WildStar's combat is the first place that drew players to the game

WildStar opens by throwing caution to the wind and breaks generic MMORPG tropes through introducing faster and looser gameplay mechanics. Jumping into WildStar for the first time, even as a seasoned veteran of the genre will feel like a new experience due to the lack of single target damage and exchanging it for a fixed cone of attack that changes depending on what ability the player chooses to use. Effectively every single attack in this game is an AoE, with no such thing as an auto-attack. In concept it’s a maddening idea that would only lead to mayhem, but in practice it finds a way to work superbly.

You’ll find yourself thrown straight into the middle of a long battle for control, putting you as hero of the hour with a lot of people ready to throw quests your way. You’ll need to go through a few tutorial quests to get you going, but once you’ve cleared the basics Wildstar opens up its gates to the planet Nexus and you’re free to go head first into whatever adventure you fancy. Unfortunately this is where Wildstar hits its main hurdle, managing to become a victim of an age old problem within the MMO genre. Narrative is delivered too sparsely for your character of choice to blend into the already rich tapestry.

While there is truly a lot of lore hidden in the world of Wildstar, most of which is to be had from a rather large abundance of books, audio logs and other such text that has been carelessly littered throughout the planet, you’ll only really get a sense of this if you are willing to spend your time digging around for it. This means that a lot is left unknown as you spend your time leveling up and relying on short and random bursts of cinematic greatness to guide you along your verse of the Nexus history books.

The combat in WildStar is one of the aspects that really drew me to the game in the first place when I saw the DevSpeak video relating to it. In the same way that the rest of the game is 2familiar but different2, the combat works similarly to other MMOs, in that you have to kill enemies using a variety of skills on a button bar along the bottom of the screen – but it’s hugely different in the sense that it’s an active combat system similar to TERA.

If you want to slice through an enemy with your hidden wrist blades, or even just want to smash them over the head with your gigantic sword/axe/hammer, then you don’t necessarily need to target the enemy first. If you mouse over the ability you want to cast/use, you’ll see an area around your character where that ability will do damage. Often this is a small arc or long channel in front of you. Knowing exactly how far away you need to be from an enemy when you attack, as well as where the ability is going to do damage, is the key to combat in WildStar. Any enemy unlucky enough to be inside your damage area will suffer and the combat will begin.