
That's not to say that the game didn't have plenty of elements that I enjoyed. The visual design of the content (player races, monsters, landscapes etc.) was great and unique to the game – as much as anything can be anymore. The combat system took notes from other more action oriented games and added the necessity of movement and skills shots instead of letting the computer run the numbers behind the scenes for you. The main story line was something that was quite enjoyable as well – an ancient race using the planet as a bio-engineering lab. There was also an attitude about the game that seemed to separate it out from its competitors, “lets hoverboard around the moon and then take part in a little genocide!”

Parallels are not always bad, though as new games would hope to have all of the features (crafting, arenas/battlegrounds, high level raids, dungeons, housing, stand alone adventures, PVP and more) that World of Warcraft has just to be able to compete with it. The problem was that while WildStar did have all of these elements, there were way too many, “Oh, this is just beta. That issue should be fixed by release.” moments that turned into, “Oh, it's only the first month or two. They will fix things in the first big patch.” moments. PVP remains(ed) broken, after the first few intro areas leveling starts to put the brakes on, mid and high level content was not fleshed out, the crafting and loot systems were broken (I shouldn't always be able to craft better gear than a quest rewards) and the capital city design was maddening at times, just to name a few problems.

The other thing that people are getting burnt out on is the paid subscription model. These days you can count on one hand the number of successful games still following this business practice. I believe that this is where some bad luck befell WildStar from the beginning. When the game was still in development and nearing its release, the paid subscription model was more or less still valid. It didn't take long for this to change though. As I said in my first WildStar article, after playing Guild Wars2 (which had an initial purchase of the game but was F2P afterwards) it was going to take a lot for me to set up that recurring charge.
With any luck the WildStar F2P version will repopulate Nexus in the fall. For a game with so much potential, it would be a shame for it to disappear into obscurity.