WildStar

As part of WildStar’s free-to-play transition, character stats are getting a radical overhaul. Terms like Moxie and Finesse are out, and secondary stats are being revamped. To help understand the reasons behind the change, Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer caught up with Lead Designer Steven Engle.

Carbine Studios has started to reveal what’s on WildStar’s Road to Free-to-Play. In this week’s column, Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer takes a closer look at that journey, and asks if there are any blind corners ahead.

How does WildStar’s endgame experience stack up, now that it’s a year since launch? Armed with a freshly leveled alt, Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer goes on a mission to find out.

Fancy a cupcake, Cupcake? In this week’s WildStar column, Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer takes a look at WildStar’s first birthday celebrations, and discusses some of the fears around the upcoming free-to-play switch.

Carbine has announced that WildStar will go free to play this Fall. In his latest column, Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer asks if the studio’s proposals represent a good deal to players, and what pitfalls it must avoid.

With Drop 5: INVASION freshly released, Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer pulls on his engineering boots and heads back to Planet Nexus.

When it first launched, WildStar was met with a mix of praise and criticism from press and players alike. Over time, Carbine Studios’ game has come under fire for a variety of issues, ranging from low server populations to deferred update schedules. It’s quite possible that the phenomenal amount of hype for the game resulted in its initial acclaim, which tends to happen with large scale AAA titles.

Earlier this week, WildStar’s Drop 3 finally hit live servers. It’s been three long months, but the Mysteries of the Genesis Prime are now open for us to explore. For many of us, the release marks the start of Carbine’s road to recovery. But does this latest update really tick all the boxes?

WildStar is going through a time of transition. There’s no way around it. Server populations have been on the decline. Key Carbine team members like Jeremy Gaffney, Chris Lynch, and Stephan Frost left for various reasons and that was before NC Soft let roughly 70 people go. The update timeline was officially stretched. About a month ago, the Shade’s Eve Halloween event and the Christmas event, Winterfest, would not be held at all. Megaservers were announced and implemented.

Last week, NCSoft announced it was “restructuring key operations” across Western properties, with WildStar’s Carbine Studios hit particularly hard. In this week’s column, Gareth Harmer takes a closer look at the possible impact of the layoffs.

Loremageddon has come to WildStar, revealing many secrets of Nexus and the wider fictional universe. In this week’s column, Gareth Harmer rounds up the news, gets the latest on Drop 3-4, and finds out how the community is coping with Megaservers.

In a recent interview, Carbine Studios explained how it hopes to turn WildStar around. For this week’s column, Gareth Harmer explains why this won’t happen overnight, but instead marks the start of a longer series of improvements.

Over the last seven days, Carbine Studios has outlined its plans to bring WildStar back on track. In his column this week, Gareth Harmer reviews all the revealed changes and when we can expect them.

WildStar had all the hallmarks of a promising launch: promising reviews and widespread critical acclaim, queues of players waiting to log in, and a burgeoning community that was excited by Carbine’s new IP. It’s difficult to imagine a better environment in which to fire up a brand new MMO.

Since WildStar’s launch in early June, Carbine Studios has been focusing heavily on quality of life updates and bug fixes. As a result, Drop 3 looks like the biggest update yet, with a number of changes in the works. But what happens when it’s time to start on shiny new stuff? Columnist Gareth Harmer details what he’d like to see arrive on Nexus.