Jeremy Gaffney talks about Combat Mounts, the Million Idiot March and more.

Mounted Economy

With everything being packed into WildStar’s elder game, I asked if players will be able to earn enough coin to pay for their subscription every month, purely through buying CREDD? After describing some of the various gold sinks in WildStar (incidentally, Warplot elements will have a gold coin cost and Warcoin cost to help with matchmaking), Gaffney went on to explain the flow of gold in the game.

“What we try to do is make the best entrances for gold be solo play, and the best exits be group play. If you’re in a guild, you have a lot of solo players out there harvesting materials, gathering gold, and then funnelling that over into the other things your guild spends money on. We think we balance that well for having lots of stuff to do.”

Another thing that we’ll be tempted to spend coin on is mounts. In WildStar, these aren’t just vanity items that look pretty in some virtual stable - they actually have special abilities that we can use when riding them into combat, as Gaffney explained.

“When you hop on a mount inside of WildStar, you don’t get knocked off it by random damage. For us, your mount has a shield bar. When you work the shield bar down to zero you get knocked off the mount, and you can’t hop back on it for a period of time. The mounts have abilities that you can use in combat so, depending on the mount, depending on how you customized it, you can get ones that are buffer, that are harder for you to get knocked off, or ones that have more useful powers for you to use in combat. It usually has temporary powers such as super-jump, or super-speed or something that you can use infrequently.

“The goal is to make a kind of mount economy, where you don’t want just one mount that’s the best at your level, but there’s actually some utility to having multiple mounts. It’s still kind of a baby system for the ones we’ve already added into the game, and we also intent to add more variety and ability to the mounts over time too.”

Does this mean that we’d start to see jousting battles in WildStar? “When we do our Warplot tests right now, a lot of people ride their mounts into battle and then start kicking butt, which is actually amusing to see. Even in our tests last week a lot of folks have started doing it. I’m sure that more of that will be added over time too.”

Alongside the business model announcement were details on how much WildStar will cost to buy. Paying $60 for the box is what we’d expect, but there wasn’t any mention of a Deluxe or Collector’s Edition. I asked Gaffney if there’d be any way we’d be able to throw more money at our computer screens.

“We know players like to get extra stuff in the game for a couple of extra bucks, and so we’re definitely looking at options to make sure players can get that. Will that be a true Collector’s Edition with big items and stuff? Maybe. We’re sort of debating a couple of options about that. Players will tell us if they want us to do it or not.

“It’s tricky if you’re a new IP because nobody’s heard of you before. You need to earn players’ money before they’ve even maybe tried the game. Is it fair to demand extra money for a Collector’s Edition of a game that’s brand new to you? There’s an argument to say we should add that stuff in after the game ships, or give extra benefits to people who sign up for long subscriptions and stuff. Doing more veteran reward type things might be a better way of rewarding the hardcore players than forcing them to pay extra money up front. But we’ll see. I’m sure we’ll toss round a couple of options.”

Beta and Beyond

Earlier this month, Mike Donatelli provided a comprehensive ‘State of the Beta’ update, describing how some of the game systems will be updated. We now know that those updates are likely to land in the next beta phase, starting in October this year. With the team now seeming to shift focus, I asked Gaffney about the current state of development.

“We’ve developed a crap-ton of content. There’re 20-odd different zones in the game, and each zone ranges from moderate size to frikkin’ ginormous. Each one has multiple tracks with different biomes in it. And, as we’ve been measuring players game through, we’re expecting it to be about 150-175 hours to work their way through the game the first time.

“Beta feedback as we roll the data looks more like 250 hours, so we’ll probably speed up some levelling curves and things to get that down a bit. But really it’s making the variety feel right so that you’re not getting bored with an area. You’re excited to do an area; you feel like you’ve done an area, it’s time to move on.

“We see our major mission now as polishing the crap out of things. We’ve got a few new systems to put in. We have a really big overhaul coming up in October, where we take all the feedback from CBT1, 2 and 3. We’re making some pretty substantial changes to everything from levelling progression to how we handle quest credit, to itemization, all that based on player feedback. Once we do that, we’ll test it in front of the players. If they love it then we launch, and if not we do it till it’s awesome.”

Although Carbine was considering a 2013 release, the team has always kept a ‘when it’s done’ attitude. Following the recent shift to a spring 2014 release window, I asked if this was due to all that beta feedback. Gaffney disagreed, explaining that it’s a number of things, including that all-important polish.

“There’re these little things called consoles that are launching at the end of this year, and so there’s lots of attention on those things, and we’d like a nice little open PC window to do it in, if I can get an open and honest answer. Also, it’s a matter of polish. We want to make sure we polish the living crap out of things, and make sure that our elder game stuff in particular has time not just to be put in the game—it’s cool that it blows away the boss [Gaffney], but it’s got to blow away the hardcore raiders who go in there and tune it, and say ‘Aw, this is too easy, this thing is impossible.’ We need to do multiple iterations of that to make sure that it’s truly great by the time we launch.

“I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, there’s no better way to set fire to a big pile of dollar bills, than make an MMO and not do your elder game well. And it takes time to test that stuff. This is the trickiness of the business: how do you test your elder game? You can’t just grab fifty dudes off the street, stick them in a raid in their first level whatever character, and expect them to do well. You can’t even really grab the best raiders in the world, stick them in characters that they haven’t levelled up on their own, or understand, and then pretend that’s going to be a real experience.

“No, you need to let them level up legitimately, which takes a long time. You need to have them do it multiple times, with multiple series of gear, ranging from barely adequate gear to the best gear in the game. It takes time to do all that stuff right, so we want to make sure we take that time.”

Finally, I asked Gaffney about an idea that had been kicking around—releasing a character creator so that players can prototype their persona before WildStar Launches. It’s an idea that seems to have grown, with UI supremo Jon Wiesman liking the concept. But even with the Black Rowsdower’s encouragement, is this something we might eventually see?

“We’ve tossed it about because we let you customize all kinds of cool stuff with your character. It’s quite fun going through all the options and stuff – all the ears and fur options and all that kind of thing. So we may. But it’s really a matter of the folks working on it, if there’s polish for them to do in game instead, they’ll do that. So I don’t think we’ll commit to it one way or the other. If someone can sneak it in, that’d be good. And Jon is the master of our UI. If anyone can do it, he’s one of the guys who could.”

We hope to catch up with Carbine again at PAX Prime this weekend to bring you even more WildStar news. After clinching ZAM’s Gamescom award for Best in Show, we can’t wait to hear what they have planned next.

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Senior Contributing Editor

Follow me on Twitter @Gazimoff