Sometimes, there's no logic to what happens in life.
Every time I think about what happened to Wildstar two years ago, I feel sad. Because it was a stunningly beautiful game. With humor levels through the roofs — tons of cultural references, too, coming back to us from lightyears and eons away. With NPCs (Non-Player Characters — the scripted dudes that make the world around you alive) that rocked. With views of an alien planet that took a lot of imagination to build. The story it had! And with music that inspired...
I don't know if this soundtrack will touch you the way it does me, but it would be cruel of me not to share it. Don't worry, I am not RickRolling you, just sending you to Youtube to find your musical background while reading on. Or while reading or writing lots of other things. Many a short story I've written here on Steem had this loop playing in my background.
A snapshot of my screen while I am looking from the top of a hill at the valleys of Algoroc. The Exiles' countryside.
The game servers had to close on November 28, 2018, when NCSoft shut down Carbine Studios. We've been waiting ever since for private servers that may never come.
Anyway. I was busy, I had no working graphics card at the time, and I couldn't even save enough snapshots of things I would have liked to show in my archives. The one above I took in order to try a watercolor piece on the scenery.
What personal advancement I lost
The coolest side feature of the game was building your own Plots in the sky. You got rewarded with Decors in the game, a class of items that could only be used in your plots to pimp them up. And some of them could even be applied to good effect.
You could have a house with any kind of furniture and trophies in it. You could change the size and angle of any decor. It was your responsibility if trees will look rooted in your garden or if they will fly in the air. There were flying trees by default, too. You could climb on them. Jump around. There were also special challenges on small premade mini-zones that you could fit on your plot. And gardens you could grow things on. Like Logicleaf. The fruits of which were snippets of programming code. Visual effects only, but still those fruits could be used by craftsmen to brew stuff.
I had one-quarter of my plot resembling the Arctic. With campsites for explorers and the frozen bones of huge ancient reptiles protruding from the ice. Hundreds of decors, altogether, carefully arranged. It was a game of design for me. So many hours spent. A collection of plushies, too. A barbeque site. A small forest. Even NPCs welding some ironwork...
Other things I miss
The Caretaker, the AI with schizophrenia that cracked me up with each sly remark.
The Protostar cloned employees with their commercial wisdom.
The Lopps — a society of bipedal talking bunnies with their funny accent and manner of speech...
Too many things to actually list here.
The drama between the fractions.
The Fractions
The Exiles and the Dominion. Guess who were fans of Freedom and who were scions of Order. Decentralization and Central Authority at their funniest.
The Setting
The planet Nexus attracts everybody. Because the super-advanced race of the Eldans is suddenly gone and high-tech stuff has been left behind. And a mystery to be uncovered. The Osun giants are in decline. An infection is spreading. Nexus is the nexus, you see?
With plenty of natural dangers and creatures to lurk under every rock. Hell, they are the rocks sometimes. Sometimes they just eat them.
Why shut down?
Not massive enough. There was no critical mass of players even though this goodie was free-to-play with premium accounts. You could go through most of the stuff Free-to-Play. I don't know how the studio was expecting to gain economically. And I don't know why it was not massive.
It was great and still, it had not enough fans.
Some blame the...wait for it...
wait for it...
...level of complexity.
The gameplay was brilliant but more oriented towards the hardcore players. While the content was appealing to casual players. That is some analysis friends of mine believe in.
I realize there's too much to be said. It was a virtual world, after all. An amazing one. Where I will ride my Grinder no more. If you are interested, ask me stuff in the comments. Maybe I will dedicate another article to Wildstar later on.
Thanks for reading!
Yours,
Manol
