The AAA MMO That Died - WildStar in 2024

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Furries, action combat, over-monetization... WildStar was ahead of the industry

Wildstar was such a great game that was just killed by poor direction. They were so hard on the 'hardcore player' hype train that they neglected the casual player and trying to build them up into that sort of environment. It's a shame really since with better direction and some polish Wildstar I feel could of easily been an MMO that was still around today. It's combat and gameplay was so fun to mess around with and IMO a large step up from GW2's combat yet it got abandoned far too quickly rather then giving it a rebirth it deserved.

I actually loved Wildstar, I played it when it first came out with a bunch of buddies. It ran into the problem where there wasn't much endgame content when it launched and all the players that rushed ahead and weren't interested in story had very little to do. I think I played right up until it closed completely.

What went wrong? NCSoft! It was just one of the other mmos out there and in the times we have now, when we old mmo schoolers are starving and the Sun is low even the smallest dwarfs cast the biggest shadow

Wild Star was a good game just didn’t have a robust endgame and they thought people missed the 40 man raids from WoW. The housing was great, mounts were fun (furry had a hamster like wheel bubble mount), and the action combat was decent. Also the regular dungeons were overturned for new players.

I was sad when I tried to play Wildstar back in the day and my personal computer couldn't handle it. I remember it many years later only to see the servers were shut down. I missed a truly great period, and that kicked off a summer of me trying every massively multiplayer game I could find.

Wildstar suffered from a "raid or die" mentally. There wasnt much worth doing aside from questing and then raiding. They did try adding more casual features once the writing was on the wall that players were unhappy with the content, and the devs refused to listen... but by then it was far too late. They took all the bad, grindy features of classic WoW that no one really cared for, then were unbending when players said thats not what they liked about old time WoW. And the aesthetic wasn't really appealing to those who were looking for a classic style of World of Warcraft.

I remember a reddit discussion about this game a very long time ago where an (allegedly) actual developer made a post about how toxic the work environment was at the company. I remember him saying that they had mandatory crunch, how artists learned to code to fix the game and how one of his colleague, an animator, made the hover board in his free time and added it in the game without support from the team or leads. The hoverboard was the most popular mount in the game

The cash shop came later after the game fell off in subs being originally a subscription based game. The game itself was far less obnoxious with that angle when it first came out where it wouldn't be in your face the whole time.

Man I miss WIldStar. It was actually unironically my favorite MMO alongside TERA, which also closed. RIP good MMOs.

The focus on hardcore is what kept the game alive as long as it did, i was deep into the raid scene, did every and we used to Sherpa people on a regular basis. People say the game was horrid but on the EU megaserver it was so beloved and the top guilds stayed right till the last second. I miss this wonderful game.

I would have played Wildstar just for the housing 100%. It was crazy what you could build with it. 🤤🤤

Wildstar was an incredible MMO. It did not deserve to die. The competition was too heavy and it launched pay to play which was a terrible idea. Then they just stopped launching content and Nexus wanted it to be gone to save money. If only they would actually help people run a private server. RIP Wildstar.

I started Wildstar when it was already dying. I immediately fell in love with the graphics and art style, but the combat system was the best. It combined tab target and skill-based combat with real-time dodging like no other mmo. I've played Guild Wars 2 and Elder Scrolls online, but even today it doesn't feel as smooth as Wildstar's combat system. The classes were also very creatively designed, even though they represented typical classes. The paths were the icing on the cake. Really frustrating that NCSoft screwed this up, the players were up for it!

I played WS from beta to shutdown. I'm normally a fanatic raid grinder in MMOs, but just qualifying to get into WS's raids was such a nightmare that I didn't bother until they dropped most of the requirements a year later. WS was specifically designed for those people who constantly complain that MMOs these days aren't punishing enough, but then none of those guys spent money playing it. Though I'd give pretty much anything to have WildStar's player housing system back as a standalone. Oh, and it also had some of the only MMO PvP I've ever enjoyed, with the Warplot mode. That was an objective-based mode with some features from housing, where both sides had custom-designed bases that the other team's goal was to bust into and destroy. It was awesome. Of course, Warplot matches only happened once a month, since it was 40v40 and WS rarely had that many players online, much less queueing up. The regular PvP modes were killed off by the one guild that refused to give up on PvP, since all normal PvP matches ended up with a full stack of Gatlike Gangstars' dedicated PvP players vs some unfortunate victims trying to get their PvP dailies. I still wonder if Gatlike ever got matches competitive enough to be enjoyable, since I never once saw it happen. We constantly told the devs the only thing PvP needed was to stop matching premades against randoms, but player feedback is the last thing the WS devs wanted. The final bit of irony was that since I'd been a City of Heroes player, I spent my whole time in WildStar wondering when NCSoft would randomly pull the plug on the game. Instead, they did the exact opposite of what they did with CoH, and kept the game grinding on for years after it stopped being profitable.

I would love for a oppertunity to play this game again:) i played 250+ hours in the beta and one or two months after launch before burning out a bit. Went back when it was free to play again, but the monetization was completly out of the wazoo at that point and i couldn't get myself to cotiniue to play.

Poor optimization, devs actively pushing non-hardcore raiders out of their servers, and a tone-deaf mismatch in their actual raiding scenes compared to what the players wanted at the time. NCSoft might have been a big factor, but the devs didn't do themselves any favors by pretending that hardcore raiding was the only way to play.

I remember monetization in WildStar wasn't bad at all. I got through the whole game, levels 1-50, without spending a dime. In fact, you got Omnibits just by playing the game which you could use to buy cash shop items for free. After saving up through questing and doing other content, I got myself a sick mount and some nifty housing decor to spruce up my plot. There was an optional sub fee, sure, but I don't remember there being any outrageous advantages compared to being a f2p player. I think you'd get more Omnibits while subbed, but don't quote me. It's been a while...

Oh man I remember having such a great time with this mmo. Raiding was a lot of fun. It's a shame it shut down.