I have played WoW since its inception 10 years ago, and the start of the EU servers (even before the game was released locally, and we had to find contacts in the UK to buy us copies and mail us the keys).
Now I have done everything I could in WoW in terms of PvE, and also a lot of BGs in my time. Starting from 40-man and the two early 20-mans, all the way to only raiding 10-mans. For each MMORPG that came out since WoW's release, I looked at with disdain and stuck to WoW. I still smashed WoW when MoP came out last year, and we had a good amount of 10-man raiding progress and cleared all instances up to halfway through ToT until the guild fell apart.
Recently, I decided to buy a 60-day game card and give SoO a whirl, only to find it absolutely mind-numbingly boring. In fact, in less that two weeks I had had enough, and hadn't logged in since. Just the "legendary" quest line is such a vomit-inducing experience that it completely overshadows the joys of the game. The drop rate of the crap I need for my legendary cloak is atrociously low, and I have always believed drop-rates of quest items to be one of the core faults of WoW. How can a wolf not have a single tooth? Anyhow, I digress.
My brother gave me a guest pass for Wildstar last week, so I downloaded the 17.5GB and started playing on Thursday. I was not expecting much. The game looked too colourful and cute to be taken seriously, and honestly, after investing more than ten thousand hours into WoW, why would I throw all that away and start anew in a childish-looking MMORPG?
Well, I haven't been able to stop playing (much to the dismay of my wife), and I am only level 15 at the moment. The game has a steep learning curve (as WoW did when it started) but once finding your feet you realise how truly well-thought out the game really is. It reminds me of Vanilla WoW where everyone was running around clueless, waiting to see and experience the next thing that unlocks at level X. What I like about Wildstar, is that the "wolves" all have "teeth", in other words, 100% drop rate. I haven't felt like I was grinding at all. The leveling up is slow, but about the same pace as Vanilla WoW was, but there are so many things that you are leveling in parallel, that it doesn't bother you: something is bound to level up in the next couple of minutes, be it your class, path or some trade skill.
I like that when I sometimes mine an iron node, it comes alive and tries to run away, whilst I chase behind with my laser pickaxe. Apparently sometimes the nodes become giant worms that if killed, creates a tunnel to an underground passage that's littered with mineral nodes, and you have a time limit to mine as many as possible.
Crafting has taken on a whole new dimension, where you actually get to assemble things, component by component. Components come in different qualities and colours, which affect the stats of the weapon you are crafting.
Even quests have mini-games involved, making you more involved than just looting something.
Combat is awesome, and is way more involved that WoW's combat system. Having to dodge the enemy's attacks whilst aiming with yours makes it more immersive than merely selecting an enemy, then only looking at your ability buttons and pressing them in a sequence without having to even be facing the enemy. I am worried, however, that combat could become a bit one-dimensional in the long run, but I will have to get to the level cap and see before making a call on that.
Many comments have been "it's a blatant WoW clone". I agree that it has many WoW-like elements, and my first impressions were exactly that they took WoW and made a sci-fi version of it. Though I have never played any other MMORPGs, I believe they have looked at all of them, summarised what has worked well for those games, and what have not.
WoW has more pros than cons, and I would assume that is why the gameplay of Wildstar feels much like that of WoW. They'd have been stupid not take the best parts of all the MMORPGs out there and merge it somehow into their own game. After a couple of hours I realised that it is so much more than just a WoW-clone.
One of the downsides for me thus far is that at times there is a lot to read, and I am too impatient to care. I had a similar problem in WoW where I would not read the quest text, and get frustrated when I discovered I could have done two quests in one had I been paying attention. That's my own fault, though.
The sheer amount of information is still a bit overwhelming to me, but I am getting there and finding my feet.
I run the game on Ultra settings (v-sync off, though, otherwise you get no more than 60fps). My framerate jumps around between 60fps and 110fps.
I've started on Eko as Exiles, and will be trying to get a hold of Sorted Gaming as soon as my copy of the game arrives.
