WildStar: Reloaded is here, and as to be expected, it’s a mixture of giddy highs and crushing lows.
Most of the lows are on the technical side of things: a crushing queue that sometimes reached into the hour-and-a-half range, server lag, and so many day-one maintenance patches and associated downtimes that playing was more of an occasional nicety than anything else. I expect most of these issues to be worked out soon, but it didn’t make for the best F2P opening I’ve ever seen.
In fact, at times even when I was in the game, it was virtually unplayable. That’s the thing about action combat — any lag pretty much shoots the experience in both feet. Two or three seconds of delay between hitting any key and seeing a result was unacceptable. I was not the only one I saw who got out of the game last night to wait and see when Carbine would iron all of this out.
On the upside, the excitement over WildStar is positively electric, both in the game and outside of it. It’s kind of a weird mixture of launch, expansion, and Christmas. The second I logged in, I rushed to check all of the loyalty goodies that I’d accumulated. While for some reason I have yet to be awarded the subscriber pet and housing item, my cosmic rewards shot into the fifth tier and spat out a ton of items and unlocks.
That Northern Lights dye is spectacular. And I’m not complaining about the mounts, costume pieces, and pets either.
Every long-term player was suffering from inventory bloating, myself included. Due to all of the rune changes and whatnot, Carbine mailed us SO MUCH STUFF that went on top of any cosmic rewards. Sorting all of that out took some time.
I poked around the new challenge interface as well. Instead of tying a set of randomized rewards to individual challenges, now you have a challenge reward track that lets you choose one of three goodies at certain intervals. It’s cool… I guess. I am saddened that my Thayd run will no longer spit out a string of decor boxes or that certain challenges I had been working on for pet rewards are no longer there. I really wanted that squirg pet, darn it!
In a spate of questing, I did start to accumulate omnibits — one here and there, including one from a challenge. It’s going to be slow going building up a bank account of those to spend on the store, but at least it’s an option. There’s one lawman outfit that I really want to get at some point.
Apart from that, I put together a couple of outfits from the sets that I was given (a cannibal one and a formal one — seen above). I jetted off to my housing plot and suffered agoraphobic shock at how much empty space there is now that the plot’s been quadrupled in size.
Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about that. I can imagine that many intricately designed housing plots were ruined with this. For me, I’m struggling to think how I’m going to fill up all of this space. Eventually we’re supposed to get more housing plugs, but they’re not in yet. I just wish that my house wasn’t so far away from the teleportation pad.
Speaking of the house, the patch allowed me to buy an opposite faction pad, so I got the Cassian cozy house. I like it so much more than the Exile one, if that it contains straight angles, a floor grid, and enough space to make a second floor easy. Lots to do there, and I am mulling over options as to how I want to design the interior before moving in all of my stuff.
It’s a heady feeling to have so much to do and a largely improved game in which to do it. I still have to go through the Alpha Sanctum and start on crafting, so those are on the table for some time this week.
Bio Break 