As preparations for the next phase of the WildStar beta commence, Carbine discusses changes players can expect to see going forward.

WildStar Wednesday is here folks and whether you're fighting for the Exiles or Dominating for the Dominion, you'll be interested to here about the upcoming beta changes that get discussed this week.

As many of you may remember, back in August Mike Donatelli released a "State of the Beta" blog post detailing systems that would be reiterated upon for the next stage of beta. Today we receive a few details on regarding a few of the core systems that have been changed. First up on the bracket, let's talk "Leveling up".

As discussed by Carbine's Senior Community Manager, David Bass, leveling up didn't feel all that significant and interesting during previous stages of the WildStar beta. You "dinged" and that was pretty much it. To make leveling more interesting and even more insightful, the team implemented a "Level Up interface" that shows you all of your new class benefits and abilities, game features as well as other important things that are now open to you from reaching the next step in your leveling process.

"By making what you've unlocked much clearer, leveling up feels much more like a celebration, and less like a paralyzing choice of what to do or where to go next."

Next up on the list we have "Ability Loadouts". With the act of gaining access to new abilities being a big part of the level up process, Carbine wanted to make it easier for players to understand what these abilities are actually useful for. For this they created a new "Ability Loadout UI" that lists and categorized abilities based on four different criteria. These categories are "Assault" (for offensive abilities), "Support" (for healing or tanking abilities), "Utility" and finally "Path" (abilities you receive based on what Path you've chosen in WildStar).

Last, but definitely not least, we have changes to how the Quest System works in WildStar. Originally quest objectives were shown as your standard "kill 10 rats" display. Something we've seen in MMOs since, well, even before MMO's quite frankly. Based on player feedback from previous stages of beta, Carbine decided it was time to "modernize" the WildStar questing system a bit. Now, instead of having the quest bar show how many rats (or Squirgs in this case) you've killed out of 10, your quest log shows a completion percentage.

"Creatures of varying difficulty can now count for more or less quest credit rather than every creature incrementing your kill count by one. Kill a Squirg? Maybe you earn 16% towards your quest objective. Take on a MEGASQUIRG DESTROYER™? Suddenly you've completed 40% of your quest with one badass kill."

On top of this change, an "Open Tagging" system has now been implemented in the game. See someone having trouble with a monster while you're out questing? Now if you run over to them and help kill it, both of you will receive experience points, quest credit and loot even if you're not in the same party. Is this completely revolutionary? Not really, no. However, it definitely is a quality of life change that helps encourage working together. You know, as opposed to waiting for that stranger to die and then taking the rare spawn for yourself. And while there are concerns that do tend to crop up with these Open Tagging systems, David says the team will definitely be tracking how these changes affect gameplay going forward.

"These combined improvements to questing are definitely one of the largest changes we're most excited about, but it's also one that requires the most extensive internal testing.

The specifics of Open Tagging are crazy complex and we could spend an entire devblog talking about the system behind it. For now, rest assured that we've kept in mind the usual concerns about open tagging when implementing this system, including powerleveling concerns, high-level gank squads, and the oft-used "tag-and-forget" scenarios that terribad players use."

Since we've received a lot of information about beta this week, it might be safe to assume that Closed Beta Phase 4 will be starting up rather soon. Let the F5 spamming commence!

The full WildStar Wednesday blog post can be viewed here. For more information on the game be sure to check out its official website and stay dialed into ZAM for all of your WildStar news needs.

See you on Nexus!

Corey "Crimzen" Jenkins

Follow Corey on Twitter @coreycrimzen