We interview Carbine's Content Director about everything new in the Closed Beta

The idea of Farside--a zone on a moon--sounds awesome. What was the story behind it?

If we go back to the root of it, we’re talking about space westerns and having the ability to go from place to place. We didn’t want to be terrestrially bound the entire time either. We were saying we could go to moons, we could go to planetoids, and we could go to asteroids.

Farside is the first step; there are other tracks and zones and places that are off-planet, this is just the first one that [players are] going to see. And we can get to do a lot of great things that we didn’t get to do here. The number one thing is gravity, or anti-gravity in this case, where we can turn round and say ‘Hey look, some of these asteroids have breathable atmosphere, some of them you have to wear a helmet.’

 Almost all of them have gravity that you would have on a moon, so you’re leaping higher, which changes the entire dynamic of combat. Now you can double jump and glide way over the top of people’s attacks, and it turns it more into a 3D space. We can do the most amazingly crazy things for jump puzzles now. It’s a different kind of gameplay.

Not to pun it up too much, but it was a pretty big leap of faith, because we were like ‘This is going to change everything.’ If we go to a moon, then we have to redesign how the game’s going to work. How’s combat going to work? How do you not trivialize jump puzzles and explorer things?

We really felt like it was worth it, because that’s what people want to do. You want to go into space, you want to see weird creatures and alien things, and it was somewhat easier for us to do that just going out into the galaxy around Nexus.

What level are people going to be hitting Farside at, and is it contested?

Farside is a contested place--either side can go there. I’m thinking it’s right after Whitevale, so we’re looking at late 20s, maybe?

There are other missions--we have spacehand missions where you go to asteroids and space stations and old half-destroyed Eldan installations and things of that nature. We have little adventures like that, but I think that’s the first full-blown zone you can explore.

It sounds like a great way of combating zone fatigue

Farside has some secrets to it as well; it’s not just all moon surface. There’s some very underlying content there that I think people will dig, and it’s a lot like how you’re saying: how do you break up that monotony? You want people to see new places and new things, so I think it’ll do very well.

You’ve made the decision that all classes can resurrect. What was your thinking behind that choice?

Again, nothing is set in stone. We’re trying something out. We always talked about our classes having a lot of utility--we never wanted it to be ‘You can’t play with us because you’re this,’ right? If you needed to be ‘Hey, I can do that, I’ve got a limited action I’ve got a Limited Action Set just for that. Let me do that thing.’

So we talked about some utility abilities being put on the classes, and I think at this point we’re just testing it out. Because there has been a lot of back and forth about ‘is it a healer only thing?’ But then almost all the classes can heal, there’s no true real healer, so we’re testing it out.

We’ve got enough internal feedback that we’re trying it, because it’s a legitimate thing, but I would say it’s not set in stone. We still have to see how it pans out with actual people playing it.

One thing that’s a work in progress is Tradeskill Talents. Can you share any more on it?

We were getting feedback from some of the beta people, who felt like there was a lot of stuff being rolled out at the same time. It felt like they were being inundated at certain level ranges. So we just took a step back and looked at the rollout of pretty much all the things throughout the entire game.

One of the things we talked about was crafting, salvaging and then ‘the system for crafters to specialize and be recognized’. I think you’ll like it, but I have to go and examine what we put in, because we kind of put in pieces. If you look at our housing stuff, we got guilds in, but guilds as in the most basic functional level. I don’t want to say too much about the crafting talent stuff because I don’t know what actually made it in this build. I’m just going to say that it will be cool.

Neighbors and Roommates are two roles that you have added in housing. Are they going to remain as labels, or will you be able to look around your plot and see these as neighboring houses?

What you’re suggesting is definitely something we know is a premium, and that we have plans on addressing. But what we wanted to do right off the bat, first order of business, is making sure that the solo player experience for housing is solid. You have an instance, they have their own instance, and you deal with each other on your instance or their instance. When you’re being attacked by space pirates, your friends can go to your instance and help.

We wanted to make sure that we got the instancing locked down before we started turning neighbors into neighbors, so to speak. So for right now, it’s literally just that Neighbor is the title that allows you to visit your friends. But I know what you’re getting at and we definitely have plans in place.

‘Rivals’ is a really interesting concept.

We like the idea of it just because we talk about it; let’s say you’re a crafter, we have systems involved now, but there is competition. So if you want to know ‘Hey, my rival is in this zone, going after these crafting things,’ you could keep tabs on him. Or obviously enemy faction guys--we want to make sure that if you’re doing some open world PvP, and there’s a guy who’s literally just tooling on you, if you want to turn around and be like ‘I’m marking this guy so I can find him in a fight and kill him,’ then you have the ability to do so.

My favorite though is the suggested friends list. This one I’m particularly proud of.

It’s almost useless to say ‘I remember back in EverQuest when I had this thing, and we got together and it had this feeling’, because, as the genre has matured, some of that “face punchy” stuff needs to go away. But you do remember certain feelings, and I really did like having a need or a reason to group with other people. Somebody saying ‘Hey, I notice that you’re doing this thing, why don’t we join up in a group and do that together?’

In a lot of MMOs today, you jump in, you get out of the group, and you never speak to the guy. I literally insisted on this because I wanted to be able to go into a dungeon, leave the dungeon, and then have the game remind you ‘Hey, you just played with this guy. Did you like ‘em, would you like to invite them to be your friend?’ Just that little nudge, I’m hoping, will help people create those really long-lasting friendships. We work very hard on these social systems, and we want people to have these relationships, because I remember that as being one of the best parts of an MMO. But we get further and further away from that, and it’s hard, because people don’t want to be forced.

But I think these soft, automatically generated suggestions about becoming somebody’s friend because you share the same interests, is something that’s going to be more palatable for people. I hope that it’s going to, if not change the landscape, at least nudge people into forming the relationships that I remember so fondly from MMOs I played in the past.

Does this mean that if you’re in the group finder and a friend is in the group finder, the game will just naturally throw you together?

That’s actually an excellent point and I’m not a hundred percent sure. The group finder stuff, it’s kind of in flux right now because we want to make sure that it has access to everybody in the area that wants to get involved. But again there are certain things we’ve been talking about removing from the group finder because we want to preserve the feeling of exploration.

That being said, I’m actually going to walk out of this room, walk right into my Social System team guys and talk about the ability to do that, because you think that it would be rote. I would say yes, we’re absolutely going to do that, but I’d better check before I make somebody scream and pull out their hair.

With that, we wrapped up the interview. I’d really like to thank Mike Donatelli for his time, and wish him the very best in wrangling WildStar though beta and beyond. Don’t forget, you can also register for Closed Beta yourself over on the official site.

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Senior Contributing Editor