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lineus Tech tips coverage of PS 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel

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and steel Series so I'm here with David Bass the senior community manager for

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WildStar I mean tell me about how long you guys have been working on this game

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WildStar has probably been an active development maybe four or five years at

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this point um the studio was founded 7 years ago uh by a bunch of X blizzard

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developers and they kind of spent the first few years trying to figure out an art style building an engine doing some

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kind of R&D um and we really just started active development just a couple

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years go on W what eventually became Wild Star itself okay so what I okay

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you're the community manager so obviously an MMO is all about playing by

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yourself not connected online and really not interacting with anybody so you can

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tell me how are you trying to uh to break out of that as the MMO that really

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uh no okay I'm messing with you guys yes so what are you doing differently so as

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an MMO where nobody plays together uh I don't actually do anything on the

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project no I'm kidding um MMOs obviously Community is the most important thing

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that explains why he didn't have an actual business card where'd you get this t-shirt from

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oh I just stole it off a guy and then someone brought me over here and was

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like hey you're going to talk on camera um but as an MMO I mean obviously

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Community is one of the most important things if you don't have players you've got an empty world and so it's really

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important to us to make sure that the community understands that we are a very

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responsive a really Open studio we've been trying to be as transparent as we

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can be with the fans both people in beta and people outside of beta when

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something's not working in the game we tell people here's what's working here's

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why it's not working and when beta testers come to us and say you know what

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this part of the game sucks instead of saying to them well you know that's kind

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of what we wanted to do so suck it up we actually will go back and look at and

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say okay if they're not liking it clearly there's something wrong here so what is it what can we do to make it

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better and so we'll engage in that dialogue with the fans and we really enjoy being able to be responsive like

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that now you were saying a lot of the dev time was spent on refining the art

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style building an engine why would you bother to build an engine at this point

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when there's so many engines out there that are fantastic that can be licensed

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engines are amazing because they give you kind of like that base level to go in and do stuff but there's also a lot

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of limitations there you're you're stuck with I mean you can modify the code and

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and work your way through it but by building your own engine it gives us so

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much flexibility to to change up stuff if if something's not working if a

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programmer can't do what they need to do if an artist is really limited by the

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something on the art side that is technical that I probably don't understand then the guys who are

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building our tools and building our engine they can go in and change it and there's no problem they can do it really

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fast the tool set we have available is super cool we actually we might be showing a

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demo on the booth later this weekend of some of our tools but it lets our artist

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just go in and literally just paint on the world and so the art style that

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you've seen is really cool because we can translate that directly into the

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game the concept art that you see literally things in the game look like

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that concept art whereas in other games concept art kind of looks a little

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different because you can't directly Port it to the engine but our engine was

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built with this art style in mind now I want to hear I'm going to I'm going to

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jump ahead in our our plan I want to hear the pitch to someone who's a gamer

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they understand the concept of an MMO but they've never played one before why

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are they going to buy Wild Star why are they going to play this so a lot of MMO

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whoa I got just got really squeaky there so wild star um is a MMO obviously but

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it's a Sci-Fi MMO which is something that people really haven't touched that much on and in addition to that we've

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got a very very unique personality with the game we have very strong characters

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strong personalities and we don't take ourselves too seriously and the game

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itself doesn't take itself to seriously that's not to say there's not a really

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interesting story and a really compelling mystery going on in the world

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but at the same time it's okay to for there to be humor not everything has to be 100% serious world is ending figure

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this out oh God we're all going to die we can joke around a lot if you see any

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of our trailers that we got on the website both styles of animated trailers

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versus explaining game features we just kind of are Gamers playing games and I

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think it shows a lot of the stuff we do so with that said if it doesn't take

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itself seriously then I guess that leads us pretty well into give me the hardcore

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pitch then how do you pitch this to the guys who have playing Wow since the

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first day so while we're not taking the story and like the actual personality

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stuff very seriously we are taking an endgame really seriously because

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everybody knows in an MMO leveling content's all well and good but if you

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don't have an end game when you launch the game you're screwed there's just nothing you can do to keep those players

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around or to get them to come back and so we're really focusing on three

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aspects of the end game we've got for the solo player for the person who just

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wants to level by themselves and then you know play around at endgame they'll

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have their own story to to push through that only starts once you hit the level

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cap we want to show the story of the planet Nexus the mystery surrounding it

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that stuff you'll only really dive into when you hit the end game as a solo

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player for the the hardcore guilds for the groups of people who want to do that

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group content we'll have raids and we're doing old school 20 man and 40 Man raids

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that are going to be really difficult it's okay for not everyone to play those

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raids raids are not supposed to be for everyone they're supposed to be hard they're supposed to give people a

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challenge and then for the PVP player we've got a system where well we've got

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Arenas and Battlegrounds which are you know the normal instance objective PvP

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Arenas ranked you know rated small group fights but we also have a system called

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War plots we're not talking a lot about it yet but it's going to be 40 versus 40

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groups forming war parties where you actually build your own Fortress you

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build it you customize it you can decide what paths you want to force the enemy

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to take you can actually go into a raid and capture a raid boss and bring him

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back to your warplot so that way the other team has to fight against him and

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then you bring your War plot to the fight the other team brings War plot and

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you guys just go crazy that sounds absolutely bizonkers so tell me about

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the combat because that's one of the things that I keep hearing a lot about I

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mean we've been asking people around what what are you excited about we've

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had some people say Wild Star and we kind of go why and they say Well it the

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combat is fascinating tell me about it the combat is a really fast-paced it's

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an action combat game so you're going to have telegraphs when you're using

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attacks you're going to have these you know decals on the ground that kind of show where your attacks land which means

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that if you can position people well you can hit as many enemies as you can fit

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in that Telegraph and the enemies all have the same types of attacks so you're going to be need to need to dodge out of

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their attacks and position yourself and stun them and interrupt them and at the

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same time we're also making sure that like healers for example also have to

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deal with telegraphs healers can do the normal like standing in the back and

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targeting a guy and hitting their heel but they can also aim their heels if

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they want and so if the group lines themselves up you can heal everyone at once with a nice line attack you can

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drop a big circle around everyone and everybody knows where to stay and so we

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want to take some of the responsibility of the Healer off of them onto the DPS

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where if the DPS are not paying attention to where the healer is that's

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their problem it's not always the healer's fault in the fight can you talk

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about the inventory system sure uh so the inventory we have a bag system um

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got a basic inventory which is wow this is really full of crap right now

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standard bag system um you can actually look here you got a bunch of different bags you'll earn bags as you play and

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you can also actually crafting materials go in a separate Satchel so that way

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when you're collecting things out in the world if you're mining if you're Gathering seeds or whatever they'll go

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into a separate Satchel separate from your inventory cuz we got a lot of different things you can collect okay so

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can you can you show us some of the uh some of the character customization you can't show us the customization but you

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can at least uh cycle through a few random Creations maybe talk about what

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we're looking at yeah so right now we're looking at the Dominion character creation um so we've got four races on

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the Dominion side this is the marari female and we've got a marari male to

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these are giant robots obviously and

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so the customization that was a terrible

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way of say that the character customization is uh currently a work in

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progress I wish I could zoom into the face but you can see that you can change

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the color of the hair the shape of the hair the uh her uh we it's facial hair

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but it's actually you know antennas and different like technology things on the

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Mari the Cheo which we just announced is

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this small furry little race and they've got a bunch of different eye types hair

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types they're kind of cute and they're actually gender list so you can click on

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this and it doesn't actually change

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anything we also have pink cheu and blue Chua there's the

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pink uh the dracen are this crazy crazy

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horned Fierce vicious race so they got all kinds of different

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horn types different hair they all look super Fierce and super scary so I I'm

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really really stoked to check it out tell us about the monetization model so

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we just announced our business model we're going to be doing a subscription based game you buy the box and you get

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30 days free after that you can pay $15 a month to keep playing however we're

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also doing something called cred which is a actual in-game item that you can

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purchase with real money and that cred if you redeem it is redeemed for 30 more

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days of game time so what that means is that we're actually going to have a market in game where if I'm playing the

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game for a month and I'm earning tons and tons of gold and I got all this money left over I go on that market and

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spend my in-game gold to buy a month of game time so I can actually play the

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game for free if I'm playing the game enough that I love it and have all that money to spend while someone else who

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doesn't have that much time to spend but really wants to get some gold maybe they

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want to buy that new Mount or whatever they can spend some money to buy cred

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and sell it to you on the market so that way they get some extra gold you get a

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free month and now everybody's happy and the gold sellers don't get anything so

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there you have it guys uh it wasn't that long ago that the word on the street was

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oh monthly subscriptions are dead but you guys have taken a bit of a unique

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spin on that and it sounds like it just

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might work I guess we'll find out won't we thank you so much for taking the time

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to talk to us David this has been absolutely great and uh good luck thanks

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man