WildStar: Choose your Adventure
Cyglaive breaks down Adventures and recaps his journey through Hycrest Insurrection.
MMORPGs are games that thrive on giving players memorable adventures and content that they can experience with their friends and share with their guildmates over and over again. In its upcoming MMORPG WildStar, Carbine Studios is taking this term quite literally and adding an actual gameplay type into the game referred to as Adventures!
If you’ve seen Carbine’s latest WildStar Flick, then you might have a good sense of what these dangerous trials may entail--other than knowing your life will be on the line every step of the way. Following the latest Flick, a few press members, including myself, got a chance to hangout with Carbine’s Senior Content Designer, Matt Tobiason, as we ran through one of these Adventures and got to experience first-hand what they were all about. So without further delay, let me jump right in and discuss exactly what these Adventures have in store for all of you would-be heroes coming to planet Nexus!
Adventures? Dungeons? What’s the difference?
In most MMORPGs your typical group experience usually consists of gathering a party of five and attempting to clear the game’s increasingly difficult dungeons, one boss at a time. And while WildStar does have its share of dungeons, four to be exact, it also has six of the alternative 5-man content type that are Adventures. So how are these different? Well usually your typical dungeon experience consists of invading an enemy cave, fortress or other stronghold as you plow through waves of enemies and lesser henchmen in order to make your way to the big loot-filled bosses that lie in wait.
This is where Adventures differ.
Unlike Dungeons, which have an emphasis on heavy trash pulls and complex boss encounters, Adventures focus on player choice and completing ever-changing objectives.
“Adventures are 5-man instanced group content. Unlike dungeons they don’t use sort of a specially constructed interior environment. So it’s not like hallways, then a boss room, hallways then a boss room like you typically see in dungeon content. They tend to take place in open stretches of the game-world. They’re modified from open spaces in the game-world, but they are definitely recognizable areas you see [in the open world]. The sort of key element that differentiates them from other instanced content is that we put in a lot of player choice. We put in a lot of other random elements and anything we can do to make sure that the content is highly re-playable.”
So what kind of player choice and objectives are we talking about exactly? While our main objective in this group Adventure was to aid in a rebellion against the dominion, which I’ll get to in a few, Matt was kind enough to give us a few examples of the types of objectives that some of the later Adventures had in store for players.
“In future adventures though you’ll see things like, for example, War of the Wilds. It’s basically a MOBA against AI opponents. If you go into “The Siege of Tempest Refuge” You’ll see something that’s a tower defense/holdout on into “Crimelords of Whitevale” which is sort of a crazy biker crimelord revenge story. You also have the Malgrave trail which is very Oregon Trail-inspired. You have a caravan of people and you’re navigating across a giant desert and you’re choosing where to go next and how to handle problems that you encounter along the way.”
While player choice can mean your group being given a list of options to vote from, as you'll no doubt see in the DevSpeak video below, it can also mean being given an objective and deciding how set up traps, defenses and other tactics to ensure the completion of your primary mission. And while there are boss fights involved in Adventures, the real challenge comes from communicating with your group and figuring out ways to solve and conquer all the obstacles and choices that get thrown your way.
Now that the overview of what these things actually are is out of the way, let’s take a dive into WildStar's first Adventure!