After getting his hands on Carbine Studios' short WildStar demo at PAX, Director of Content Cody Bye thinks the game could do big things in the MMO world. Read on to find out why!

Perhaps the feature that caught our interest the most during the demo was the four “path” choices that players can select at the beginning of their creation experience: Explorer, Soldier, Scientist and Settler. These are completely separate play choices that will enhance the game beyond what is already the “standard” mix of quests and missions that you can go on during your playthroughs. In many ways, these completely changes what you might be doing during particular parts of your leveling and adventuring experience.

One example that I can relate from my encounter: I was traveling through one particularly nasty section of the map, slaughtering mobs to complete a kill quest that I'd picked up. Since I had selected the Explorer path, I saw a flashing indicator in the environment. “Awesome!” I thought, “Something for my Explorer to do.”

And to be honest, it was pretty fun. With a few clicks, a hidden path was uncovered for me (which anyone could have taken advantage of) where I proceeded to do a relatively simple jumping puzzle and ascend to the top of the peak, where a short message from my “Explorer master” followed. It was simple, but if the developers really want to flesh it out, the elder game missions could easily become complex assortments of jumping and evasion and scouring landscapes for neat little tidbits. There's a ton of potential for this sort of thing, even so far as to enable characters to unlock hidden raids, dungeons, or item caches.

Perhaps the one area that I thought was a little disappointing from the demo we saw wasn't so much what was shown, but what wasn't. Two of the paths weren't available to be picked, and obviously the races and classes were restricted, but what was really concerning for me was that the demo seemed to indicate that there might only be one starting area to choose from for players.

Now that's a complete assumption, but the trend that other games have set up with only one or two starting zones available is one that's incredibly hard to swallow for a gamer that grew up with EverQuest and World of Warcraft as his MMOs of choice, where every race had its own starting location. Even though that made partnering up with friends a little difficult at first, there was a sense of “home” attached to being able to select cities like Qeynos, Freeport, Stormwind or Orgrimmar. You had a place that you could call your own. It carried a sense of pride with it, even among players of your own faction.

However, that really is a small complaint in an otherwise stellar first showing for a game that looks like it could do big things in the MMO world. Everyone at ZAM is extremely excited to see more of the game, and we'll do our best to bring you all the need-to-know information from this developing title. Keep your eyes peeled here and on Facebook and Twitter for all of our breaking news, contests and more!

Cody "Micajah" Bye, Director of Content