In our first hands-on, Michael "Ragar" Branham tells us why we should be excited about Carbine's upcoming MMO

Exploring Nexus for Fun and Profit

My time with the Warrior wasn’t all just charging around and hitting things with a greatsword though. His chosen path was Explorer and there was no lack of opportunities for him to explore the zone of Deradune. The overarching goal was to explore the entire zone: if there was a greyed out hex on that map, I needed to fix that. It’s not all just running around and filling in the grey till I get an achievement though. Explorers also get a variety of different mission types. ClaimTerritoryis about what it sounds like – you’re trying to claim an area for your faction by placing markers and beacons. Vistas are areas that usually involve a jumping puzzle to get up to, but in the end you’re treated to a cutscene showing off that part of the zone similar to the Vistas in Guild Wars 2 as well as sometimes showing you other areas to explore. Scavenger Hunts send you all over a zone in search of some form of treasure or item.

Finally there are Path Switches and Explorer Doors. Both of these are items or places in a zone that only Explorers can use, such as peculiar boulders or a camouflaged hole. Path Switches will open up some form of new path when clicked, like rock ledges to jump on or new leaves on a tree you’re climbing. By contrast, Explorer Doors take you to a somewhat hidden second part of a zone. In the case of Deradune, this sub-zone was a vast underground cave network. Both of these can sometimes be accessed by non-Explorers but they’ll need an Explorer to gain access. It’s no mount, but when you’re too low to use one, it’s a great way to get across a zone faster as well as find the occasional named mob to fight.

Quests and Challenges: It’s Not An MMO Without An “!” Over Someone’s Head

So the combat’s fun and the Path stuff is as well, but what about questing? Is it fun? Did you actually read the quest text? While the mechanics still boil down to your normal quest types (kill/explore/magic wand/collect – I didn’t see any Escorts but I assume they’re in there), I did enjoy all of the questing I did during the press event. Besides the fact that I enjoyed the combat and just playing the game, the presentation of the quests worked quite well – probably because of the “TweetQuest” presentation they talked about in an old WildStar Wednesday post. The story’s still there for your quests, but it’s presented in ways other than a page of text upfront. You might hear comm chatter over your radio when you pick up the quest or when you complete one of the objectives. You might also get snippets of descriptive text/audio with each part of a chain – the whole story’s presented to you, but in bite-sized chunks rather than a wall of text. If you’re into those walls of text and lore, the game still has them (it’s all in your journal with the datacubes you find and other information), but now you can play the game when you’re in the mood to play and read up on the lore when you have some time and your group’s not waiting for you.

Amidst all of the Explorer missions and the normal quests I picked up from both the quest hubs and the radio calls while I was in the field, I was also working on Challenges as they popped up. Carbine’s mentioned these pseudo-quests a couple of times. You’ll be fighting some type of monster for a quest and you’ll see something show up on the side of your screen, usually “Go kill X more of these guys in the next five minutes” or “Pick up Y of these items that are on the ground next to those mobs in the next six minutes”. If you manage to complete one of these Challenges, then you get to roll for loot. Clicking on Collect Reward brings up three or four different possible rewards and you get to select one. Once you do, then it’s a slot machine roll to see if your selection comes up. You’ll still get the reward that pops up if you don’t pick the winner, but choosing well nets you double the reward. If you don’t manage to complete the Challenge in the allotted time, don’t worry about it: click on Retry and the Challenge starts anew. You can retry these Challenges as many times as it takes you to complete the task – good thing too for some of the other Challenge types. I’d rather not think about how many times I had to retry that “make it to the top of this tree in 60 seconds” Challenge I found over by Metal Maw.  There was also the “make it to the bottom in 60 seconds without taking falling damage one once I made it up there – I’ve got the first half of that Challenge down pat, but that second half’s a little tougher. On a completely unrelated note, you can run back to your corpse from the graveyard or pay to resurrect in place after a few seconds.

Building Your Character Through Abilities, Milestones, and More on Page 3 ->