WildStar developer Carbine lays out an attractive stall with its sci-fi Wild West mash-up

WildStar developer Carbine lays out an attractive stall with its sci-fi Wild West mash-up, but can it take on the kings of the MMO genre? Dave Cook gets stuck into the beta to find out.

I’ve just strolled into a Dominion encampment swarming with robotic footsoldiers and explosive auto-turrets to help liberate the snowy Northern Wilds from the empire’s oppression.

Basic grunts fall screaming one by one as I cut through them with ease using my aqua-tinted blade, while mortar bombardments explode all around my bearded warrior. I fight my way up a hill towards the last of the hostile army, only to be met by a towering Megabot that stomps through the tree line unexpectedly.

WildStar is an MMORPG. Other games of late have almost shied from the title, but Wildstar makes no bones about what it is, how concerted an effort it is to appeal to a particular sort of gamer. I can respect that: at least it’s not pretending to be something other than it is, unlike some of its recent peers. If you say “it’s another MMO” to it, it will look you square in the eye and say “yes, yes I am, what of it?”

This is a game where you’re constantly presented with a legion of things to do, numbers to increase, boxes to tick, things to collect, factions to impress, points to earn, monsters air-dropped in to battle without warning and/or preferably all of the above simultaneously. It might even be too much, too overwhelming in its parade of sideshows. It’s difficult to gauge this even after a solid afternoon of playing with a recent build, partly because I was dropped straight in to level 6 and partly because my motives in playing a game at a press event are so different to my motives in my playing a finished game privately.

WildStar comes positively bounding into the fray. It knows what it is, who it’s for, and where its strengths are. It isn’t working overtime to try and fix what’s wrong with the MMORPG, or trying to push some kind of grand narrative vision. Instead, it’s focused on doing what MMORPGs already do best, just doing it that little bit better, with a few twists on the side.

It’s hard to discuss any new MMORPG without mentioning World of Warcraft, and WildStar doesn’t make that task any easier. While WildStar’s vibrant cartoon visuals are more lushly lit and beautifully detailed than those of Blizzard’s aging behemoth, they’re still clearly indebted to them, and the overall look and feel is very WoW.