What the hell happened to ESO and Wildstar?

[MonsieuRoberts]

For months before their releases I would see threads talking about what to expect and how hyped people were and how they would become actual options for alternative MMOs, (not WoW killers) but now, months after the release of both, I seldom find a single thread talking about these two games.

I'm not surprised at all when it comes to ESO, I played in 2 betas and didn't enjoy the combat or the aesthetic, and felt from the beginning that "Skyrim with friends" was and still is a dumb idea. TES has never been about co-op or groups, it's been about giving you a shit ton of tiny things to do and spreading them across and through a vast continent, and it's always been about YOU. I was skeptical when I heard the first rumors about ESO and my skepticism seems to have saved me time and money.

ESO's been on sale for $20 3 times in the past few months at Futureshop, it makes me think that a lot of people jumped in expecting a great MMO or a great multi-player TES game and weren't satisfied. But that's 100% my own opinion/assumptions. I don't see anyone talking about how great or how terrible ESO is...it's just fallen off the map, it seems.

With Wildstar, I see some people referencing how it's almost too hardcore with the return of Vanilla raiding concepts like attunements, and I hear talk of how the game is dying, which I feel is impossible. It's not APB, so how could it truly be falling apart so quickly? Is it just the people who tried the endgame for a week, didn't like it and returned to WoW? I tried one of the closed betas for only a few hours, got to lvl 10 and I enjoyed the actual gameplay, but I felt it wasn't revolutionary or game-changing enough to pull me away from WoW. The aesthetic didn't really jive with me either...I love Ratchet & Clank, but it felt very strange for me to be playing in an MMO with that sort of quirky style. It didn't seem like a bad game, but I really didn't play enough to judge it, and I have no clue about the endgame aside from knowing that there's attunements.

So what's with these two games? I'm asking more oriented towards Wildstar honestly, but if you've played the endgame of either of these or are in a position where you could summarize the pros and cons of these two games and maybe shine some insight on why there's seemingly 0 discussion about them, go ahead.

[Oneirophobia]

Elder Scrolls Online was "stillborn." Dead on arrival.
Which is a shame. I was greatly opposed to the ES franchise becoming an MMO regardless, because their single player games are fantastic and I'd hate to lose future additions for an MMO the way we lost Warcraft due to WoW (not that WoW is a bad trade). We lost a lot of future Skyrim DLCs due to the ESO MMO, which I am a tad disappointed about. That game had the potential (and really with the modding community, still does) to be timeless.

Wildstar seemed to survive for a short time, and now appears to be slowly bleeding to death.

[Chickat]

The same thing that happened to all the other mmos releasing with a sub fee in the last 8 years. ESO was a buggy piece of crap that had potential to be a diamond. Wildstar is good, but its pretty challenging and a niche mmo for hardcores. Id I had to guess which one will still be around in 5 years Id guess wildstar with a solid 250-400k playerbase. If that is enough money to sustain them that is. Wildstar will probably be about as successful as Rift give or take. Almost every mmo is failin these days, WoW included. New mmos with a sub fee have almost no chance.

[carnifex2005]

Wildstar and TESO are ranked way below all the other major MMO's in playtime on Raptr and XFire and their Twitch numbers aren't good either. Basically players are tired of playing just another themepark MMO. I suspect that Archeage will have a bit better traction in retaining players (even though it is a niche Asian sandpark game).

[Oneirophobia]

The same thing that happened to all the other mmos releasing with a sub fee in the last 8 years. ESO was a buggy piece of crap that had potential to be a diamond. Wildstar is good, but its pretty challenging and a niche mmo for hardcores. Id I had to guess which one will still be around in 5 years Id guess wildstar with a solid 250-400k playerbase. If that is enough money to sustain them that is. Wildstar will probably be about as successful as Rift give or take. Almost every mmo is failin these days, WoW included. New mmos with a sub fee have almost no chance.

I'm pretty content with how GW2 has turned out. The new living story additions are pretty great. The game is veeerrrry single player oriented in the late game, however. Its sort of like Skyrim now, but with people to chat with and run into.

[Zaxvriin]

My experience with Wildstar was fun for like 5 hours into questing, then just boredom. Immense boredom that after the first day when I logged on, I would do like 3 quests, then log back out due to just not finding it fun(not a good sign if I'm bored, with nothing to do, and find that to be more boring than doing nothing). Just a problem of the levelling wasn't engaging enough to me to make me have any desires to continue.

[Scubasteve]

We lost a lot of future Skyrim DLCs due to the ESO MMO.

Can you explain your reasoning for this?

I assume you are aware that these are 2 completely different developers.

[Daralii]

Games launched with sizable issues, devs were far too slow to fix them, alienated significant portions of their audience. Wildstar was doubled down on by that and its lack of an existing IP to profit from.

[Phreak]

Wildstar had it's bugs but I still play it from time to time.

The biggest thing that has kept me from really investing in the game (got an engineer to level cap and 1800 5s, never finished attunement) is that I'm already so established in World of Warcraft there really isn't an MMO out there that has been compelling enough for me to give it all up.

I will say the dungeons were fantastic and I absolutely loved combat with the difficulty, but the community in general just wasn't there for it. People didn't want to learn a new language or they truly did expect that even if they couldn't play well if they bashed into the boss long enough it would go down. It was really hard to put groups together and people were just god awful at the veteran dungeons, puging them was blasphemy on my server. It came down to like 2 raid able guilds that soaked everyone up while the 'casual' player base was left out in the cold running dailies and vet adventures while playing house till they got bored.

[Auxis]

I played the ESO beta for like... the starting zone plus running around the next zone (it was a port town or something) feeling lost. That was the only hour I'd ever invest in it.

Wildstar on the other hand, I spent like 4-5 days questing, testing out different classes/races. I enjoyed it, it had charm. But it wasn't enough to end my WoW "following".
I cancelled my subscription after my game automatically activated on launch day. I don't know if I was overreacting to something that I could have avoided (was there a way to choose when it activated?), but that flipped the table for me.

[MonsieuRoberts]

I don't remember who said it, but I remember reading a quote from a Dev on an MMO team that was along the lines of "When you're designing your MMO, you should assume that everyone playing it is already subscribed to World of Warcraft", and I feel like that advice has just been ignored by these MMO developers, like they think that their audience hasn't already spent years paying for, spent thousands of hours invested in their WoW characters.

For all the hate and complaining that comes from people who have played WoW before, there are things that I think are undeniable about how good the game is, like how much you get to do for $15 a month. If you're going to demand that I pay $15 for your game, it had better have a bunch of features that I'm going to have to become enamored with, otherwise why would I leave WoW? WoW is not infallible, but ESO and SWTOR and Rift, I feel as if none of them have really offered anything compelling to make WoW players look at those titles longingly with their months watering thinking "I wish I could do X and Y and Z, I wish those features were in WoW."

Aside from actually making your game unique and appealing to WoW players, both past and present, I feel like a sub fee just isn't applicable for new games at all. In this new era of free-to-play and DLC, how are you going to pull non-MMO gamers into a $15 a month plan? $15 a month to play an inferior version of Skyrim? $15 a month to play a fraction of the content that WoW also offers? It confuses me how some Devs and publishers seem to think that it's viable, when they expect millions of players.

[Bearshield]

ESO launched with many of the issues that plagued it throughout beta. For me as someone who was very interested in it for story and graphics, the controls kept me from purchasing it. I would have liked to have seen some options for the controls rather than just forcing Skyrim controls on everyone.

For Wildstar, I did purchase it and played the hell out of it for the first month. Got to 50 and decided the gating to end game was just more than I wanted to deal with. I loved the majority of attunements in early WoW, but Wildstar took it to a whole other level. Furthermore I disliked how strict roles were in Wildstar. Meaning if you leveled a tank/dps hybrid as dps, but wanted to run a dungeon as a tank, you needed a full separate set of gear to do this. At end game that is expected, but not while leveling. In the time I was leveling, I never finished a single dungeon. Joined about 3, first 2 I did as dps and the group fell apart after repeated wipes. The third I tried to tank and finally ended up leaving when it became evident I couldn't do it in dps gear. These were lvl 20 dungeons. So that really left a bitter taste in my mouth that prevented me from really wanting to even try dungeons at 50.

[MonsieuRoberts]

Games launched with sizable issues, devs were far too slow to fix them, alienated significant portions of their audience. Wildstar was doubled down on by that and its lack of an existing IP to profit from.

That sounds like SWTOR and Ilum.

[Chickat]

My experience with Wildstar was fun for like 5 hours into questing, then just boredom. Immense boredom that after the first day when I logged on, I would do like 3 quests, then log back out due to just not finding it fun(not a good sign if I'm bored, with nothing to do, and find that to be more boring than doing nothing). Just a problem of the levelling wasn't engaging enough to me to make me have any desires to continue.

I did enjoy the combat in it though.

[Tastyfish]

Honeymoon is over, nobody cares anymore other then the people playing.

[oplawlz]

It seems like every game except GW2 has had trouble separating "hardcore" and "boring". It's fine to have things in game that take a lot of time to get, or combat that is very challenging (wildstar combat was fantastic, especially in groups), but designing endgame around dailies or mob grinding is really not acceptable anymore. There are plenty of dynamic content ideas for mmo's to steal, no need to suck the fun out of endgame with that nonsense.

[sargior]

10 years ago Blizzard made World of Warcraft.

True story.

There is really only a spot for 1 top MMO as most people these days not having the time to invest in these types of games. Most people playing MMO's have so much put into WoW that they don't want to restart and do the same all over.

The only thing that will kill WoW will be WoW itself.

I think I will only ever play a blizzard MMO. Now If only they can buy Magic the gathering off wizard of the coast we may have something interesting.

[MonsieuRoberts]

For Wildstar, I did purchase it and played the hell out of it for the first month. Got to 50 and decided the gating to end game was just more than I wanted to deal with. I loved the majority of attunements in early WoW, but Wildstar took it to a whole other level.

Could you or someone else elaborate? I vaguely understand what Attunements are, a form of gating content. Are the raids locked behind paywalls or reputations or a quote of quest items or random drops? I heard once about a raid in WoW (I don't even know which one it is) where you had to get a buff from a mob in Azshara and if it fell off you'd have to zone out and go BACK to Azshara and get the buff again, but I don't know if that's true or not.

Furthermore I disliked how strict roles were in Wildstar. Meaning if you leveled a tank/dps hybrid as dps, but wanted to run a dungeon as a tank, you needed a full separate set of gear to do this. At end game that is expected, but not while leveling. In the time I was leveling, I never finished a single dungeon. Joined about 3, first 2 I did as dps and the group fell apart after repeated wipes. The third I tried to tank and finally ended up leaving when it became evident I couldn't do it in dps gear. These were lvl 20 dungeons. So that really left a bitter taste in my mouth that prevented me from really wanting to even try dungeons at 50.

That does seem pretty ridiculous for non-level cap content. Imagine if you couldn't run Wailing Caverns if you didn't have Tank Heirlooms as a Warrior. u.u

[Marthenil]

Honeymoon is over, nobody cares anymore other then the people playing.

Pretty much. Though, ESO has had a new surge of people with the Steam Launch and the 1.3 update.

I can't speak for Wildstar, but ESO is doing ok for what it wanted to accomplish. The devs have said multiple times they didn't aim for a WoW-esque success, but a rather niche game.
What stopped it from becoming an instant "hit" was caution from the MMO Crowd in light of recent other MMO launches, numerous bugs that were present, along with PvP imbalance.

[Bearshield]

For all the hate and complaining that comes from people who have played WoW before, there are things that I think are undeniable about how good the game is, like how much you get to do for $15 a month. If you're going to demand that I pay $15 for your game, it had better have a bunch of features that I'm going to have to become enamored with, otherwise why would I leave WoW?

I've played WoW since vanilla, tried pretty much every MMORPG that's come out since then, and there was a time when I would have agreed with you but gone are the days where I really feel like I get more for my $15 with WoW than I do with other games. There are free to play games patching more content on a regular basis then we've gotten in this entire expansion with WoW. Blizz may have done a lot of things right with WoW in the past, but they've gotten too comfortable at the top and are no longer putting out the quality we've come to expect from them.