WildStar

WildStar’s instances are getting a bit of a boost. In order to provide a form of endgame progression, Carbine Studios recently introduced the Primal Matrix as a way to develop characters beyond level 50. Beyond the raids, dungeons and questing zones, the Matrix will provide longer-term goals that shiny loot just can’t match.

Carbine’s next update aims to keep the endgame ball rolling, but is it enough? Gareth Harmer brings us this Public Test preview.

Destination: Arcterra hits WildStar’s test realm, bringing a new zone, new story, and shiny new rewards. We tooled up columnist Gareth Harmer with a scarf and gloves, before sending him on a trip to this wintery wasteland.

WildStar is back! Well, it didn’t really go anywhere to begin with, but to say that Carbine’s freshman game was an underappreciated title would be an understatement. WildStar has always been a bit of an underdog, and today marks the relaunch of the MMO as a Free to Play game. And at least so far, the relaunch seems to be working from a hype perspective, because those megaservers have definitely been feeling the pressure. Read on for more of our Day One thoughts on a Free to Play Nexus.

About 4 months ago, Carbine Studios announced that WildStar would be going Free to Play. Since then, we’ve learned a lot about what the transition would look like, including a sneak peek at E3, and a deep dive into character stat refactoring. But the studio was also eager to get fan feedback, promising a beta period for new and existing players to give feedback on this reloaded version of WildStar.

WildStar has always been a terrific candidate for a non-subscription-based business model, and at E3 2015 last week, we got a chance to chat with Carbine Studios about their flagship MMORPG’s upcoming free-to-play transition. It’s no surprise that they’ve received a great response to the transition since their announcement of it a few weeks ago, with over 100,000 free-to-play beta signups in the first day.

It’s not going to surprise anyone here, as we all follow Carbine’s freshman outing closely, but the sci-fi fantasy MMORPG is going Free to Play (F2P) this fall, and we’ve got the full scoop. We recently flew out to Santa Monica (at NCSOFT’s expense) to preview many of the game’s upcoming changes. Read on to learn where WildStar has been, and where it’s going in 2015.

WildStar’s latest game update, INVASION: Nexus should continue that trend and have something for everyone. We recently had a chance to take a look at some of the goodies coming in today’s game update, so let’s go over a couple of the highlights.

WildStar is close to releasing its next big content update to the live servers, and we were recently given a good look at The Protogames Initiative. Chad Moore and Mike Donatelli were on hand to show us everything the patch looks to add to the world of Nexus and beyond.

After a promising testing period, WildStar’s third content update will soon be going live. Along with a ton of new content, Carbine’s also been working hard on a number of ‘quality-of-life’ updates to the MMO. For this week’s column, Gareth Harmer took a tour of the upcoming patch with Content Designer Morgan Brown.

The team at Carbine is hard at work bringing some new content to WildStar. We got a sneak peak at some of the projects there and what fans can expect to see in the upcoming releases. With the lore of Nexus finally coming out from behind the curtain, Carbine has some plans for solo content as well as a new high level zone which players can check out. Stephan Frost, who gave us the demo, stressed the boost in solo content which looked and played almost like an RPG.

During Gamescom, Carbine’s Nick Roth took columnist Gareth Harmer on a tour through some of WildStar’s upcoming content. The upcoming Defile patch was a major feature, bringing a close to the story prologue and clearing the slate for an upcoming World Story. But that wasn’t all – a massive new arena, new Protostar-themed 5-player dungeon and new holiday event were also shown.

One of the best parts of the MMO-side of our E3 was getting a sneak preview of WildStar’s upcoming first content patch: The Strain. Led on a walkthrough by Carbine’s own Jeremy Gaffney, we toured the all new zone of Blighthaven, the new five man public dungeon of The Nursery, and got a look at some of the all snazzy looking new Strain-infected gear you’ll be able to nab. Read on!

At PAX East this past weekend, Carbine Studios unveiled more information about the much-anticipated PVP feature known as Warplots. Lead PVP Designer Jen Gordy took us through an overview of how the system would work and showed us some of the customization options available for the plots. She called it a teamcentric system, 40 on 40 PVP featuring fortresses that are prepared for battle whilst aloft and then plopped down hard onto the ground to duke it out with an opposing Warplot.

Raiding in WildStar is all-out, taking the game’s splashy look and large scale into consideration all the way. Big is a theme for the game, and those who love to raid and constantly improving their gear will find much to dive into when the game launches. We were treated to a presentation about the game’s raids, which will fall into both the 20-man and 40-man varieties.