ZAM talks to Carbine's Hugh Shelton and Chris Lynch

Moving back to specific roles, I wondered whether tanks would receive abilities that highlighted their protective nature, such as giving them aimed spells to cast on allies in the form of shields and so on.

Hugh: Some of our more interesting abilities on tanks are abilities that affect your group and that you have to stay within a certain range to keep them active. We’re experimenting more with our tanking and so you might see more of those spells where you do actively target allies—as you might see healers actively targeting allies.

You might see that coming out of the iterative process, but so far we find that the tank abilities that are interacting with the group have worked out really well, because you’re balancing between the positioning of the boss and the position of the group.

Though current tank abilities are more radius based, aura style spells that depend on staying in range—with taunts and damage abilities that focus on aiming—there is room for some other types of interactions for meat shields. Personally, as a tank at heart, I find the whole aiming system to be very exciting in the different possibilities it holds for new game play in large group encounters.

I wondered if the devs had seen knock-on issues for design in other areas. For example, did it make pets something that needed balancing particularly due to their more consistent DPS?

Chris: It’s definitely something we’ve seen. I know it’s something Hugh uses a lot in PvP because of the consistent damage, but it does get balanced; its budget goes down because of its ability to land.

Hugh: The ability he’s talking about is on Espers. It casts out pets onto a number of enemies and they’ll attack the target until the target’s dead, or until they’re dead. Not only do you have that consistent damage, but those pets can also be killed, so that swings the balance toward being more powerful. At the end of the day, pets are fairly similar to DOTs until we start adding more interesting things like where we add telegraphs to pets, so now they’re able to do some attacks that might not actually deal damage to the targets they’re attacking.

We have a mixture of both of those.

With such a clear idea of the intent and scope of the combat system one has to remind oneself that the game is still neck-deep in beta. What are the aspects of WildStar’s combat that are still being worked on?

We’re experimenting with certain things; one of our beta players actually created an auto-hotkey script where you are able to play WildStar as a full mouse-look game. We have players in the company who are experimenting with being able to toggle on and off mouse look. We’re not saying we’re launching with that, but we’ll see how it goes. Currently you find yourself holding down the right mouse key a lot as you’re playing because you don’t have to worry about selecting targets that much.

Besides that, a number of our heal abilities are still targeted; we’ve been moving further and further away from the target abilities. As we come up with good ways to make free-form versions of target abilities, we move [them] over en masse to the new version.

I went on to ask if the devs were seeing new kinds of roles in evidence due to the particular nuances of the aiming system.

Chris: It’s definitely opening up new roles. It started off, when we were developing this system, with very basic shapes. As our tools have evolved, and our designers have evolved, the shapes have become very interesting, on the creature and the player side. They shock me every week now, and the new stuff they come up with…I mean healing is now totally different in our game now than it is in other games. You have to evaluate your position and aim your spells, which is something I don’t think we’ve experienced in many other games before.

Hugh: It lends itself to more hybrid types of builds, if you want to play that way, because it’s not as taxing to switch targets as it would be in other kinds of games.

When adding the variety of cast-types that are offered—such as hold and release charge attacks, or first click to charge and second click to fire—the variety of spells in combat is very encouraging and should offer a nice variety in “feel” between abilities and even classes.

After the roundtable, I was reminded of just how different WildStar feels, particularly in comparison to other MMOs, and, of course, that I need to play it again.

It will most likely be PAX Prime when I get my hands on the game again. Who knows, by then we might know how long we have to wait for the most intriguing MMO of 2013…

 Scott “Jarimor” Hawkes, Editor in Chief

You can follow me on Twitter @Jarimor