Cyglaive had a chance to sit down and chat with Carbine President Jeremy Gaffney about content in WildStar.

Looking Forward

As our time began coming to a close, I decided to ask Jeremy what the next couple months were going to look like for WildStar’s beta and beyond, which surprisingly yielded a few interesting tidbits. Aside from popping the beta level cap up to 25, the team is looking at getting more content in for players to test, including the Drusera story instance content mentioned at PAX East this year. In a few more weeks we should also hear some things regarding open beta. Most surprising was that, as the team moves towards WildStar’s launch, Jeremy said that they already have pre-production complete on the first 16 post-launch game updates. If they stick to their monthly release of game updates, that’s about a year and a half worth of content already being worked on. In a world where MMOs die without frequent content updates, Carbine seems to be coming to the party prepared.

“Next is really focus on open beta. We may do another weekend or two, but open beta for us is how many people can get into the game. We’re a little guy fighting against the giants you know? World of Warcraft’s sitting there with 10 million subs for a decade, and then you’ve got Elder Scrolls Online coming out. Skyrim sold 60 million units, it’s an IP everybody knows and loves, and now they’ve got an online component to it. We are that crazy game with the psychopathic hamsters that people haven’t heard of yet, because we’re a new developer. It’s a brand new IP which means we don’t have Jedi, we don’t have lightsabers and we can’t bring you in because you loved the movie back in the 80s or whatever. No, we have to earn you. We have to earn your retention, we have to earn you getting our game and we have to earn you staying in our game."

"For us, a lot of what we want to do over the next six weeks is to make sure we have high awareness and the way we’re going to win is through gameplay. The goal is that if we’ve intrigued you at all, come in and check it out, and if you like it, awesome! If not, that’s actually ok with us. We’re going to go and log in all the data about where you left and what you did and make our game better anyway, because we’re not done improving it and we’re never going to be done improving it. We think this can be the best game that’s launched in terms of polish, in terms of overall content and in terms of depth. But we want to be better [each month], we want to earn your 15 bucks and we want to earn you playing in our game and earning CREDD with your gold pieces, because we have to. We’re in a Darwinian fitness industry where good games do well, and well-marketed crap games die. We want to be a good game, not a crap game.”

I would like to thank Carbine Studios and Jeremy Gaffney again for letting me conduct this interview. WildStar launches June 3rd of this year, with pre-orders and closed beta and underway as we speak. As always, for more WildStar news, information and updates, keep it locked to ZAM.

See you on Nexus!

Corey “Cyglaive” Jenkins

Follow Corey on Twitter @Cyglaive