Hands-on with WildStar

Adventures

Aventures are new concept that blends a mix of instanced dungeon with a choose your own adventure book.  A group of players can take on an adventure much like a dungeon.  Adventures tend to have less of a focus on combat and use gameplay mechanics that aren?t a part of the regular game world.  See, adventures are run as a computer simulation, yeah, a bit like the Matrix.  So you can run them again and again with different outcomes, and your loot depends on the medal you got based on how well the adventure was completed.

Housing

I?ve played a lot of MMOs over the years, and one thing I constantly hear the community clamoring for is player housing.  I?ve seen games promise it and not deliver, or it comes out well after launch as more of an afterthought.  Like rest of the systems at launch, the WildStar team was adamant about having housing in place from the beginning.

A house for you player that you could decorate would be great, but what is available in WildStar is so much more.  First, you get a Skyplot.  A piece of land hovering on rockets up above the planet Nexus.  The plot of land is where you build your house.  Houses come in different styles, which can be bought, earned, or crafted throughout the game.  And sure, you can change the wallpaper, the floors, change the lighting, and hand place and resize a ton of different pieces inside.

The Skyplot allows for so much more though.  The social team came up with a great idea and UI to support additional creation on your plot.  It uses a system of sockets and plugs.  Each plot has a certain number of open sockets of different sizes.  Then a plug can be purchased, earned, or crafted to place into a socket.  Plugs are so much more than decoration.  They can be portals to lands you?ve already explored, even portals to raid dungeons.  They can hold a gathering node farm or challenge instances that give rewards.  By making friends (neighbors), they can share in your portals, and crafting workshops, and gathering nodes.  There?s so much more detail, but I?ll leave that to experimentation and discovery.