On May 12 and 13, a confidential NCSOFT press event took place in London and Games Managers responded on behalf of IDestinia!
Monday the 12th was arrivals day with a restaurant to top it off with team members from NCSOFT, WildStar and Blade & Soul.
I will not hide my joy in having been able to sit at the table facing Mike Donatelli, Product Director for WildStar! Beside him were Ben Conrad and Chad Moore with whom I was also able to speak. I was able to introduce Mike to my Machinima from the Guardians of the Nexus which made him laugh!
The following day, Tuesday the 13th, was the day of announcements and tests! The article on Blade & Soul is already available at this link with the announcement of the game's release this winter. Today, we're going to be focusing on WildStar!
Summary
Presentation conference
Unlike Blade & Soul, WildStar has already been available for almost a year. The in-game conference first dealt with the content that has been rolled out over the last few updates to come to the point of what's to come.
Mike Donatelli announced that for 2015, Carbine has resolved to follow the feedback of its players and make updates with a variety of content for all styles of play. To improve the overall experience of players, it indicated that you have to remove all the obstacles to be able to try the game, that's why a decision was made: WildStar will go free-to-play this fall ! A completely crazy new trailer has been released on the occasion:
As a reminder, fall will take place from September 22 to December 22. So this may coincide with the rumors for August but it has been confirmed that no specific date has yet been established.
Details on the economic model were then issued. We learn that the content of the game will be fully accessible without exceptions, this includes all PvE and PvP instances. Regarding the development of the game and the content, it will not change, updates will remain quarterly and their content will not become leaner.
Although free, obviously the team must be able to live, so there will be a optional subscription system which will offer certain advantages. Among these perks will be experience, crafting, currency, loot, and reputation bonuses, but also more character, costume, bank, bag, and decoration slots.
There will also be a real money shop which will only offer completely optional items such as costumes, mounts or pets. Almost all of these paid items will still be recoverable in exchange for a lot of in-game effort for those who prefer to give of their time than their money. They insisted on this point, the game will not become "pay to win" (with more powerful items for real money).
The real money store will work with a certain currency and we will receive some on transition based on the number of months of subscription we have purchased so far.
Finally, some improvements are planned by then such:
- better tutorial and better low level experience
- improvements to itemization and character characteristics for more consistency and less chance
- unblocking of all AMPs by default
- even more dungeon content
- even more general improvements for a better quality of play
So much for this rather emotional conference!
Following this event, we received additional information on rewards for loyal gamers ! Thus, rewards will be offered to players in 2 subscription categories:
- From start to F2P transition
- From June 15 to passage F2P
This category is therefore for players who had a non-stop subscription account from the release of the game on June 3, 2014 to the transition to free-to-play.
- Ikthien Robot mount
- DJ Goalkeeper Decoration
- Families Snoglug disco
- New housing music
- 4 months Premium subscription
- 2 new titles: Living Legend and Nexus Loyalist
Ikthien Robot mount
Families Snoglug Disco
DJ Goalkeeper
If you haven't subscribed all of the time since the game was released, or if you subscribe before June 15, and you are subscribed from June 15 to the transition to free-to-play, you will be entitled to these rewards:
- DJ Goalkeeper Decoration
- Families Snoglug disco
- New housing music
- 4 months Premium subscription
- Nexus Loyalist Title
Basically everything except the mount and the title Living Legend.
DJ Goalkeeper
Families Snoglug Disco
A bit of a shame for the condition of 100% fidelity for the frame, I myself will not have it, having had a few weeks without a subscription. I was hoping perhaps for an additional, more intermediate level. However, there will be a loyalty point system that will reward players even after the move to free-to-play, which is an important point for Carbine, and we will know more in the future.
Interview
After the conference, we were able to get on the computers to test the game and short interview sessions took place one after the other. Were present :
- Mike Donatelli, Product Director
- Chad Moore, Creative Director
- Ben Conrad, Public Relations Director
During the presentation, you talked about the history of WildStar, the good feedback from the players, will we have a follow-up to the OMNIPlex and Arrow of Light events for the next update?
Chad : I will not reveal anything specific, but I would say that the story, which we notably addressed during the presentation, will be continued. I can't say anything more.
Mike : I have already played it, personally! (editor's note: so we can assume soon)
How did the business model process go?
Mike : This is how it happened. We started to develop WildStar about 6 years ago. At that time, there were a lot of subscription games on the market. So we followed it and developed the game in this direction. Unfortunately, as the release approached, the market had already changed with some good free-to-play games. Then came the release of the game and we saw how little space we had left in the market. So we started talking about free-to-play very soon after the game was released and it wasn't until very recently that we decided to take the plunge. There is no better way to bring millions of new players to the game.
We have nonetheless been able to observe recently a strong increase in the population, in particular with the release of DEPLOIEMENT: Nexus and the 10 days offer. Can you confirm this impression?
Mike : Definitely!
Ben : Just know that we can never give you exact numbers.
Mike : Yes, indeed, we can see it at each Drop. But there are unfortunately far too many people who would love to play the game and are unwilling to spend the money on it.
Chad : We've been really thinking about this for ages, almost since launch, and finally found it best not to put any obstacles in the way of players who would like to play WildStar. This change was really necessary.
Mike : I play almost 80% of the new free-to-play games that come out because there is no reason not to. Sometimes they are original and I will end up spending a lot of money on them.
Ben : Plus, WildStar was one of the top rated games of 2014 and it's now a much better game, and now we're going to be able to play it for free!
Mike : I have no doubt that the players who have played before are going to come along and be really surprised at the new content, but I also think that the new players who are coming are going to literally ... "shit on it"! They're going to be there like "Oh wow, is this all really free ?!"
And why do you think this model is the best choice?
Chad : I think the way players now engage in MMOs has changed. They're not going to do short gaming sessions anymore, some are just going to log in every now and then, play for half an hour and then do something else, and a subscription doesn't allow them to play that way. In addition, it has now been proven that this economic model works very well and the games that have adopted it only survive, on the contrary!
Mike : With what we were able to learn from this experience, I will no longer be able to play games with an economic model with subscription, it's as if you were saying "I don't want you to play my game!".
Was the 10-day operation to test or return to WildStar a success?
Mike : We had a ton of new players who came out to test the game. Once the 10 days were up people had been playing like crazy riding their character super far, they enjoyed the game hugely but often said "Yeah I would play it, if it was free!"
Chad : And I think the best part for us was that the vast majority of the players who came back were there saying "Oh my god! This is a totally different game!" So it's been really encouraging to see that we've made the right choices for the game.
Mike : One of the things we focused on is making the game accessible to make it accessible to all types of gamers. We didn't make the content any easier, but for example we looked at low level areas where players would die a lot and there we saw that players often picked up other monsters by dodging to survive. In these cases, we then spaced the monster packs a little more apart and it was immediately better. The difficulty over the levels is thus less brutal.
Small bonus to end this interview: a selfie with Chad and Mike!
Rather collector, no?
Assessment of the getting started session
Regarding the test session, not having really had any announcements concerning the content to come, there were no new features to test. It was simply the content of DEPLOYMENT: Nexus, released a week before, that it was possible to discover.
In itself, nothing new for me, obviously. However, almost everything was unlocked, so I was able to pretend to have class with the Data Drift mount:
This concluded this second and final day in London. It was time to come back to his country and go back to work the next day. Life is so hard!
What do you think of this huge decision? If you don't play, will you (re) come? And if you play it, are you going to stay there?
