Swtor has nothing to fear from Wildstar!

WS and ESO will help swtor to be better, competition you know.....

I never thought about it that way... nice post, I definitely agree and I hope it gets EAware to step up their game.

Hopefully you're right.

I had hopes for Wildstar. It's not a sci-fi game, heck, it's not even space fantasy, it's pure WoW fantasy with a bit of tech sprinkled in. A quibble perhaps, but not what I'm looking for. I think the focus on high population raids is going to bite them hard and that 42 weeks worth of dailies just to finish out your capstone skills is pure insanity.

On the up side, it's all new content right when it looks like SW:TOR is facing a long dry spell.

Wildstar is catering to the hardcore and competitive gamers I do hear some stuff will be there for casuals and the like but it'll really a contender in the MMO market imo

I've been perfectly happily immersed in SWTOR since about launch. This post sums up what I sense is a stale feeling that I haven't witnessed in the game since playing it. Everything was going at a good pace and then the buzz of people forming ops groups at fleet died off. The guilds I'm in are pretty much quiet except for 8 man HM DF/DP. An expansion to level 60 on a planet like Makeb probably would've kept the momentum going with new crew skills to match. My sub ends in June.

E-peen appeal only works for PvP type games and modes. When applied to PvE modes, the population motivated by that becomes vanishingly small. Focusing on the 1% at the expense of the other 20-80% interested in the content is just bad business.

What Carbine promises will only stand up to what NCSoft will let them keep. I have to chuckle every time one of the fanboi's claim that there will be no cash shop, it's a freakin' NCSoft staple! Unless Wildstar is a runaway success they're going to change their tune once subs inevitably dip.

In my experience, no game can really ever threaten another game. Even if Wildstar is the best thing to be invented in the history of the world (which it probably isn't, since that is a matter of opinion and not fact), SWTOR still has a devoted fanbase just like any game.

So I went out and purchased the game. Finally logged in and made a toon as a gremlin.

The Look:
The color was a bit too intense for me as if everything was coloreized with glowing black light paint. As a person who has never played WoW I found the character and their type chat actually hard to read. As others have mentioned the casting bars and maps are very simplified. The maps had very little content to interact with. My eyes actually got tired trying to take in the intensity.

The Feel:
Not sure if it's intentionally the engine physics but the movement seemed exaggerated and a bit sluggish. Not the crisp movement if you hit left/right/left/right like in SWTOR. Nothing is really intuitive I just ran in circles in what may have been the training area. Very claustrophobic and not clear on what you should do.

These are my first impressions while I'm open minded I think the game is too pricey for what it seems to offer. Of course this is beta but the reason for this reply is to let people know they aren't missing out on much and most importantly if you've played SWTOR for a year or more believe it or not your more spoiled than you think as far as the content and depth of play it offers. I didn't realize that until trying out Wilstar.

Let me preface this by saying I've got a lot of characters (22 on one server and 15 between other servers) and time spent in SWOTR. I've been at the point where I've been looking for something new for awhile now. Wildstar gave me hope for a change of pace and something new.

I got a key for the beta weekend two weeks ago. So I leveled a few toons to 14-16ish on both factions. The cartoonish look didn't bother me at all, if the gameplay is fun the look seldom effects me. Granted all the females having kardashian butt was amusing in a disturbing kind of way. I didn't pay close attention to the story, if it had one I didn't look for it, mostly because if I was going to buy it I wanted to be surprised at launch. I like the humor they have in the quests and dialog. Oddly I miss the cinematics from SWTOR even though I'm at the point now where I spacebar everything.

I enjoyed the combat system, something I was surprised to find after disliking Terra and ESO. I suspect it's the hybrid system they use between those games and traditional MMOs that kept me from disliking it instantly. The limited number of skills on the action bar was also welcome, after playing some of the classes in SWTOR it's a nice change.

I loved the Paths part of character progression. I only tried the explorer and the settler paths but the concept and implementation is pretty fun, particularly the explorer path. OMG do I love the jumping around to get to stuff for that path! The game has some area/world quests that everyone who interacts with the progression process gets xp/rewards at the end, this is similar to the Rift world events. Every MMO should have something like this.

I didn't try the pvp because I like a month or two a playing a class to get comfortable with mechanics. Judging from the UI there's more PvP options, particularly battlegrounds which are likely to never appear in SWTOR.

The thing is that while that game is fresh and new, I'm not sure it's worth $60/$75 + 15$ a month. I had 2.5 days to play with that beta weekend and after Friday afternoon and Saturday I was back in SWOTR and didn't bother on Sunday at all. I really want to like that game. I'd like to find something new, but I don't think Wildstar is going to be it. Is it wrong of me to want it to go F2P so I can have more to experience it and decide if it's worth the cost/subscription?