A music video for WildStar has crossed the million mark. Here the soul and spirit of the game are captured, which players often painfully missed in the finished MMO. But do humor and epic storytelling really go together?
Before WildStar was playable, Carbine made a kind of “guerrilla” marketing for the game. The dev videos were hilarious, and the trailers boomed and banged in every corner, the game took every opportunity to make it clear: “We don’t take this too seriously.”
Even when players entered the first zones and saw cube-shaped pigs (from a capitalist perspective absolutely logical: Cube-shaped can be stacked better), many players were charmed by WildStar, while others saw it as an opportunity to dismiss it as childish and not even bother starting.
Does WildStar tip from funny to epic somewhere in the middle?
But somewhere in the story, it seems the creators from Carbine lost the humor and lightness. “Where is the humor?” some asked. But maybe it wasn’t present in the game itself, not rooted in the DNA of the game, but just a flashy presentation and a few comic relief characters? That’s what Hollywood calls characters that bring a few funnier scenes into every action flick.
Shortly before the release, a rather serious trailer was released, which put the backstory in the foreground and clearly illustrated the dimensions that would be important in WildStar. Even the rather tragic origin stories of the individual races and the fate of Drusera in the main storyline have nothing funny about them.
No question: Compared to the anarchic videos that introduced WildStar and surely contributed to its popularity, the finished world of Nexus feels rather moderate and solemn. One wants to trigger amazement, engage the players, and that doesn’t work well if they don’t take anything seriously and stroll through Nexus with a smile.
WildStar should be able to laugh again
In an interview on mmorpg.com this dilemma was specifically addressed. Players missed, it was said in one question, the spirit and vibe that they had learned to appreciate from the trailers and the dev talks about WildStar. Could this be part of the current problems? WildStar is suffering from a lack of players.
And in fact, this is a criticism that Chad Moore from Carbine has heard many times, as he says. In the future, they want to showcase the best of the brand, which also includes the quirky world. They want to continue striving to make the content as epic as possible, but that doesn’t mean the players couldn’t also have something to laugh about along the way.
My MMO thinks: This indeed seems to be one of the critical points of the game. While many enjoyed the entertaining presentation of the game. And some experienced an “Aha” effect when seeing a cube for the first time. Carbine apparently didn’t trust that.
The endgame completely departed from this light tone and turned to large, epic themes. How to reconcile these two poles, “funny” and “epic,” will be one of the most important “aesthetic” questions of the game. Do laughter, smiles, and amazement really go together? Can one bring together the tragic story of a race that has lost its homeland and ditzy junkie rabbits? Should we really believe that the adorable Chuas are insane mass murderers, and that the Aurin are nature-connected philosophers? Those who want to cover all fan bases may end up pleasing no one.
A music video with an “original” song for WildStar has now received over a million views on YouTube. Here, the lightness and freshness from the pre-release days can be seen again.
