WildStar

» see wildstar-online.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed wildstar. by june 2014 i was thirty and the mmo budget i kept for personal time had been going to the same handful of long-running games for years. another forty-dollar boxed mmo with a fifteen-dollar monthly subscription was not in the cards. wildstar was an adult game for the audience that still bought boxed mmos in 2014, and that audience was already shrinking when the game shipped.

carbine studios had been building it since 2005 in southern california, with a team that included a number of ex-blizzard developers from the original world of warcraft cycle. the marketing was sharp. the trailers had a stylized sci-fi look that did not look like every other fantasy mmo, and the combat used telegraphed attack zones on the floor that you had to dodge out of in real time. the ncsoft publishing deal closed in 2007, and the game finally shipped on june 3, 2014 after multiple delays.

the subscriber base lasted about three months at a healthy size. by september 2014 the population had dropped enough that ncsoft began consolidating servers, and by february 2016 the pve server count was being cut again. wildstar converted to free-to-play on september 29, 2015. it did not save the game. ncsoft announced the closure of carbine studios on september 6, 2018, and the servers went dark on november 28, 2018 at five pm eastern.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the carbine pitch was that wildstar would do hardcore raid content for the players who felt world of warcraft had gone soft. the forty-person raids at endgame had real attunement requirements and skill checks, and the dev team made a series of marketing videos in 2013 explicitly framing the game as the one for hardcore players. that pitch found a small dedicated audience and alienated the broader market that was not interested in committing fifteen hours a week to attunement chains.

~ the actual end ~

by 2018 the active population on the consolidated servers had dropped low enough that ncsoft's korean leadership ran the math and decided to stop funding carbine. the official announcement on september 6, 2018 said the studio was being closed and the game was being wound down. the actual server shutdown ran on november 28, 2018. fifty people lost their jobs in the closure, and ncsoft refunded in-game purchases made after july 1, 2018. carbine had pitched at least two new projects to ncsoft in the year before the closure, and ncsoft had rejected all of them.

~ the long tail ~

private-server preservation work began almost immediately after the shutdown announcement. a project called nexus forever has been running an emulator since 2019, with intermittent progress on rebuilding the server-side logic that ncsoft never released. the source code is presumably still on a backup tape inside ncsoft's seoul office, and an official revival has not been on any roadmap. the wildstar art style and combat ideas did get absorbed into newer mmos, with the telegraph-zone mechanic showing up in final fantasy xiv shadowbringers content and a few other places that watched what worked.

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