Meet My Niece...and Also the Exiles

Had a great day today. Since I will be out of town for my Niece's 4th birthday party I went over to her house today to deliver some gifts. Since I did not know anything about this giant hat wearing platypus I was advised to deliver, my Niece showed me, first how Netflix worked, and then her favorite episodes of Phineas and Ferb. Then there was some sort of chile being prepared, a visit from a friend and the sudden announcement that the girls would be playing dress up and wanted permission to take off their cloths. That is cue for non-creepy uncle to get the F out of there. But not before I got this great picture of her with, as I now know, Agent P. I am going to have this picture with me at PAX East, and if you see me there and would like to say Happy Birthday to the adorable Mara Jade I will take a Vine of you with the picture. I will be attempting to force this on game developers and celebrities of any caliber I encounter at the convention.

But let's talk about Wildstar and the start of a flood of information that began on February 6th with the release of the Meet the Exiles trailer. (See if you can spot the Wilhelm scream)

This marked the end of the press embargo on the event that was held at Carbine for members of the official media, following the break I will go into the other information that was shared with us.

Three other major releases came out of Carbine at the same time as the above video. The first two were more videos Short pieces of game play footage focused on two of the four "paths" that will be available. (You will notice a couple Dominion races in the Explorer Path video. That introduction came a week later, and I will be looking at that tomorrow.)

The next piece was the February State of the Game address from Mr. Gaffney. In this address the Executive Producer identifies this as the "Year of Wildstar" announcing that the game will be released before the end of the year. Gaffney outlines a ton of ways they are trying to make their game excel in a lot of important areas, and he throws out some pretty crazy ideas. Who would like to see large scale raids that have their content adjusted weekly in a dynamic fashion? Would you like to have your housing system integrated into large scale group orientated PVP? He talks about how they are going to make sure there is solo content coming at a steady pace for end game players, and that they want the leveling experience to be fun and varied so it doesn't just feel like a endless grind. Telegraphs are mentioned as having a great communication effect. If you want to cast a centered on self heal in most games you may have to type out your intent or say it over voice chat, but with Telegraphs players will see it and move into the area of effect. There is more information, I just wanted to highlight the things I found most interesting. Check out the full February State of the Game.

And it doesn't stop there. I mentioned above that this was the end of a press embargo, so there was a ton of press coverage. There are a ton of links you can follow over on the Wildstar Blog, but I personally got the most of out this article on Massively written by Brianna Royce. I also enjoyed this entry over on ZAM, who also had an interview in two parts (1) and (2).

Finally, Jeremy Gaffney appeared on a livestream for what was an amazing interview with MMOFTW. Due to technical issues this is broken into two VODs but the snaffu seemed to have happened at a good time. You can start right with Part 2 which is all about Wildstar. If you want to hear Jeremy Gaffney's commentary on other gaming news that was going on at the beginning of February in Part 1.

This was a very exciting week for Wildstar and marked the point that I started concurrently watching news in the present and the past. I am going to be happy to end that duality over the next couple of days.