Just wanted to take a quick minute and post some screens that I took during gameplay this past weekend. Quick disclaimer though. My computer is nowhere near top of the line and the graphics settings were not even close to set to max. With that knowledge in hand lets look at some pictures 🙂
This is a picture of what it looks like when you talk to people to pick-up quests. You also see this screen when you turn in a quest as well. Also this NPC is one you interact with a bunch and depending on what part of the story you finish you sometimes get an extra piece of loot from the chest in the backround to the left there. There is voice over, but you are not stuck looking at this screen the whole time. You can immediately Accept the quest and then either listen to VO as you go to do something else (or even start on the quest) or you can just cancel out the VO all together if you don’t care to listen to it.
I took this screen during a foundry quest I was doing (my character is in front the npc following me is the one you can really see there). You see that gold and purple sparkly path there? That is the quest tracking path. You can turn it on and off using “Z” and it will show you the way to go to whatever quest you are tracking, even where you need to go to turn in quests.
That’s just a picture of my Great Weapon Fighter Half-Elf in town at level 12.
There are also Harper Agents at most of the quest hubs. You can talk to them to find out about local rumors and they will open up the foundry menu for you.
Action shot of me fighting during one of the Foundry quests. That person to my character’s left is my Companion whom I named Trevor. You can also see two piles of loot on the ground from mobs I killed before this picture.
Lastly, near the end of beta a bunch of people gathered up and took a picture in town. You can see a couple of the mounts (look at the bear in the middle!) and a few different spell effects.
Hope the pictures were fun and interesting for everyone 🙂
Over this past weekend I got a chance to play around with the professions system in Neverwinter some. At level 11 you can start learning the professions. You don’t need to find a trainer or anything, all you do is press “N” and the menu opens right up.
This is the default menus for professions. As you can see the options are Leadership, Mailsmithing, Platesmithing, Tailoring, and Leatherworking. The first step for every profession is to hire someone who actually does the crafting for you. After you do that they will be listed in the bottom section under the “Profession Assets” Section. Also as you both level your character up and level your professions you will unlock more Task Squares. Eventually you will be able to have nine tasks going at the same time.
The next few screens show the process of hiring your first miner for Platesmithing.
The first task takes 5 seconds, but after that they start increasing durations. The longest duration I saw during the beta was two hours but I also did not get much past level 3 of crafting. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Rare Tasks at higher levels had multiple day duration. You can also pay Astral Diamonds to finish any task immediately. Higher level tasks obviously cost more to finish immediately
Overall I am a big fan of this system. I really like being able to craft anywhere, and that I don’t have to stand around crafting because for me crafting is a side thing to do, not really a main aim for me in a MMO. The option to be able to go run a dungeon while crafting is a huge plus.
You think Wildstar’s guilds will be the same as every other MMO? Not so fast there. Wildstar has taken guilds a step further than the normal run of the mill set-up in most MMO’s.
The Wildstar Devs recognize that while most people have their guild they are a part of and they view it as the central avenue into whatever aspect of the game they are most interested in; Â people often form friendships outside of their guild as well and look to those people to do other activities. This is something other games have tried to address by allowing you to join multiple guilds at the same time. The main drawback of those systems is that you can usually only view the guild chat of one guild at a time. As a result you are severely limited in your ability to interact across your different guilds.
What Wildstar is doing instead is in addition to your guild they will also have something they are calling “Circles”. These will be different from guilds but have some of the same features guilds do: roster, private chat channel, name tags, and other undisclosed features. Say for example you are reading guild chat and notice there is activity in your “Firefly Appreciation Circle” well you won’t miss any of the conversation and will be able to jump right in.
Currently the limits are set at 1 guild and 5 Circles. They have not been specifically clear on if it is per character or across an account as yet, but they did say they are open to possibly increasing the limits if they find during beta 5 Circles just are not enough.
Honestly Circles is a great sounding feature which has a lot of promise. One thing I am a little concerned with, and we will have to see how it is handled, is Circles might help to contribute to fracturing in guilds. This would probably mostly be a potential issue for larger guilds, but it also could be something which might destroy smaller guilds. Also imagine being in the middle of a raid and having people not paying attention because so and so is being funny in their Circle chat.
The potential peril is all guilds develop groups of people who play together more than other people. This is a natural thing which develops among groups of people. Some people will get along better with certain other people, while different people will like others. Sometimes it is as simple as some people’s playtimes line up more than other people’s. The issue with circles though is it could very easily give people a place to talk to those friends freely without other guild members seeing. Which could be fine, or it could sow discord.
Solving those issues will probably fall to guilds themselves, and I am not sure doing otherwise would be a really good idea on the Dev’s part. For instance completely disabling Circle chat during raids by default might be an issue for people who can handle raiding with some distraction. They could give us some tools on to handle the issues on our own. Personally I think in the long run a player choice focused solution would probably be for the best.
As always though it is all very up in the air until Beta is over and we know more about where everything is falling. Overall Circles have some great potential, and very few obvious drawbacks.
For more information about guilds in Wildstar please check out their Dev Post “What is a Guild?“.
Neverwinter announced today they will be doing their final closed beta weekend April 12th -14th. During this weekend we will finally get a chance to tryout all four professions (Leadership, Mailsmithing, Platesmithing, and Leatherworking). If you played during Beta Weekend Three you will be able to pick-up your characters where you left it and continue your adventure. You will be able to level up to level 50, and there have been many improvements based on the feedback they received from beta weekend three.
In addition to announcing their fourth closed beta, Neverwinter also announced that open beta will start on April 30th. All characters from closed beta will be wiped before open beta. They have also confirmed there will be no wipe of characters between open beta and the game launch.
Also as expected they are continuing to push their founders packs by offering the Hero of the North purchasers 5 days of early access to the open beta. People who have purchased the Guardian of Neverwinter Pack will receive 3 days of early access.
My speculation is also the Drow race is supposed to be held for 60 days after the game’s start. I am now thinking since they are doing a “Soft Launch” the Drow will be available based on the start of Open Beta and we’ll see them on or around June 28th.
There’s been a lot of information released about Wildstar in the last couple of weeks and in their panel during Pax East they released even more details about player housing, paths, warplots, and more. First you should check out their video with all the highlights!
Player Housing
Player housing is literally what it sounds like. You can buy a plot in-game, clear it of unwanted wildlife and build your house. You can add paint and wallpaper as you like (or leave your walls bare!). You can also fill your house with any furniture you want. The example they gave at the panel was if you want a table floating in the air upside down with a chair on it – you can do that!
In addition you can do things like build a crafting table or a shop at your house. Logging out at your house will give you more rested XP, and the more things you have in your house the greater the XP return will be. Wouldn’t it be amazing to teleport from your home directly to raids? Well you can also build a portal at home that will take you directly to the raid and give you a buff for using it.
What good would a house be if you could only go to it once every hour? Well it would be rather inconvenient which is why you will be able to teleport to your home anytime you want!
Every house has neighbors and good neighbors help each other right? Every time you help a neighbor whether it’s fighting off bandits, helping with crops, or anything else that can happen you get XP and a share of the rewards for being a good neighbor.
Warplots
First look at warplots seems to be something guilds will create and build together. Basically a guild will build one and set it down in the middle of a battleground. Warplots will have defensive and offensive capabilities and they look like they might offer a ton of customization as well.
As of right now if your warplot gets damaged in a battle the guild will need to repair it to get it back up to full strength. However, if it turns out during beta that repairing is just too difficult or sucks the fun out of PvP they did mention that there are other options to be looked at.
Paths
In an effort to keep leveling from being too linear the Wildstar team has introduced the concept of paths. At character creation you choose which path you want to follow. Once you pick a path you can still take part in things other paths focus on (“Crossing Paths”) but you well get a bit less XP for those activities. Some of the options given were Explorer, Scientist, Solider, and Settler.
With the explorer path it is all about exploring the world and finding things. When I played at PAX East one aspect I really liked was as you ran around different exploration quests would pop-up and send you off in different directions. I can definitely see being an explorer leading you to all sorts of random places you wouldn’t think of to start (which is the point).
Solider path is all about killing things. People who enjoy leveling through grinding or quests where you need to kill x many mobs that will be the path to choose.
Scientist will be the patch for people who are more interested in the lore side of things. Your quests will involve learning the stories behind the game and the Nexus.
The last option is the Settler which is the social path. The example given at the Wildstar panel was you have a campfire and every time someone uses your campfire you get bonus XP and the more people who use your campfire the more XP you’ll earn in a given amount of time. You wouldn’t be able to look up where the best place to put a fire is because if everyone is putting them in the same place fewer people will likely use your particular fire. There is a bit of a puzzle built-in here for figuring out the best places to put your fires.
Those are the three main areas that they went into more details about. Other interesting tidbits are this game will be PC only at launch, there will be mounts, there is a world storyline that is soloable at max level, Elder Story is a storyline told through group quests at max level, and the factions will operate completely separate from each other.
The last bit (and probably the biggest deal for long-term success) is they have not settled on a business model yet. The estimation at Pax East was they will have something for us regarding that in about 2 months.
mmoarlee 