Executive producer Jeremy Gaffney helps explain the M31 Patch Notes, otherwise known as Closed Beta Test 2.

Rapidly Iterating Interface

According to Gaffney, most of the feedback from CBT1 was about classes. It’s pretty much what I’d expect, with players celebrating skills that work particularly well, or pointing out abilities that fall a little flat. As a result there’s been a huge stack of changes, with the biggest being Attributes and Milestones.

Goodbye to the old ways of naming Attributes, and hello to six snazzy new ones. Players will now be boosting their Brutality, fussing about Finesse, or agonizing over Tech, Moxie, Insight and Grit. Classes now have unique Milestones, which automatically pop into play once you cross that Attribute Point threshold. Some of those top rank Milestones are particularly tasty, and I’d encourage you to chew into the full Patch Notes for more details on the class you’re contemplating.

Coupled with those changes are a clutch of UI updates to make swapping stats easier to understand. “Our goal is to enable what only the cool kids could know, or what only the guys going on the web could know, and put as much of it visually in the game so that everybody can know it.”

A huge number of other UI elements also see improvements in CBT2, thanks in large part to the modifiable UI. I asked Gaffney if supporting addons had caused any pain during CBT1, where the first player-created addon was released 6 hours after launch, without any support or documented API. He replied: “None at all. Having your modifiable UI system online early makes development speed up so massively that it’s worth almost any pain you can take for the system.”

The reason for this is that each team produces its own addons involving the features they’re currently working on. A team might make three or four addons, then choose the best and rapidly iterate on it. “It allows the evolutionary change to happen at a much higher frequency because the UI is not a blocker.”

A couple of major UI updates are to the Settler path UI, making it easier to create new buildings, vendors, banks and other cool stuff inside the towns. Combat logs are also being enhanced, in direct response to community requests, providing “more ability to do interesting addons with damage trackers and all that kinds of stuff.”

A raid frame UI has also been added to support internal raid testing, which will be in our eager hands after a few more polish passes. “We want the toughest raiding guilds on the planet to come in there and start competing for who can do the world’s first and the world’s best”.

Carbine is working on a worldwide system that rewards guilds for competing against each other on a week-by-week basis. Each week, a randomly selected configuration of dynamic elements will be pushed to each server, ensuring that each guild gets the same fresh challenge, with incredible rewards for the best. “Our goal is to make them tough as hell. We’re really aiming this towards the hardcore raider and not to do a carebear raiding fashion. You’ve got to be good to handle the raids.”

In order to support player addon development in CBT2, Carbine is also releasing an addon development package called Houston. Including a Lua editor and XML templating, the environment should help potential addon developers get running very quickly. Gaffney added that, for cases where someone’s addon is so great that they end up incorporating it into the base game, they’re still trying to work out a way to properly compensate people. He mentioned that they’re currently speaking to some of the mod sites about it, but that it’s likely to be a discussion with the community.

Teasing Tradeskills

The M31 patch notes do include a small hint on an aspect of WildStar that Carbine hasn’t really commented on – tradeskills. While Gaffney promised us a “deep dive” into crafting in the next few months, he was eager to share a couple of highlights.

According to Gaffney, Coordinate crafting is “frikkin cool”. It’s an exploration and discovery system for finding new recipes in-game, but it’s also unique to each character. Using the humble Boulderback Sandwich as an example, he explained that the basic variant might be at coordinate 0,0. With axes for sweetness or saltiness, stuffing your sandwich with additives might open up another variant that gives you a unique buff when you eat it. Apparently the aim is to encourage a strategy for discovering new recipes, rather than a walkthrough where players follow a guide.

Architects will have a tradeskill that’s almost entirely devoted to player housing. We’re told they can make kits to speed up house builds, but also create fabkits (or is that Fabulous Kits?) that contain pre-packed items for your plot. Although some fabkits will be found or vendor bought, your friendly Architect will be the primary source of snazzy style for your home.  

Harvesting tools are also something new. Although you can use your weapon to take down an ore node or rip up a herb, using a tool makes it faster. That said, there’s always a chance that your precious ore will grow legs and sprint off, or turn out to be a massive worm. Part of this randomness is because it’s apparently fun to be eaten by a giant ore monster and transported to a pocket dungeon where you have limited time to hack off as much ore as you can before it spits you out. The other part is because we’re told it’s tough to code a farming bot that can handle being eaten.

World Under Construction

Even though beta is progressing at pace, Carbine’s art and world designers are still hard at work building more of Nexus. So much so that Illium, one of the main Dominion cities, was originally going to be in a “grey box” state of rough layout for the second closed beta. All that changed two weekends ago.

“The team on their own, without any senior management influence or any of that, decided to come on in on Saturday and Sunday and just dogpile. Break themselves up into teams of artists, designers and programmers, and they did what they call a gamejam, and they just beat the heck out of Illium. They put in all the AI and the walking and movement paths, they put in all the quests with the content teams doing all that. The artists came back in and polished everything up, and put in clutter and all the details, and in two days they knocked out this huge area with multiple city districts. It was in the schedule for later, but they decided that just from pride they wanted that going into closed beta 2 as opposed to closed beta 3.”

It’s not the first time that GameJams have happened at Carbine to add features. Housing Dungeons are where players go out into the real world, find a treasure map and open it out on their housing plot. It opens up a pocket dungeon for groups of three to five players, where you might go into a skeech-infested cave. Once they’re cleared out, the cave could become a temporary mine for the next four or five days. As it was an optional feature, Gaffney was considering cutting it, so the team built eight of them in a weekend while he and senior management were at PAX East.

“We have so much other stuff that I wasn’t intending to do, but they’re cool and so now they’re in.”

Housing has got an incredible amount of love, with over 400 new décor items arriving in CBT2. “We think housing is top of the industry now, or damn close to it, but every month it’s just going to get better and better.” That pile of newness includes fun ‘festival’ plugs and a ton of new roleplaying items.

“Housing is one of the areas where we’re trying to seed a lot of stuff right for the roleplaying community. We really think they’re underserved in most games, and so what we’re doing is adding things like the festival plugs - basically little party plugs. They do things like have a feast come along, so you can have a place where everybody can sit and eat and do that sort of thing. We do Ferris Wheels where you can ride on it. We do everything from little quests where you buy the plug and then there’s some puzzle to be solved on it. There’s a giant geyser that throws you up in the air and you need to collect as many crystals as you can on your way down. Things that incent people to come over to your house.”

Off The Map

What about items not in the patch notes? Gaffney willingly shared what he could about the general state of the beta, with the obvious question being when we’ll know about the unrevealed races and classes. The answer? Soon.

“We are fighting a battle right now against how fast players can leak stuff out versus how fast we can turn out a reveal in a polished fashion.” A personality trailer is planned for release in the next few months, revealing not just who they are but the personalities behind them too.

The various WildStar forums and message boards also seem confused on flying mounts, so I asked if they were still under consideration.

“Let me give you the exact honest answer on that. We designed the world from the ground up expecting flying mounts and implemented flight at a very early stage, because we were like ‘hey it sucks when you have half the world for flight and half not for flight.’ But there’s a very interesting debate that’s arisen over time, since we added that four years ago, about whether you should really have flying mounts in your game or does it trivialize too much of the content? So what we’re doing right now is listening to the community and figuring out if we want to launch with flying mounts, or put some restrictions on them – if you have a little spaceship you can fly around, does it have a gas tank so you can’t fly infinitely? – we’re not sure. We’re actually listening to the community pretty strongly on this one, and so we’ve been following the arguments on the boards as much as anybody else has. We have the technological capability to do either, and at the end of the day we’ll probably listen to the fans and see what they want.

“The honest answer is for people to complain on our forums one way or the other, and that we’re idiots if we don’t do it the other way, and we’ll actually listen to that. Except for the part where we’re idiots – we think we’re all smart.”

With the team working hard to get WildStar through the various Beta phases and into launch, there’s a risk of staff burnout. Gaffney responded by adding that the team doesn’t do mandatory crunch periods, and employs senior people who crunch of their own accord and are expected to manage it responsibly.

That said, he also added that they lay on free crunch food every night, with about a hundred people signing up for late night snacks and another 30 or so who forget and end up waiting for “vulture call” to scoop up some leftovers. He admits that’s a lot of people crunching for it to be non-mandatory, but stressed that building an MMO is about running a marathon – it gets harder once you launch.

Part of his theory for that is that there’s a general feeling among the team that the community is very positive, encouraging them to go that extra mile. “I’ve run, I don’t know, about 8 or 10 betas over the years, and this is the most pleasant one I’ve been in.”

“And pity our content guys. We’re going to launch with 300+ hours of just outdoor content, never mind all the other stuff, and we have about 220 hours of it in various stages of beta readiness, that’s getting unlocked month after month. Maintaining that much content while generating the remaining 100 or so hours plus raids, plus responding to feedback, plus progression on making sure things don’t break, that’s the hard part. And our guys are kicking ass being here and working on all of that, but that does not mean it’s not a ton of work.

“We will not launch until we have highly varied content and hundreds of hours of it, just while you’re leveling, and hundreds more of elder games behind it that are tuned, tested and polished – that’s our mantra, that’s our secret sauce at the end of the day more than any single cool USP.”

It felt like I was seeing a glimpse of another side of Gaffney; not just the charismatic raconteur who shares insight with a rare bluntness, but the man toiling away at the helm of a huge triple-A MMO to keep the SS WildStar on course.

“There’s a question we all face in our personal lives, which is ‘when do you figure out you’re not going to be president’. Is it 20 when those party pictures go up on the internet, and you go ‘well, I’m not going to be president now’, or is it 30 when you’re like ‘well, I guess I went into journalism or game development, I guess I’m not going to tool that into a political career.”

“When you’re in your game, you always hit that stage where you’re like ‘man, we’re not going to be the best game on the planet’. We’ve not hit that stage yet, and I don’t guarantee that we’ll hit it. But I’ll tell you that the error bar still contains it for us, where we’re all stoked about it, because this is the best game most, if not all of us have ever made in our lives.”

Gareth “Gazimoff” Harmer, Senior Contributing Editor