My Wildstar Beta Weekend Experience:
This past weekend, I played a new MMO that is still in it's beta stages called Wildstar. If you haven't checked it out yet, I suggest you do so here: http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/
I had been looking forward to this game for quite some time, since it has been in development for a while. It's a sci-fi MMORPG, and I was mainly drawn to it by it's cartoon look, humor, and how it's a bit over the top. It looked insanely fun, and boy was I right.
I'll skip story-time with the lore, because it's all on the website. If you want, you can research that. I'll just speak about my experience.
First off, when you start the game you have to create a character. There is so much to choose from, and many different ways to create. There are a lot of races you can choose too! As you can see above, I created an Aurin male named KyleSan. (They wouldn't let me do any hyphens or spaces. Lamesauce.) This race of people are also known as furries! Ha, no joke, you get to customize the fur and the kind of ears they have. Although, I'm not really into furries, the male characters looked pretty cool. Small and scrappy. (My character actually looks a lot like Zidane from Final Fantasy IX.) There are a bunch of different classes you can choose from: Warrior, Spellslinger, Esper, Engineer, Stalker, and Medic. Different classes are available for different races. I chose stalker, since I love being the sneaky damage dealer. Essentially you get awesome Wolverine claws, which is bad-ass. You can also choose a 'Path'. This determines what kind of side missions you'll be taking on. These are: Soldier, Explorer, Scientist, and Settler. I chose Explorer, because I just love exploring the land, and doing it as a side mission is tons of fun.
So, I hopped in, did the whole tutorial level, then I was on to Nexus! (The planet everyone is fighting for.) I did some missions, got some cool gear, and had a lot of fun. The combat is similar to World of Warcraft, but it's much more action oriented. Whenever an attack is being made, whether it's yours or the enemies, it shows the radius of where it's going to hit. So you have time to dodge and counter attack. You also have to make sure that your attacks are making a hit too. If you're not facing the right direction, you could miss! With this feature, you can also attack more than one target, as long as they're in your attack radius, and they don't even have to be targeted. Dodging, and jumping around to avoid attacks was really fun, and the battles never got dull. The missions were also pretty fun, trying to protect the forest from the opposite faction, The Dominion, who were burning it up!
All in all, it was really fun. I didn't really get to play it as much as I would have liked, mostly because real life got in the way, but I will definitely play it more when I can. I never got to try the PvP stuff or do the player housing, but I've heard that those are both amazing, and something I want to do in the game. Hopefully I get to play more beta before the game is launched!
Even though it was really fun, there were quite a few glitches and bugs. I had to submit some. It seems like the game needs a bit more polishing, but of course, that's why they have the beta tests.
Anyway, go check it out! It's a fun game, if you like MMOs!