Road to 10. First F2P impressions Pt.1

I will be honest, I already had an impression on Wildstar leveling and not much have changed since OBT took place. All was almost the same.

So when I started out, I was pleasantly surprised seeing low-level locations full of life. Don’t get me wrong, Wildstar starting locations on Nexus are huge areas with enormous amount of quests. And people are spreading among these leveling up and exploring beautiful Nexus sights. Taking in notice how big starting locations are, particularly in my zone(a defined part of location with its own story quest) there were approximately 7–8 guys leveling up side-by-side with me. The similar count was when I was moving through other zones in starting location. So overall presence on location was quite OK although it’s far from numbers that were on F2P Wildstar launch, but it’s obvious — most of the guys already hit the level cap of the game and now grinding for best gear.

But the fact that new players still come after a couple of months after F2P launch is a great sign for WIldstar.

Now on to first impressions of the game!

UI

So I had a free evening with strong desire to hit level 10 with my Stalker. During basic running and tutorials with couple of quests, my minimap started to become overloaded with quest icons, resources on map, gardens, path quests and some other stuff that was covering more and more pace on my minimap. So I had to stop and look at world map, but that wasn’t very helpful either, because icons in comparison to location and minimap scale were pretty huge which make it very hard to navigate and look for quest objectives or other pointers on map. What I ran into, was that icon that represented town had same shape as quest objective and would you know! they overlaped in worst manner, hiding quest objective. The one thing that came to the rescue, was that if you double-click on quest in your quest log, the arrow will appear and point the direction where quest should continue.

Character and target windows are anchored with nails in fixed position on screen in bottom center position which make unpleasant experience after playing games that had all frames on top left corner of the screen, the same is with some other windows that could not be moved. To make things worse, dialog windows make background windows blurry and unclear that makes even harder to look at own HP or target’s HP. But that could be easily handled by addons that can change the representation of default UI and allows to rearrange windows in comfortable for you manner.

The overall amount of UI and windows was not fascinating but frustrating, with all windows that could be grouped or be smaller, there’s this panel for all hotkey and windows that really scares me of. Because there are so many thing you can look into, and I’m not really sure I need all of those.

Complicated quest log that showes everything that it could, including allies that are is same zone, quests, challanges, your personal data, mother’s maiden surname and size of your girlfried breasts. And I think that “smart” quest log increased it’s complexity. It is confusing also in the way that it don’t show all available quest, just some “important” ones, that could be even in other location, so you endlessly look in quest journal, that actually don’t have any info on where you should go or what should you do. Together, Journal and quest log are doing everything for you to stop even looking there, and just run from point to point on map or NPC and don’t even try to track progress or quest lore. It’ll be very hard if for some reason you really want to track these kind of things.

In overall, there are complicatied UI windows, but for most time you won’t need them and forget about them, this aslo involves things that you won’t need for the rest of the play. But most windows that are useful — are pretty simple, like bag, character window, shop, abilities and AMP tree. But without addon that changes UI elements and unlock positioning of things on screen, UI is really feels uncomfortable, so my advise is at first install some UI addon that will suite you and have a comfortable play from the start.