WildStar: Happy trails and happy PTS

I can’t see my car from here

I do a slightly weird thing whenever I’m out and about, which is to constantly be tracking (or estimating) how far away I am from my car — and by association, home. If I’m out hiking or at Disney or even taking an airplane ride across country, my mind will occasionaly be pinging my conscious with updates on just how long it would take to get back to my car and everything I know. So while I like to go venturing out to explore and on trips, I guess there’s a part of me that’s always anxious to be able to get back quickly.

Sometimes I feel this way in MMOs, such as WildStar, even when I have quick ports and the like. For instance, last night I was heading up Scourwind Peak (there’s that great adjective + noun naming convention at work), noting that there wasn’t any easy way to get back without slogging through a whole bunch of enemies on a fairly linear if spiral track. So I kept looking at the map and encouraging myself not to die, because the trek back would have been somewhat annoying (and I’m a total miser about spending gold to rez on the spot).

I actually ended up doing the entire peak journey twice because I missed a few quests going up the first time. The story around the peak had to do with a team-up between two Lopp and Freebot deputies trying to bring “justice” (straight-up executions) to the bird people and various elementals on the mountain. I actually got into a nice questing groove there, listening to a podcast while riding dust devils up, knocking out quests left and right, and ultimately doing the mother of all free-fall dives off the summit.

The end result was that I dinged level 48 — still taking tiny little baby steps to 50, but it’s looking very close now. I also got a few new housing items (I got three drops in a row) and some neat costume pieces, which made me all sorts of satisfied.

New patch in testing!

I really can’t wait for this fall’s big free-to-play patch — and not just for the F2P. There’s a TON of stuff that’s going into the patch, which began testing yesterday, and I’m drinking up the details like a man parched for water in the desert.

Of note, housing plots will DOUBLE in size with more plugs (woohoo!) and there are going to be well over a hundred new costume pieces, scads of new housing items, new dyes, and plenty of gameplay quality of life improvements. I’m not testing it out because I don’t generally waste my time on test servers when I can be playing for real, but I am following what others are reporting quite closely.