Listen up Cupcake… it’s Adventure Time!

The big reveal this week, was a new WildStar Flick about Adventures!

Highlights from the video:

• The CareTaker… reminds me of some DMs I had playing D&D when I was younger… that dude has gone crazy!
• Adventures seem to be more ‘mega questy’ than a ‘normal’ dungeon.  Looks to be a ‘simulation’ inside WildStar, instead of a traditional dungeon as well.
• Choices matter, good choices get you rewards, poor choices…. not so much.

Looking forward to getting more information from Carbine about what we can actually do in an Adventure.  This flick was great at teasing it, but didn’t give me as much ‘real’ information as I would have liked to see.  Really, we just know that Adventures are 5 person instanced group content.  Fortunately, the Carbine team will be conducting an Adventure AMA on Wednesday, in the WildStar sub-reddit, starting at 2 PST.

There are more ongoing beta key giveaways (check the Official WildStar page here to see the current ones), and Jeremy Gaffney swung by Reddit (he really loves that place!) to chime in on some of his thoughts about that (and some other interesting beta tidbits):

As more hardware is coming online, we’re going to up the scale of the testing we’re doing. Compared to other historical betas, we’re still in “dev” stage (actively changing/fixing things using players as guinea pigs) rather than “marketing” stage (where really you are out of time to be changing things and you’re trying to just raise awareness.)
Though given our internal mentality, we’ll probably be changing things based on feedback through and after launch too (that’s how we’ve set ourselves up; to be flexible and responsive) so for us the distinction will be pretty blurred.
Our purchase intent surveys from beta testers in-game say there’s player desire to say “ship it!” but to gently disagree with the survey feedback (most of those folks haven’t seen elder game yet, for instance so can that truly be a full judgement?) and to respond more to beta forum feedback which is more strongly opinionated on polishing/critical things to work on: we want more testing on elder games because we haven’t had enough mass tests of that yet and also in our opinion we want more polish on areas like UI, encounters, small group play, etc.
As hardware comes online, and as stress tests succeed or not with that hardware, we’ll start with more wide availability (soon, if things go well, somewhat later if not).
Obviously there’s a lot of pent-up demand; hopefully we can walk the right path (or close enough) between polishing/finishing the game responsibly, making folks waiting for access happy, not burning folks out through delays, and having a successful, stable launch.
Oh, forgot to respond actually to OP: we’re doing partner giveaways in part to be nice to our partners (we respect ’em for having helped out and so it’s a way for them to get some traffic/etc when in the past they are the ones who have been giving US traffic) and in part so that there is some outlet for players to have other ways to get keys (contests etc.) other than our scientific-but-unsatisfying-if-you-don’t-win-the-lottery base random selection method.

This current round of Beta Key Giveaways, runs until the 24th, so you’ve still got time to get a key and jump in and help test!

There was a stress test over the Valentine’s Day weekend, and nothing appears to have gone KABOOM over the weekend (didn’t see any tweets/vines about Carbine team members mourning for server hardware having gone up in smoke).  That’s probably a good sign, maybe they’re getting closer to opening beta up to more people, now that they’ve raised the beta level cap to 50, and that end game content is getting tested by players!

Want to see a Chua cry?  Of course you do!  Lucky for you (and the rest of us), the folks over at MMORPG put together a short video showing off a whole mess of emotes that have been added to the game over the last update.  For being such little models, the Chua can be pretty expressive!

That covers the WildStar news for the past week.  I’ll see you next week!