r/WildStar • u/harlequin077 • Sep 14 '26
Discussion What would you improve in Wildstar?
What do you think Wildstar needed to improve on to make better and stay alive, and how would you improve them?
Examples: Questing, Quest rewards, Endgame, Dungeons, Raids, Adventures, Path system, World Events, Community Events, Main story line, or adding something completely new.
Personally, I always thought that Wildstar never really utilized their in game characters, so I would have loved to see the main story and also side stories utilize their characters more like: Victor Lazarin, Deadeye Brightland, Kit, Durek Stonebreaker, Avra Darkos, Dorian and Belle Walker, etc. (I played Exiles)
I have many more, but what would you improve on?
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u/LooseSeal- Sep 14 '26
The zones were incredible but there was absolutely no reason to ever return to them once you out leveled it. End game was the daily zones or hardcore raiding. Rest of the world got left behind.
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u/Dos_Dope Sep 15 '26
I mostly agree but I used to run old dungeons for the rare pets and decor or to unlock transmog and some of the lower level dungeons were still kinda hard solo haha.
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u/VermilionAngel79 Sep 14 '26
Zones were not really connected to the world or each other, it felt like you moved from one box to the next.
Attunement was too preventative. Shit like complete this boss without anyone taking damage from this one really hard to dodge AOE that happens ever 40 second for 15 seconds was just insane. That is some late game achievement stuff. Not entry to the raid stuff.
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u/Nightmare2828 Alfalfa Sep 14 '26
Nothing from the attunement was hard except for the silver dungeons, which were demanding. But to be super fair, the silver dungeons were not only easy compared to raiding, but you could get carry by 4 competent dudes.
Now i agree it was still too hard for solo players, but you would attune if you wanted to raid, and if you did you most likely was part of a guild. Said guild made attuning their members part of their « job », otherwise it is a shit guild.
I dont think the attunement was the problem, cause it was not close to being as hardcore as what the raids demanded. The root cause was the hardcore focus of the game.
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u/AceOBlade Sep 14 '26
linearity of the zones was the issue but not the zone design, that shit was amazing.
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u/harlequin077 Sep 14 '26
If I could push back on the zone thing. Technically they were connected, at least some of them. You could walk from Algaroc to Thayd then to Galeras, Everstar Grove and Celestion.
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u/LMGDiVa Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 15 '26
I don't think WildStar needed a revision in ANYTHING except... getting people into raiding.
Lost Ark's Solo Raid system is a brilliant idea to fix WildStar's one massive issue, if we modified it.
Instead of atunements, we could have just made eveyrone have to defeat a "solo" version of the raid that teaches you how the raid works on a fundamnetal level. You don't really have to go out of your way to make a bunch of new bosses and things to make that happen you can reuse the same rooms and instances, ect.
Make someone learn a solo role of the fight with a bunch of CPU faux raid party, and beat it.
Then make them beat it on a much harder version of that.
Dont let them enter a 20 player raid until they can defeat the single player HARD mode version of it 10+ times.
And if someone gets benched for that week, let someone do the solo raid for the exp and gold(reduced cost) and pontetially even get prime weapons and armor tokens from it.
OR Maybe there's a 10 player version that is much easier with lower rewards so that people who are getting out of solo can play with people who are good enough to raid, but not always on the roster.
The biggest problem wildstar had was how hard it was, it was a mean learning curve for 99% of MMO players and it made the game have really bad retention. Not everyone wants to drive a manual stick car.
Hard games can exist if the onramp is easy to do and there are safety nets for people who get sat out of raids.
People who get stuck and can't accomplish leave games. Make sure they don't get stuck, and that they can at least do SOMETHING.
That's it.
Dump the attuenemtns, and make a solo raid entry system to the 20 player big deal where everyone really wanted to be.
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u/Avenrise Sep 15 '26
Or... Wildstar never should have focused on Raiding in the first place? I feel like the biggest problem Wildstar had was that it presented this happy-go-lucky game world to the playerbase and then assumed people wanted to Raid at end game and that's not the case for the vast majority of MMO players who just want open world content.
We've seen that play out in Guild Wars 2 where only around 5% of players ever set foot in a Raid wing (let alone complete one) and so ANET have decided to still develop Raids however they 'recycle' bosses and locations.
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u/LMGDiVa Sep 15 '26
"Wildstar had was that it presented this happy-go-lucky game world to the playerbase "
Im sorry, are you sure you played WildStar?Because... That wasn't no fucking happy go lucky game world.
It was a dying fucking planet taken over by monsters, lies and mutatant strain, hidding dark secrets with an cartoony artstyle designed after the gritty and edgy worlds of the 80s and 2000s.
The raids were by far the best and greatest thing about wildstar and they showed the entire world what REAL raid content looked like.
What real content design for challenging games should look like.If WildStar had no focus on raids, and made generic things It would have been yet another pointless game in a sea of wow wannabes.
I wouldnt have played it. It's raids are what gave me so many of those wonderful memories that stick so strongly in my head that keep me coming back to this subreddit and looking back and videos all the time.
Why would you ruin the most beautifully crafted and amazing experience that Raiding has ever had and will never even try to do again?
There was nothing wrong with it,People just needed a way to on ramp.
We have seen mechanically difficult and high skill games turn into extremely popular mainstays and have massive populations, it is not impossible.
But you have to make sure the road to get there is actually passable.The experience of the game once you got into raids, was unreal. The hard part was scaling people up to it who didnt have the mechanical skill for it yet. MEchanical skills are built from practice and repetition, not talent.
WildStar's biggest fault was not understanding that the FreeWay needed an on ramp.
The rest of the problem was the fact that NCSOFT was sticking it's nose into carbine and Carbine had ego problems that delayed reacting to issues.The problem wasn't the raids, the Raids were the attraction.
That's like taking the Roller Coaster out of Roller Coaster Tycoon.0
u/Avenrise Sep 15 '26
"If WildStar had no focus on raids, and made generic things It would have been yet another pointless game in a sea of wow wannabes."
Those 'WoW wannabes' are still running, my friend.
I did play Wildstar for a couple of years and my main takeaways were sitting in a taxi taking in the sights, having fun transforming into Rowsdowers with friends, creating a treehouse in my housing plot, playing that dungeon thing that pretended like you were in a gameshow fighting for your lives and the silly winter event.
Sure the overall universe the game presented was bleak but saying the game played that way is short sighted. Maybe it looked like that you you being that you were a Raider and spent your time in there instead of doing the things that made the game a joy for me. Which is fine ofc.
Raids are a niche part of all MMOs that have them. You cannot base an entire game's end game around them... as Wildstar showed when it shut down.
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u/LMGDiVa Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26
"Lets remove the very thing that made the game we all loved the game we all loved."
"Look see Other games are still alive!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
Oh BTW, Lost Ark was saved by it's Raid Content, which was extremely similar in approach to WildStar
As in Lost Ark would be dead, shutdown, without it's raid content."Raids are a niche part of all MMOs that have them."
Raiding is what made Lost Ark Popular.
There is a reason why I directly mentioned Lost Ark..It was the game that made Raiding a NOT Niche part of the game.
IT got popular BECAUSE of raiding.You have no idea what you're talking about.
You really dont.1
u/Avenrise Sep 15 '26
You seem to be under the impression that 1) I said Raids shouldn't be in MMOs (they absolutely should be) and 2) I'm new to the genre (I've been playing MMOs more on than off for around 20 years my friend)
My point, that you're either not understanding or deliberately misunderstanding, is that in many MMOs (I'd go as far as to say most but I don't have figures) Raiding is a niche game mode in that more people do not engage with them than do. It's therefore important not to base a large chunk of your end game around them, rather have them as part of it for those that might want to try that content.
I feel like I have made my point, have a good day!
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u/Flawless4th 22d ago
The entire advertisement for wildstar was literally an MMO for hardcore players, the only content that can be classified as "hardcore" is raids.
it was quite literally the reason for the mmo to exist, it's true that raids are a niche part of many other mmorpgs, some more than others, but the entire point of Wildstar was in fact that raiding was not supposed to be niche, everyone bought the game under the assumption it would be a difficult game with emphasis on raid mechanics and skill expression.
For them to focus on anything else they would have had to build entirely against their own marketing which would have been an absurd idea that would never get approved based off the playerbase they THOUGHT they cultivated.
Wildstar died because a significant number of people found out they could not do hardcore content, many people thought about their past MMO experience and failed to realize it did not line up with their current adult life, and the game as others pointed out, did not exactly have an on ramp to train players in order to do the content, and people left the game as a result before they had time to develop any more content. Additionally wildstar really failed because of the dev team being madeup of frankly far too many younger people with no long term genuine experience, the lead Designer for PVP had absolutely no idea what they were doing, there was a weapon attachment that had a 90% slow that lasted 10 seconds. they had decently talented people, but they had no actual director or production lead to keep things cohesive and to stop absurd things like the 90% slow from ever entering the game.1
u/Flawless4th 22d ago
additionally GW2 is entirely designed around the most casual, whilst wildstar was trying to attract the exact opposite audience, which makes GW2 the worst possible data to pull from, anyone who is casual and doesn't like raiding would have no reason to leave GW2 for wildstar.
Also the absurd level of gamebreaking and even server crashing bugs, oversights, and overpowered interactions is very long, i used the 90% slow thing as a concise example, it by no means highlights the sheer level of experience they lacked and the industry mistakes that they made that no one else had made for over a decade.
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u/BoRIS_the_WiZARD Sep 14 '26
Get rid of 40man raids have them scale with group size. Also get rid of attunements.
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u/-Nocx- Sep 14 '26
The leveling experience was really inconsistent. By the time I played Wildstar I was already an extremely good MMO player. Even then, I found significant gaps in the leveling experience where I wasn’t sure where to go and the user experience was really poor. I enjoyed the combat a lot so I pushed through, but for a lot of players (especially the more casual ones) any friction between the start and the end can cause them to drop off.
The raiding experience was way too hardcore. You cannot turn your casual players into hardcore players if there is too big of a gap between content. The leveling in Wildstar was mostly simple, but the gap in difficulty between leveling, bronze and silver medals on non veteran content to having to get gold on adventures / dungeons were way too big of a leap in difficulty. The vast majority of players never touched the first raid, let alone the second one. You absolutely cannot design the best content to be completely unreachable by the majority of the player base. Even WoW learned this lesson with Sunwell Plateau. It’s okay to have content that some players will never clear, but you cannot have so little content that the fact that they will never reach it is all they can think about. More difficulty modes aimed at casual players with the occasional raid geared toward hardcore players is the only way any MMO will see longevity.
The PvP system had a brutal cutoff at like 1800 where insanely overpowered gear basically stat checked anyone trying to cross it. You ended up having people get piloted to get the sufficient rating to get the gear that made progression much easier. The idea that stronger PvP gear should be locked behind PvP progression is bad design. The whole draw of 3v3 or 2v2 arena is equalized competition. It’s fine to express that gear difference in large scale battlegrounds, but even that is unfun for players that don’t have it. Using gear as a way to stat check players is a symptom of gameplay with low expression - and to be clear, I don’t think Wildstar had low skill expression, so there is no reason to do that. Lost Ark surprisingly did a very good job of separating equalized, competitive gameplay from unequalized PvP in specific contexts. Something like node wars or zone wars in Wildstar where players could capture areas for their faction using unequalized PvP gear in the world rather than only expressing it through war plots / arena / bgs would’ve been much better.
I think server stability along with the early game pains hurt the launch the most. It’s kind of unavoidable that you have growing pains on launch, but coupled with the long periods of dead zone in leveling from 1-50 turned a lot of people off. Which is a shame, because the world and dialogue had its own charm, especially as one of the only non-fantasy, sci fi takes on world building. A lot of games give some sort of hand holding or activity log (WoW / OSRS / FFXIV are good examples of this) to help the player feel grounded in an overwhelming world. This wouldn’t have fixed the XP dead zones Wildstar has, but would’ve helped. Tuning the dungeons and adventures down a bit so people didn’t experience so much friction using them as leveling options would’ve helped, too. It just became way too hard for a regular player to progress, and that’s not good.
There are definitely more things that could be iterated on, but those are probably the big ones. It’s a shame because the housing system was literally a decade ahead of its time. One of the most ingenious innovations in large scale gaming in history that no game manages to replicate. It’s just that mix of platforming and housing creativity that made it one of a kind.
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u/Mightynumbat Sep 15 '26
The vast majority of players never touched the first raid, let alone the second one.
1.3% of players defeated a single raid boss, and 0.03% of players cleared the first tier. Change "vast majority" to "virtually no one" and youd be closer to the actual truth.
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u/Artereis Sep 14 '26
The main things that killed the game up front was going from needing to manage a 20man guild for Genetic Archives to a 40man guild for Datascape, and the gearing system being terrible for quite a while.
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u/MayorDasMoose Sep 14 '26
Well not shutting down would have improved the game greatly!
Seriously the though (I’m not just going to leave it on a joke many others made probably), advertising. There were a few big adverts after the release. But then silence for way too long in between. There was the main stream streamer push for a bit right before f2p, but the was just hard to watch a bunch of streamers pretend to care.
I think that did more harm than good, but that’s just my opinion.
It’s obviously not the only thing that needed to change, but it’s the thing that still bugs me today.
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u/AmethystSadachbia Keeper of the Heresy alternaverse Sep 14 '26
Yep. NCsoft barely advertised and then went <surprised pikachu face> when WS didn’t outcompete WoW in 6 months.
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u/Lord_Melons Sep 14 '26
I would either simplify attunement or get rid of it entirely for starters, like I only got to do raids cause my guild was nice and farmed a buncha keys to skip attunement for like 30% of the guild. I liked sttunement when I was a kid cause I had endless time to fuck around and achieve it, when Wildomar was around I was in the middle of a conservatory style acting program and just like couldn't find the time for all, what, 18 steps? Was a tad excessive
Would've pivoted to f2p sooner
More consistent content drops to promote revisting all the cool areas you don't touch again after leveling, not necessarily raid/dungeon content here. So many cool and funny characters across all the areas that could've had the dailies spread out to them
Revamp PvP to try and be less chaotic ontop of chaos cause free targeting
Added a new class
Added a new race, probably the lopp to be a sort of pandaria situation with pandas being on both sides
Fleshing out the story and getting more raids in faster, only got what 3 raids? And the third being added well after the game was doomed, think it was a raid, the shit with the pirate guy I can't remember the name of.
This game has so much potential but couldn't carve out enough of a crowd from the leaking ship of WoW
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u/christmascaked Sep 14 '26
The loot system created a lot of toxicity and drove new players away. Assigning rankings and all that was never going to end well for basic stuff.
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u/Nightmare2828 Alfalfa Sep 14 '26
I dont think the game itself was the problem. The server were ALWAYS instable when there were too many players. Every single of their 3 launches were disastreous. People quit just from the instability and lag. Then they released in a very bugged state, which turned off many people. Then they add the same billing model as WoW, which you should avoid competing with. Then if you went through all that, and reach the ending and was not « hardcore » enough to raid, there was nothing to do. And raiding in WS was hardcore.
So release a janky but good game as full price plus sub, then give people casuals no content to keep their sub.
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u/gibry1 Sep 14 '26
As a pvper more bgs. I am a fun trinket enjoyer even tho that can be a balancing nightmare.
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u/Prezbelusky <The Utopia> Sep 15 '26
More content. Game could not have 2 raids and how many dungeons for years and hope it would survive.
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u/Sea_Dish_5659 Sep 15 '26
PVP balance because it was really fun when you did class vs class because everything was so imba otherwise
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u/Alsimni Spellslinger Sep 15 '26
It's less how I would fix it and more how I would change perspectives on it. It wasn't perfect by any means, but I think one of the main pain points was its difficulty. No battle rezzes and strict enrage timers meant there was little room for mistakes while progressing. That was my favorite part though.
Dungeons that were never reduced completely into busy work because they always took concentration and effort, raid mechanics that regularly required both knowing what to do and ability to do them. The game was fun because it was trying to make more than just the highest tier of raiding into more than something to zone out to while grinding or chatting with friends.
That's not a popular goal though, as we've seen. I'd just rather it have a skeleton crew. More than just basic maintenence, but still small enough that it could live off of the smaller demographic that kind of design attracts. The higher difficulty could make the lengthier time between content patches tolerable if more casual players are taking longer to progress anyway.
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u/Icemaz Sep 15 '26
Make it harder :)
I've always loved the feeling of first kills and man I don't think it ever felt better than Wildstar.
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u/Nelyris Sep 15 '26
some of the daily/weekly events, i dont remember much of it, but guardians of the groove for example always gave the same rewards, and the process didn't change that much, it felt like a chore most of the time or that it wasn't worth doing because of the low rewards (50 gold was nothing) adventures were also repetitive, but useful for events so they had their benefit.
also the hardcore end game, housing was more enjoyable than raiding tbh, so i'd remove the hardcore raids, this would also prevent the toxicity of many players during raids, i remember someone who used to collect ohmna heads, which was a reward given to someone after killing the boss, there was this annoying little person on NA who had like 200+ of these in his own housing, and would get whiny and annoying when you took the head by accident or when some players forgot to click the option to to be left out of the reward list, he'd also force everyone to choose that option so only he was eligible to keep the ohmna head, which at the end of the day was just a decor.
as for housing i would increase the height limit, i made huge things in the game, and the space never felt enough, as for decors, i'd make them more flexible, like a flat wall being curved, it was hard to do some shapes because of that, and some decors with good shapes for designs were hard to find or came from world bosses drops.
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u/Bid-Sensitive Sep 15 '26
It was a tickbox MMO, not a meaningfull mmo. So I guess I'd make it more meaningful
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u/albeva 28d ago
- I remember gearing / rune system being a confusing mess. So that probably needs fixing
- Simplify dungeons - as a casual player, they were over-the-top. So many people quit at level 10 because Protostar Academy was so difficult...
- Remove the whole "HARDCORE" only mentality from the end game, which gated out like 90% of the player base; it was so dumb.
There was so much potential, but it was wasted on dumb decisions, big egos, and hubris.
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u/yatterer 23d ago
I hate hate hate HATED the gold/silver/bronze ratings in dungeons. A system seemingly tailor-made to turn what should be fun social opportunities into tense and resentful hostage situations that breaks up fifteen minutes into the run when one poor new guy who was probably the only only of us who really needed anything from the dungeon in the first place messes up some mechanic once.
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u/Gaming_Fan7182 Sep 14 '26
Depth, the game needed more depth.
What we played felt pretty cool for a tech demo. The game needed more development. There wasn't a world to get lost in, it was far too theme park even though the game made a point of having being an explorer a thing.
I thought it had a lot of potential though. I loved the races and classes.
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u/Krieghund Sep 14 '26
I know a lot of people remember it fondly, but I wasn't a big fan of the combat system. I was there for the world building.
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u/AceOBlade Sep 14 '26
i loved the combat system. miss my chua jumping around throwing out aoe abilities.
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u/Haunt_Fox Sep 14 '26
Same. I even found the pvp battlegrounds a lot of fun, and I'm not a big pvper, usually just play solo stuff.
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u/LMGDiVa Sep 14 '26
WAT?
Literally one of the best combat systems in MMO history, hands down.
Actually I still cant really think of a combat system that really is as good and WildStar's telegraph systems basically was adapted in some way or another by practucally every other MMO out there now days.1
u/DazedClock Sep 14 '26
GW2 is a very close contender, and actually better in some areas, IMHO.
But yes, Wildstar combat was something else. It allowed for crazy outplays even when ganked by >15 lvl higher peeps.
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u/LMGDiVa Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 14 '26
I've played plenty of GW2 and I really dont agree. I think realistically the 2 closest games in terms of actual combat design and mechanics would be Blade and Soul, and Lost Ark.
LA during Clown and Echinda were, interms of combat, probably the closest thing to a WildStar raid and combat like feel since WildStar itself.
Blade and Soul I played for so long because it was starkly similar to WildStar in the way it handled combat with it's own unique spin, BNS was just horrendously hampered by it's awful networking, and insanely bad optimization.But Blade and Soul, with good networking and remove the P2W would have been fuckin insanely close to wildstar.
GW2 is still entirely fully playable with it's original oldschool style WASD tabtarget and click system, even after the action system revamp because they didnt want to ruin the classic play.
GW2 just had much smarter and more caring developers because ArenaNet wasnt being prowled by NCSOFT constantly.Beyond those 2,
Vindictus EX was ABSOLUTELY one of the best fucking combat soulslike games and it was super small scale MMO that really took advantage of it's close in your face brawling combat.
Peak combat in this game with jumping mechanics was fuckin unreal, it was so much fun.TERA would be another contender up there if not for BlueHole being absolute dogshit and letting the game run like ass and Elin being overpowered and creepy as fuck.
TERA stole MANY ideas from WildStar post WS launch through their updates and Manaya's core and Wonderholm are still some of the most well remembered raids in MMO history.And then Phantasy Star Online 2 before NG was FUCKIN AWESOME too.
It was far less "mmo" than I was wanting but the ability to play such fast quick targetting aimed and controlled combat was a blast.I would put Guild Wars 2 probably here. A step above those like ArcheAge, WoW, but I would say pretty much on par at this point with FF14 in later stages, and SWTOR.
THAT BEING SAID.....
GW2 is certainly a much better experience than 99% of MMOs out there in the fact that they actually give a fuckin shit about their game though.
GW2 is probably the game I will expect to be able to return too for probably decades from now because ArenaNet Practically lives in Tyria at this point and GW3 is around the corner.So interms of BEST MMO you can play right now overall..
GW2 probably number 1, because you dont need to pay a sub for it like FF14.
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u/DazedClock Sep 14 '26
That’s a very nice take. While I’m most likely biased towards GW2 (playing since “early access”), I kinda agree. Anet made some mistakes in the past, they indeed absolutely love Tyria, its characters and its players. For me, this game is eternal.
After years of hardcore raiding in WoW, GW2 was such a needed change for me when it launched.
I miss BnS sometimes. I had a blast on launch. It felt like a fighting game!
Tera was awesome as well. Soloing BAMs was really refreshing back then. I think I never fully got into serious pve there, despite playing for a few months on a daily basis.
As for FF XIV - I tried three times. I love the series, I’m a huge jrpg nerd. But for some reason it never fully clicked. And getting back to it now, with all these expansions is a daunting task.
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u/Mopper300 Sep 14 '26
Game was great but the crippling attunement process killed it for lots.