WildStar promises less grind as it goes free-to-play today
I’m talking about WildStar, which as of today is officially free-to-play. It’s the latest (and hopefully the last) MMO to launch with a subscription plan and then make the slow, arduous transition to a friendlier business model.
Here’s how it works:
Those services and social functions include limiting guild creation to paying customers and doubling the amount of rest XP earned. It seems like a decent business model—actually free-to-play instead of the “It’s just annoying enough to make you pay” model of Star Wars: The Old Republic. But the real question is whether anyone’s interested.
WildStar screwed up. There’s no two ways about it. Promising to overhaul the MMORPG genre with a tense, skill-based game, instead it delivered something that was…well, pretty much impossible. Or at the very least a grind. I’ll refer you again to this Reddit thread from December (six months after launch), where user fooey pointed out that only 1.3 percent of WildStar players ever killed a raid boss.
So alongside the free-to-play launch, developer Carbine tells me the early-game content and dungeons have been reworked. I haven’t gotten around to trying it, but the words “less grindy” were thrown out there. Carbine hopes this time players give the game a try—a proposition made easier by the fact the game’s free—and then actually stick around instead of being run off in the first few hours.
Will it work I don’t know. I feel like WildStar’s following the same well-tread path as The Old Republic and Elder Scrolls Online, where even after it goes free-to-play the negative launch buzz persists. But it’s worth checking out. I mean, it won’t cost you anything except time, and prior to last year’s dud of a launch this was one of the most hotly-anticipated MMOs in a long while. Maybe the updated version can recapture some of that hype.