Watermelon Seeds : WildStar

Oh WildStar.

I told you so.

I know that is very, very helpful. And to be fair, like many others, I am actually really sad it didn’t make it. I would often reinstall, play for a bit (I wanted to see/feel the story of Nexus), get wigged out by the colors and playstyle, uninstall. It was a slow slog, but I was getting there. And I hoped every time I logged in that it would grab me “this time”. Except it didn’t. Just long enough to see a cutscene with Drusera, run a quest hub, check out my awesome house, and leave for a long time.

I know it has been covered before – even here – but the core premise of why WildStar failed is more easily explained by watermelons. Most people like watermelons. Some like them with seeds, some like them seedless. No one likes them with extra seeds. There isn’t a watermelon company on the planet with a selling proposition saying “we have twice the seeds as the other watermelon company!”. In a MMO world that was focusing on convenience, simplicity and play-ability at the time they went the other way. It was something no one was asking for. In fact, if you had a focus group on Watermelon wants and desires I would punch the person in the face that said we need more seeds. It was that silly.

Look, the beta weekends were fun and it had a lot of good going for it. Here is my post history about WildStar and the synopsis around each:

That’s a lot of content, hope, cynicism and realism all wrapped into a strong posting year about it in 2014. I wanted it to work badly. Most of us just knew it wouldn’t the way it was designed.

I am disappointed I won’t ever learn or experience what happened on Nexus, why the planet was such a big deal. Not sure who Drusera really was, or why the strain happened, or who wins the battle for the planet. There was so much cool about the WildStar and chalk another one up to a bad outcome of timing, decision making, and disappointing results.

5 comments / Add your comment below

  1. I gave it a go about a year ago. I had tried way back when I had gotten an open beta weekend invite. My PC at the time did not really like the load I was forcing it to run so the experience was very off putting. But last year I hopped in. I played a few hours, was getting the hang of things, except double jump, I just could not grasp double jumping. But I think you got it with the colors. It was a bit too vibrant, and a bit cartoony? Can a video game be called to much of a cartoon?

    1. Yeah, it’s sensory overload. Which is fine sometimes, in certain instances, but not all the time in all instances. I enjoyed playing it but didn’t feel relaxed afterwards (like I would with WoW). I was more amped up.

      1. Yeah. That sums up the feeling. Like I was on edge. When I looked at it when it first came out I was a bit turned off by cash transactions. It felt like you would need to dump a decent amount of cash into it just to be able to play at a moderate level.

  2. when you wrote this:

    “I would … reinstall, play for a bit (I wanted to see/feel the story of Nexus), get wigged out by the colors and playstyle, uninstall. . . . I hoped every time I logged in that it would grab me “this time”. Except it didn’t.”

    I went “Yup. That was me exactly. I wanted to like it, but it just never grabbed me.”

Leave a Reply to MarathalCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: