WildStar has a server emulator in the works. Anyone have plans to play it?

[Xan]

If you all remember, one of the Dead Game News episodes covered WildStar. I used to play that a lot. I reached end-game, and to be honest, I'm having trouble getting into other MMOs because this one just set the bar too high.

 

Just before shutdown, I was one of the people doing huge packet-sniffs (I did a run of the entirety of Farside, the world's moon. It's a mid-game area) and after shutdown I did a small bit of work on an emulator called NexusForever (Only for its initial version, I haven't done anything else). The packet sniffs were submitted to a second group, Arctium, for use in their emulator -- yes, there's two emulators in progress. Here they are:

 

1. NexusForever, which is developed publicly and can be contributed to at any time. Right now it's observably further along than the second one because they're frequently pushing updates. I say "observably further along" because the second one is in progress, but all updates are internal until release. It's a bit difficult to set up but it works pretty nicely. You need to get stuff like MySQL, then set up the necessary databases, and there's a few more hoops to go through but I won't get into it. I don't know when this will be finished.
2. Arctium's WildStar emulator. You may know about Arctium for their work on the World of Warcraft mod launcher. Turns out one of the developers over there played + really liked WildStar, so now we have him working on it. This one is as easy as running an exe and the game to get working, no need to set up databases and stuff. The caveat is that it is limited to exploring the world and walking around, you can't do much else at all. Its estimated release date is in 1 to 2 years, which is pretty damn fast given the size of WS. When it's released, it'll be the full game.

 

I don't really know about the long term pros and cons of each emulator, and from what I can tell, they will be basically identical in terms of what you can do (e.g. choose to play singleplayer, host it with your friends, etc). If you're new to it, I suggest waiting for the full release of one of these two (I'd lean more towards Arctium personally) because trying them out in their current state will ruin the experience.

 

Any old players here? Anyone who hasn't played it that really wants to? It's pretty dope to see how dedicated this game's community is, and it's baffling to think that the active player base had maybe 1000 people, even less than that in the final year or so, and yet that group is making not one but two emulator options.

Edited August 4, 2019 by Xan (see edit history)

[Xan]

17 minutes ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

I almost wish this was a singleplayer game instead.

Luckily, the emulator will let you do this. I'm hyped for that. I think it'll include commands like /give and whatnot but I don't know if they'll automate database queries because right now you have to dig through csv files to find the item ID, and there's thousands upon thousands of items in the game.

 

18 minutes ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

I just wanted to check out the environments

Some of the world locations are absolutely amazing. I don't know if you're a complete nut for game lore like I am, but the design of every location mixes in with some form of lore. The world tells a story. I think you'll enjoy every minute of exploring. WildStar is the only game where I've indulged insane amounts of time to learn the backstory and lore, I've never done that for any other game. This one really clicked with me.

 

The gameplay was really interesting because WS didn't play like most other MMORPGs where you target something and press a few buttons, it played a lot more like what I can compare to a TPS. Really interesting experience.

 

22 minutes ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

the animated videos are the only reason as to why I was even interested in the game in the first place.

Yeah, they're really well made. My personal favorite is the F2P trailer.

[BTGBullseye]

17 hours ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

In a videogame though, I can go wherever I want, for free, and there's no risk of death, yaay.

And there's a much lower risk of sunburn...