The first hour of Wildstar

Now don't take this to heart, but I didn't play Wildstar for that long so I have obviously missed out on the late game stuff and all of the little gimmicks that make Wildstar different to its rivals. However, first impressions can mean a lot especially when it comes to MMO's that want to keep their players interested long enough so they can get to the decent features at later levels that keep them nailed, glued and duct taped to the game for several hours more.

Firstly, I can assure you that Wildstar is your usual MMO with wandering monsters, character customisation, loot and hot-key based combat. It also comes with a confusing user interface and heads up display which you'll probably get used to after 15 levels of trial and error where you press every button and hope it doesn't remove something you probably needed.

The combat is actually quite fun where everything is skill-shot based which is something that Guild Wars did with 50% of the spells you were given. This means you will have to learn a completely different method of pulling the targets you want. You WILL hit everything you don't want to hit and I found this out the hard way because my shots were going through enemies and hitting people behind them. All of my spells did this. I ended up pulling the one creature I wanted, fought with it a short while before shooting the other 3 things that happily wandered by me that i didn't want anything to do with at this stage.
Also there is very little indication that your health is going down in this game. Obviously you have a Health bar but you also have a shield bar and both are sitting just above your spell bar so you can easily see it. However, as soon as you start fighting, you are so focused on making sure your attacks are actually hitting the target that you do not realise you're dying. Anything that isn't a skill-shot from the enemy either doesn't look like it should be doing much damage or you don't even notice the enemy is hitting you. There was no real 'thud' feel when something hit you so I ended up taking on a single creature and dying because I hadn't realised it was kicking my head in.

I was very curious as to why those Yeti's I had to kill would give up fighting me half way and just stand there staring into the distance, letting me line them with bullets before they realised I was still pestering them. This might have been a bug and I understand most enemies have attacks that force them to stand still, charge up for half an hour and then unleash it where I was standing earlier and had moved away from ages ago but the enemies would often just give up and watch me kill them which really didn't feel right. Creatures should be programmed to stand on the spot to do an attack that only hits me 10% of the time because they're so easy to dodge (and I sometimes cock up and get hit anyway). These are the lower levels so they're bound to be easy at first but it just doesn't feel right to stand back and pummel the poor monster from a distance as it ravages the dirt beneath it in a hopeless attempt to hit someone who has already moved from that spot. But maybe I'm just not seeing the grace of a 'glued to the ground monster'.

So overall in the time I did manage to sit down and play it before putting it down and walking away I had devised that it was a fresh style of game that had been stuck to a game that we've already played. Just, this time we're grinding aliens instead of your usual fantasy monsters for several hundred hours to max level.