Today’s WildStar Wednesday from the Carbine crew, teases at big class drops (including official reveal of the last two), more live streams, and… BETA is BACK!

WILDSTAR LIVESTREAMS

So many of you have been asking when you can see more gameplay, more developers, more more more. A lucky few of you may have stumbled on our little livestream test we ran this past weekend. We’ve got a bit more work to do, but in the next few weeks you should expect to start seeing regular livestreams from the Carbine team. And we won’t just be showing off stuff you’ve already seen: expect to see new content, new classes, new reveals, and lots of WildStar gameplay over the coming months on a regular basis. We’ll chat with the developers YOU want to talk to, play the content YOU want to see, and answer all most of your questions live! Want to get involved? Follow our channel on Twitch and get notified whenever we go live.

For those who miss any live episodes, expect to see previous broadcasts up on Twitch and YouTube the following week to catch up on what you missed.

My favorite little bit of today’s tease (besides that Beta is coming back in December), is the class drop teaser:

From following some of the Carbine team on Twitter.. I know they’ve all been putting in some seriously long days, looks like we’re about to benefit from the fruit of their labor!

Here’s the beta specific chunk of their announcement:

WINTER BETA

I’m sure most of you skipped down to this part after reading the article’s title. Yes, we’re just about ready to start up the Winter Beta for WildStar. We’ll be inviting tons of people, new and old, to check out the changes to WildStar, give us feedback, and play through the content to make sure we’re ready for launch in Spring 2014.

We’ll be sending out a survey to all of our beta applicants in the next few weeks. Be sure to fill it out as accurately as possible if you want to increase your chances of getting invited. Haven’t applied yet? Now’s your chance if you want to be included in our Winter Beta!

I’m psyched!  WildStar looks good, and I have to believe that the changes they’ve made since they halted beta earlier this year, only made it better.  Guess I’ll find out in December (hopefully!).

Today’s WildStar Wednesday is another round of patch notes.  I’m still impressed with the fact that the WildStar team took this route to address the notes being leaked back when Beta first started.

As someone not in Beta.. it’s nice to see what’s going on.. but, it also is a bit of a spoiler, as  it gives away what would be a ‘surprise’ when first playing the game (things like zone names, ability names, etc…).

Based on today’s patch notes, both factions are currently playable in Beta..and you can now flag yourself for PvP (what is interesting, is their patch notes point out that they expect there to be some griefing now).

Both Exile and Dominion factions are now available for play! Flag yourself for PvP and go nuts in the open world!

 

• PLEASE NOTE: This is our first time testing out dual-faction gameplay. Expect many testers to discover effective griefing methods during this beta phase. Please ensure that you get the data you need, report the issue, and then move on. Let’s make sure both factions have an equally enjoyable time in CBT3!

Hopefully the beta testers will heed that big note, and not grief folks to the point they stop playing/testing.  I hope Carbine at least gets some good data out of it, and can take steps to minimize the griefing come launch.

This is a nice quality of life feature to add:

All classes are now able to resurrect allies when out of combat by right-clicking on the player’s body.

 

• Related to this, resurrect abilities no longer need to be slotted in the LAS to be used.

I first came across this in SWTOR, and it’s a much better option then having to stand around and wait for your questing partner/party member to have to make a corpse run because no one is questing as a healer…  More games should add this.

I don’t want to comment too much, and potentially spoil things for someone who might be trying to wait for the game to come out (or till they get in beta) so they can approach it ‘fresh’.. so I’ll paste the full notes after the jump, and you can go to the WildStar site and read them here also.

Continue reading →

Over the weekend, the WildStar team made an appearance at the Rezzed show over in Birmingham (Rezzed is put on by Eurogamer & Rock Paper Shotgun).  In addition to the game being playable for the folks who were able to attend, some of the Carbine staff presented a Developer Panel (that happened to also be livestreamed).  At the panel, they showed off some more gameplay, talked about the a couple of game systems (healers will have to actually land their heals, for example).. and showed that Developers do cheat at their games!  (ok, so it was in the interests of time for the demo.. still funny watching a single character fly through a 5 person dungeon).

Notable highlights from the Q & A at the end:

• Windows only focus for now, will look at cross-platform post release (so there’s hope for us Mac users still!)
• All classes will have more then one role, so you could have multiple people able to help heal (or tank) in a dungeon, they’re hoping this will help avoid some of the long DPS queue times for content that WoW has.

I will say, after seeing the game play, and all the ground based telegraphs… if you’re currently playing a tab-targeting based game (WoW, SWTOR, etc..etc).. you might want to give something like Neverwinter a spin to see how the ‘action combat’ feels compared to tab targeting.