lineus Tech tips coverage of PS 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel
and steel Series so I'm here with David Bass the senior community manager for
WildStar I mean tell me about how long you guys have been working on this game
WildStar has probably been an active development maybe four or five years at
this point um the studio was founded 7 years ago uh by a bunch of X blizzard
developers and they kind of spent the first few years trying to figure out an art style building an engine doing some
kind of R&D um and we really just started active development just a couple
years go on W what eventually became Wild Star itself okay so what I okay
you're the community manager so obviously an MMO is all about playing by
yourself not connected online and really not interacting with anybody so you can
tell me how are you trying to uh to break out of that as the MMO that really
uh no okay I'm messing with you guys yes so what are you doing differently so as
an MMO where nobody plays together uh I don't actually do anything on the
project no I'm kidding um MMOs obviously Community is the most important thing
that explains why he didn't have an actual business card where'd you get this t-shirt from
oh I just stole it off a guy and then someone brought me over here and was
like hey you're going to talk on camera um but as an MMO I mean obviously
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
important to us to make sure that the community understands that we are a very
responsive a really Open studio we've been trying to be as transparent as we
can be with the fans both people in beta and people outside of beta when
something's not working in the game we tell people here's what's working here's
why it's not working and when beta testers come to us and say you know what
this part of the game sucks instead of saying to them well you know that's kind
of what we wanted to do so suck it up we actually will go back and look at and
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
better and so we'll engage in that dialogue with the fans and we really enjoy being able to be responsive like
that now you were saying a lot of the dev time was spent on refining the art
style building an engine why would you bother to build an engine at this point
when there's so many engines out there that are fantastic that can be licensed
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
of limitations there you're you're stuck with I mean you can modify the code and
and work your way through it but by building your own engine it gives us so
much flexibility to to change up stuff if if something's not working if a
programmer can't do what they need to do if an artist is really limited by the
something on the art side that is technical that I probably don't understand then the guys who are
building our tools and building our engine they can go in and change it and there's no problem they can do it really
fast the tool set we have available is super cool we actually we might be showing a
demo on the booth later this weekend of some of our tools but it lets our artist
just go in and literally just paint on the world and so the art style that
you've seen is really cool because we can translate that directly into the
game the concept art that you see literally things in the game look like
that concept art whereas in other games concept art kind of looks a little
different because you can't directly Port it to the engine but our engine was
built with this art style in mind now I want to hear I'm going to I'm going to
jump ahead in our our plan I want to hear the pitch to someone who's a gamer
they understand the concept of an MMO but they've never played one before why
are they going to buy Wild Star why are they going to play this so a lot of MMO
whoa I got just got really squeaky there so wild star um is a MMO obviously but
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
got a very very unique personality with the game we have very strong characters
strong personalities and we don't take ourselves too seriously and the game
itself doesn't take itself to seriously that's not to say there's not a really
interesting story and a really compelling mystery going on in the world
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
this out oh God we're all going to die we can joke around a lot if you see any
of our trailers that we got on the website both styles of animated trailers
versus explaining game features we just kind of are Gamers playing games and I
think it shows a lot of the stuff we do so with that said if it doesn't take
itself seriously then I guess that leads us pretty well into give me the hardcore
pitch then how do you pitch this to the guys who have playing Wow since the
first day so while we're not taking the story and like the actual personality
stuff very seriously we are taking an endgame really seriously because
everybody knows in an MMO leveling content's all well and good but if you
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
around or to get them to come back and so we're really focusing on three
aspects of the end game we've got for the solo player for the person who just
wants to level by themselves and then you know play around at endgame they'll
have their own story to to push through that only starts once you hit the level
cap we want to show the story of the planet Nexus the mystery surrounding it
that stuff you'll only really dive into when you hit the end game as a solo
player for the the hardcore guilds for the groups of people who want to do that
group content we'll have raids and we're doing old school 20 man and 40 Man raids
that are going to be really difficult it's okay for not everyone to play those
raids raids are not supposed to be for everyone they're supposed to be hard they're supposed to give people a
challenge and then for the PVP player we've got a system where well we've got
Arenas and Battlegrounds which are you know the normal instance objective PvP
Arenas ranked you know rated small group fights but we also have a system called
War plots we're not talking a lot about it yet but it's going to be 40 versus 40
groups forming war parties where you actually build your own Fortress you
build it you customize it you can decide what paths you want to force the enemy
to take you can actually go into a raid and capture a raid boss and bring him
back to your warplot so that way the other team has to fight against him and
then you bring your War plot to the fight the other team brings War plot and
you guys just go crazy that sounds absolutely bizonkers so tell me about
the combat because that's one of the things that I keep hearing a lot about I
mean we've been asking people around what what are you excited about we've
had some people say Wild Star and we kind of go why and they say Well it the
combat is fascinating tell me about it the combat is a really fast-paced it's
an action combat game so you're going to have telegraphs when you're using
attacks you're going to have these you know decals on the ground that kind of show where your attacks land which means
that if you can position people well you can hit as many enemies as you can fit
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
their attacks and position yourself and stun them and interrupt them and at the
same time we're also making sure that like healers for example also have to
deal with telegraphs healers can do the normal like standing in the back and
targeting a guy and hitting their heel but they can also aim their heels if
they want and so if the group lines themselves up you can heal everyone at once with a nice line attack you can
drop a big circle around everyone and everybody knows where to stay and so we
want to take some of the responsibility of the Healer off of them onto the DPS
where if the DPS are not paying attention to where the healer is that's
their problem it's not always the healer's fault in the fight can you talk
about the inventory system sure uh so the inventory we have a bag system um
got a basic inventory which is wow this is really full of crap right now
standard bag system um you can actually look here you got a bunch of different bags you'll earn bags as you play and
you can also actually crafting materials go in a separate Satchel so that way
when you're collecting things out in the world if you're mining if you're Gathering seeds or whatever they'll go
into a separate Satchel separate from your inventory cuz we got a lot of different things you can collect okay so
can you can you show us some of the uh some of the character customization you can't show us the customization but you
can at least uh cycle through a few random Creations maybe talk about what
we're looking at yeah so right now we're looking at the Dominion character creation um so we've got four races on
the Dominion side this is the marari female and we've got a marari male to
these are giant robots obviously and
so the customization that was a terrible
way of say that the character customization is uh currently a work in
progress I wish I could zoom into the face but you can see that you can change
the color of the hair the shape of the hair the uh her uh we it's facial hair
but it's actually you know antennas and different like technology things on the
Mari the Cheo which we just announced is
this small furry little race and they've got a bunch of different eye types hair
types they're kind of cute and they're actually gender list so you can click on
this and it doesn't actually change
anything we also have pink cheu and blue Chua there's the
pink uh the dracen are this crazy crazy
horned Fierce vicious race so they got all kinds of different
horn types different hair they all look super Fierce and super scary so I I'm
really really stoked to check it out tell us about the monetization model so
we just announced our business model we're going to be doing a subscription based game you buy the box and you get
30 days free after that you can pay $15 a month to keep playing however we're
also doing something called cred which is a actual in-game item that you can
purchase with real money and that cred if you redeem it is redeemed for 30 more
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
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
spend my in-game gold to buy a month of game time so I can actually play the
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
doesn't have that much time to spend but really wants to get some gold maybe they
want to buy that new Mount or whatever they can spend some money to buy cred
and sell it to you on the market so that way they get some extra gold you get a
free month and now everybody's happy and the gold sellers don't get anything so
there you have it guys uh it wasn't that long ago that the word on the street was
oh monthly subscriptions are dead but you guys have taken a bit of a unique
spin on that and it sounds like it just
might work I guess we'll find out won't we thank you so much for taking the time
to talk to us David this has been absolutely great and uh good luck thanks
man