community that is much smaller than anticipated.
I liked it and its one of the few recent mmo's that has actually entertained me for more than an hour. Props to the for that one. I wouldn't say the game is bad at all, if anything, its just highly misguided. F2p is the first step in the right direction if the devs are gonna remain with that ugly attitude they have.
F2P isn't enough to make up for developers with a nasty attitude towards players. If they aren't catering to their potential customers as well as their current ones the business wont grow and the game will fail.
What went wrong? It attempted to enter an over-saturated market with millions of failures and very few successes. The MMO genre is incredibly hard to break into, WoW has such a monopoly. Ultimately MMO games are social games, and unless all your friends adopt Wildstar at the same time then you'll just go back to WoW. You need a mass migration at the start and barely any MMO gets that.
WoW has a monopoly? That has got to be one of the most ridiculous statements I have read in a good long while. Not only has WoW never actually held the number spot in the genre but they have been losing large amounts of subscribers to other games some time now.
I think they aimed to high and did not get the subscriber number that they wished to. But now that it is F2P, things can only get better for the game, for sure.
Uh I wouldn't be so sure about that. If anything people in my experience often steer clear of anything that's F2P.
Almost all MMO`s nowadays are F2P. And the concept works just fine. If anything, F2P, for many MMO games, has been the cause for more players playing the game. And Wildstar is no different.
Something went wrong with Wildstar? I liked the game for the time I played it. The only thing is is that it might have been too expensive for what it is so going free to play is a good thing. Most people had too high expectations of the game I think. This happens a lot with (over)hyped games. I might install the game again with the f2p update.
