'Games Had Shifted' WildStar's Nine-Year Development May Have Led to Its Demise

WildStar came out a decade ago in 2014, after nine years of development. According to developer Tim Cain, who worked on the game, in addition to classic RPGs like Fallout, a very long development process was one of the main reasons why Carbine’s MMORPG didn't stick around.

Details come in a recent article over at PC Gamer. Cain says that when he started working on WildStar there were about 10 people, many of them WoW vets. This was 2005, World of Warcraft was already significant, And celebrated its 20th anniversary this year. Given the challenges, and the talent that was working to bring the colorful, strategic sci-fi MMORPG to life, Cain saw the potential. 

“We had some really, really great people there. And it's hard to make lightning strike twice. It's hard to capture it in a bottle. We could have done it, I can say that.”

Problems arose when the potential caused things to go awry. Some designers wanted to test and potentially try to create a lot of things, and that bloated the design time. While they had the talent, it seemed like there was some lack of discipline. 

MMORPG development is long. We've seen this in development of games like Star Citizen and newly in Early Access Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. The problem here was that that long development time let other games bloom in the background and attract players that they were not shaking very easily.  The competition was high, but also,  “games had shifted”, he says.

Related:

WildStar Is The Best MMORPG That Deserved To Die

“To put it into perspective, when work began on WildStar, World of Warcraft was still in its vanilla era. When WildStar finally launched, we'd seen The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor was just around the corner” the article notes. 

Cain left WildStar after six years, before the game came out. After launch, Carbine retooled some things, eventually transitioned to free to play before shutting the game down four years later.

(H/T MOP)