So recently, youtuber nerdSlayer put out a video titled Death of a Game: Wildstar.
In this video, he details Wildstar's troubled development and the subsequent failures that lead to its current "maintenance mode" state (Essentially MMO death). All of nerdSlayer's content is good. I'd highly recommend checking his channel out.
Anyway, in the comments under the video, a former member of the Wildstar dev team, going by the name of Sam Noone (no idea if that's their real name) chimed in with their experience, providing some eye-opening insider information. This is unfortunately yet another case of micromanagement from higher ups determined to stifle creativity and forcing their vision at all costs. I've quoted Sam's comment below:
"Ex Dev on wildstar here. Watched the video and although it was quiet informative, I just wanted to chime in on some of the key factors on why this game was a huge flop.
I worked on the game for 5+ years and let me tell you.. This games was destined to fail wayyy before there was any issues with servers or not enough updates.
Development on this project was a nightmare. The real Development time frame was closer to 10/11 years. Coming onto the project at the 5 year mark I soon realized that the leads and big boys had no fucking clue what a good game was and they could not commit to any idea. Too many cooks in the kitchen that can't cook anything other than Mayo and Beef Jerky sandwiches... Look for the double meaning in that. It's there.
One of the most prevalent issues with the game that I noticed was bad direction from top down. People like Tim Cain specifically made way more problems than they were worth. Honestly the guy was a total dick. Awful to work with and almost nothing he "did" ended up in the game. His lack of leardership I would say was one of the reasons why the first 4-5 years of the game were almost completely thrown out. Literally...
Then you have an art director who couldn't keep his nose out of anything. His selfishness drove off many of the best artists in the company including cory loftis. Literally... Cory Loftis LEFT the game which is based off of his style almost entirely because of this guy. This same art director was also responsible for hijacking the story and overall vision of the game as well. Wondering why there wasn't more raids and dungeons? Because the ART DIRECTOR thought several ALREADY MADE LEVELS didn't fit the story anymore... So they threw them away... He also made calls on gameplay... Which... is a hole other nightmare.
The gameplay was once good... I would say around the 7 year mark. 1v1 combat was very fun at this point and each class felt very unique and fun. Unfortunately most of that was thrown away and replaced with alot of new stuff that was just NOT tested enough. I repeat... most of what launched in Wild star combat wise was BARELY tested. Stuff like Warplots was broken to shit from start to finish. The designers leading WarPlots were absolute lazy trash and would knowingly put in broken systems and call them done just to appease their bosses. The only reason that warplots was even REMOTELY playable on launch was because of some amazing talent on the 3D prop team. I am not joking.. Artists LEANRNED HOW TO SCRIPT TO FIX THIS CRAP.
Pvp in general was absolutely broken. I didn't even work on paper let alone work in a multi million dollar game. The idea of telegraphs is pretty straight forward and seems to just work for most cases in combat.... except in any fight larger that has more than two characters per team... Attack telegraphs drawing on the ground is very clear when you have a small amount of people fighting but in medium to large pvp fights ( pretty much every fight that matters) the entire ground becomes a multi colored disco dance floor. Casual to moderate gamers were like deer in headlights during the VERY FEW playtests that were had for larger pvp battles. SO MUCH FEEDBACK was given by the teams that participated in these tests and almost nothing was fixed about it.
The leadership was god awful. Proof of this was that most of the BEST things in the games that players loved the most such as Double Jump and Hoverboards were things that were never planned for or schedules by leads. Those were passion projects. Double Jump was made by an ARTIST. That artist got in trouble for making double jump and eventually fired for other reasons. Never got credit either. Hoverboards were snuck in by an animator... He got written up for secretly working on hoverboards in his freetime with other coworkers. The place was a prison of ideas and everyone was getting shanked for even THINKING that they WANTED to think of something to improve the game.
Oh did I mention mandatory Crunch? We would crunch for months at a time. Mandatory. I remember working from 10am to 3 am everynight 6 days a week for about 3 months straight. And I got a talking to once because I was 10 minutes late to work. ONCE. Because Jeremy Gafney saw me coming in late. Everyone working on this game was absolutely DONE with the BS and it shows. The love died way before this game launched. No one in the studio really wanted to play the game. And then we shifted to try to cater to the hardcore audience?! ( this was the version on launch. The hardcore not for pansies mmo) During a time where pretty much almost every successful game was being carried hard by more casual players.
I can go on but... I think you get the picture. These devs thought they were clever enough to ignore pretty much every other successful business model and all other mmorpgs to make this.. There you have it..."
So what are your thoughts? Did any of you play Wildstar? Were the issues apparent from the beginning? Conversely, have any of you worked on a dev team that had issues with controlling higher-ups? How did that go? I think we can learn a lot from this story.
Banish me to maintenance mode hell if old.
