The SF-MMO WildStar is focusing on its major updates, the content drops, and is canceling events for Halloween and Christmas.
“And cancel Christmas!” is the punchline of a legendary outburst by the Sheriff of Nottingham in the movie Robin Hood starring Kevin Costner. It’s not meant to be that harsh in WildStar. Instead, the decision to forgo an in-game Christmas event is a consequence of a new direction for the MMO.
Less is supposed to be more, WildStar’s calendar still packed
Before the release, it was announced, new content would be delivered every month. Therefore, team members were already working on content that wouldn’t be released until a year later. And so, events like Christmas or a small Halloween scare are already “almost” finished. But this “almost finished” is no longer sufficient for Carbine. They miscalculated.
With the first patches, too many bugs entered the game, the quality assurance was too thin, spread over too many projects, and just a few days for testing were simply not enough. The fans were frustrated.
Now they have pulled the emergency brake, given up on smaller events, and want to ensure that the “big” changes are done well. In the last Nexus Report, we saw Mike Donatelli with over 100 pages of DinA4 paper: All bug fixes and changes.
The schedule for WildStar is tight:
- In mid-October, the mega servers should arrive.
- In November, the next drop will come with numerous bug fixes, balance changes, new features, and the end of the prologue.
- And in January, there will be a major update with daily dungeon missions, the new Protostar Arena (with tutorial dungeon), and a second arena map.
The discovery of slowness
With this packed schedule, there simply wasn’t time to make Christmas happen in a way that could have been presented to the players. In the beginning, we often talked about how WildStar would face the same questions as Blizzard at the end of Vanilla World of Warcraft. Apparently, similar answers are now being found.
Blizzard is known for only releasing truly “polished” content. And taking their time – sometimes too much. The recent changes in WildStar indicate that they have now also discovered these solutions and are willing to take the drawbacks, even if it means a canceled Christmas event.
