Carbine talks about the first week of closed beta testing

It's been a full week now since Carbine opened the gates to the first wave of WildStar Closed Beta testers. We've seen some hints of what the testers have experienced during that week, but a single set of patch notes don't really tell us much about how testing is going. In order to clear things up for those who haven't been lucky enough to get into the testing, this week's WildStar Wednesday brings us a report from the beta: what the players have seen, how Carbine is reacting, as well as their plans for the future.

Considering players have only had a week to really sink their teeth into the beta, they've been wasting no time digging into Nexus and all of the various systems of WildStar. Carbine's own combat team was destroyed in 3v3 Arena matches against players at the current level cap of 22. The first player-created UI mod was created within 24 hours - impressive in its own right, moreso considering Carbine doesn't have any documentation to work from yet. There's also the handy death chart Carbine created to show off the Deadliest Creatures on Nexus. Apparently that Deadstar Rifleman hits kinda hard... that or people need to learn to dodge. One or the other.

In addition to all of the various milestones and factoids, Carbine also talked about its goals for testing. Basically the team wants player feedback to feel important; players have a lot of released games competing with the WildStar beta for their free time, so in addition to making the game fun, they want testers to feel like their voices matter.

While not all feedback is going to be instantaneous (e.g. modifying some quests is going to have a quicker turnaround than rebuilding a class or a dungeon), the players should be able to see some changes happen quickly. That part's especially important since frequent updates and regular tweaks without adding instability is how Carbine want to run the game once it goes live. As time goes on, the players will see additional features like the Dominion content, higher level caps and more as the beta evolves.

For anyone who was concerned about a slowdown in information releases now that beta has begun, Executive Producer Jeremy Gaffney had this to say:

"And because user Doomgrin75 on our subreddit was concerned that we’d slow down our pace of reveals during beta, in addition to the above info/reveals, here is the first ever screenshot of one of our dungeons:  Stormtalon.   The fans at Arkship EU this week are getting to be the first players of the dungeon who will be free to talk about it publicly, so you can look forward to their feedback on it after the event!"

If you'd like to know more about WildStar's first week of Closed Beta, head on over to their blog. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for the beta if you haven't done so already.

Michael "Ragar" Branham