A Wild and Starry Weekend, First Part: Me and MMORPGs

I read up on how to take screenshots in Wildstar before writing this post and spent the better part of the afternoon running around mashing the Print Screen key only to find that it had done nothing and that no screenshots were being saved. So there aren’t any! Or, at least, only some boring ones I quickly grabbed by other means.

After signing up in the aftermath of Rezzed over a year ago, I finally got an invite to join the beta of Wildstar this weekend. I’d come away from my 30-minute demo with mixed impressions at the time, and was eager to play more to see how the classes and progression paths that actually interested me held up. The promise of plenty of stuff to do besides combat including the construction of settlements, interdependent crafting and other interesting social gubbins caught my attention, as did the apparent step away from some conventional MMO tropes. After maybe… 15 hours or so over the past three days, though, I’m still not entirely sure I know whether I like it.  Part of this is a sense that perhaps I’m over MMOs. That I’ve changed enough over the past decade that nothing’s ever going to capture my attention like Ryzom, or Final Fantasy XI, or Star Wars Galaxies did back when I was a teenager. I mean, I bounced off Guild Wars 2, and that was excellent, wasn’t it? Surely that’s gotta be me? Returning to the glory days of Galaxies last year using the fantastic SWG Emulator was a wonderful bit of nostalgia, but I’m not still playing it now.

Just saying that’s got me feeling tempted to go back again (and find a nice Tatooinian guild in need of a Tailor), but I doubt I’d stay particularly long.

Something’s definitely up, and I can’t tell whether it’s really with Wildstar or just me.

I was gonna just sit and try to give my impressions of the game, from the perspective of a lapsed MMO player looking for something new, but whilst writing this I realised it was taking me a long while to actually get to the point.

So, two parts, then!

I’m gonna get all the gas about why I’m not sure whether I like it or not out the way here, then go on to talk in a bit more depth about the game another time.