PAX: Wildstar - Mike Donatelli Interview
8Player housing, the Dominion, business model and the elder game.
We caught up with content director Mike Donatelli on the PAX East showfloor to learn more about the intriguing new MMORPG Wildstar.
on the Dominion:
"It's like a star spanning empire that feels like they've come to the planet Nexus, the ancient Eldan homeworld, because they feel that it's their birthright. The exiles have come here to escape the Dominion and try to set up a new homeworld, because the Dominion has been kind of running them off their planet. But there's a lot of grey here. It's not that the Dominion are bad, it's just that they have a different view of the way things are."
on the road map beyond launch and the elder game:
"We don't even call it the end game, cause we don't expect... that seems like a defeatist statement for an MMO."
"We're doing 40-man raids, that is a thing people want. They overwhelmingly say they want it. And they want it to be special, it's very hard and it's for the skilled player. We want that to be a thing, it's not for everybody. We have warplots, which is a 40-man vs 40-man - two flying fortresses which we use our housing tech to build - and then each side destroys eachother's stuff in this crazy battleground that they build and control, that gives you special abilities. And that's also tied into the game, so you can find things in the world and bring back and plug into your housing plot - those things cost points so you're matched up against equal people. You can challenge other enemy war guilds, and that doesn't have anything to do with your guild. You can still have a guild. The war guild is a separate thing altogether. But it works almost the same way.
"For the solo player. We have solo PvE instances, story instances that tell the story of what happened. We don't even start telling you the story of what happened to the Eldan until you hit cap. You can't do war plots until cap, you don't do 40-man raids til cap. We have a monthly roll out for the next 18 months planned all out on my whiteboard back at work. Dungeon, raid, new PvP arena, content, we have a whole zone... and you know this is stuff we had to make sure we planned out ahead of time."
with no official word on what business model Wildstar will employ, Donatelli had the following to say:
"The one thing I can say about it is no matter what the choice is it's about value, you can't ever just hold stuff back out of a game and say "well now, I'm going to sell you some other stuff". You have to produce value which is why we're looking at these monthly updates, right. No matter which way we go we want to make sure there's value to the game and if we ever do micro-transactions... you know, if you go into the game you'll be able to do all the stuff in the game. The microtransactions is kind of a secondary, "hey, I don't have any advantage over you". We would never do that. But that's more about philosophy, but I wish I had more to say about that."
He also talked at length about player housing and how the instanced housing is an integral part of the game as players will find quests that start on their plot, and they will be able to invite friends there to make use of crafting tools, and you can even ask other players to help with harvesting your crops if you can't access the game and do it yourself for some reason.
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