 Linus Tech Tips coverage of PAX 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital, Intel and SteelSeries. So I'm here with David Bass, the Senior Community Manager for WildStar. I mean, tell me about how long you guys have been working on this game. WildStar has probably been in active development maybe four or five years at this point. The studio was founded seven years ago by a bunch of ex-Blizzard developers and they kind of spent the first few years trying to figure out an art style, building an engine, doing some kind of R&D. And we really just started active development just a couple years ago on what eventually became WildStar itself. Okay, so you're the Community Manager, so obviously an MMO is all about playing by yourself, not connected online, and really not interacting with anybody. So you can tell me, how are you trying to break out of that as the MMO that really... No, okay, I'm messing with you guys. So what are you doing differently? So as an MMO where nobody plays together, I don't actually do anything on the project. No, I'm kidding. MMOs, obviously, community is the most important thing. That explains why he didn't have an actual business card. Where'd you get this t-shirt from? Oh, I just stole it off a guy and then someone brought me over here and was like, hey, you're going to talk on camera. But as an MMO, I mean, obviously, community is one of the most important things. If you don't have players, you've got an empty world. And so it's really important to us to make sure that the community understands that we are a very responsive, a really open studio. We've been trying to be as transparent as we can be with the fans. Both people in beta and people outside of beta, when something's not working in the game, we tell people, here's what's not working, here's why it's not working. And when beta testers come to us and say, you know what, this part of the game sucks, instead of saying to them, well, you know, that's kind of what we wanted to do, so suck it up, we actually will go back and look at it and say, okay, if they're not liking it, clearly there's something wrong here. So what is it? What can we do to make it better? And so we'll engage in that dialogue with the fans and we really enjoy being able to be responsive like that. Now, you were saying a lot of the dev time was spent on refining the art style, building an engine. Why would you bother to build an engine at this point when there's so many engines out there that are fantastic, that can be licensed? Engines are amazing because they give you kind of like that base level to go in and do stuff. But there's also a lot of limitations there. You're stuck with, I mean, you can modify the code and work your way through it. But by building your own engine, it gives us so much flexibility to change up stuff. If something's not working, if a programmer can't do what they need to do, if an artist is really limited by something on the art side that is technical that I probably don't understand, then the guys who are building our tools and building our engine, they can go in and change it. And there's no problem. They can do it really fast. The tools that we have available is super cool. We actually we might be showing a demo on the booth later this weekend of some of our tools, but it lets our artists just go in and literally just paint on the world. And so the art style that you've seen is really cool because we can translate that directly into the game. The concept art that you see, literally things in the game look like that concept art, whereas in other games concept art kind of looks a little different because you can't directly port it to the engine. But our engine was built with this art style in mind. Now, I want to hear I'm going to I'm going to jump ahead in our plan. I want to hear the pitch to someone who is a gamer. They understand the concept of an MMO, but they've never played one before. Why are they going to buy Wildstar? Why are they going to play this? So a lot of them. Well, I got just got really squeaky there. So Wildstar is a MMO, obviously, but it's a sci fi MMO, which is something that people really haven't touched that much on. And in addition to that, we've got a very, very unique personality with the game. We have very strong characters, strong personalities, and we don't take ourselves too seriously. And the game itself doesn't take itself too seriously. That's not to say there's not a really interesting story and a really compelling mystery going on in the world. But at the same time, it's OK to have for there to be humor. Not everything has to be 100 percent serious. The world is ending. Figure this out. Oh, God, we're all going to die. We can joke around a lot. If you see any of our trailers that we got on the website, both styles of animated trailers versus explaining game features, we just kind of are gamers playing games. And I think it shows a lot of the stuff we do. So with that said, if it doesn't take itself seriously, then I guess that leads us pretty well into give me the hardcore pitch then. How do you pitch this to the guys who are playing WoW since the first day? So while we're not taking the story and like the actual personality stuff very seriously, we are taking end game really seriously because everybody knows in an MMO, leveling content is all well and good. But if you don't have an end game when you launch the game, you're screwed. There's just nothing you can do to keep those players around or to get them to come back. And so we're really focusing on three aspects of the end game we got for the solo player, for the person who just wants to level by themselves and then, you know, play around at end game. They'll have their own story to push through that only starts once you hit the level cap. We want to show the story of the planet Nexus, the mystery surrounding it. That stuff you'll only really dive into when you hit the end game as a solo player. For the hardcore guilds, for the groups of people who want to do that group content, we'll have raids and we're doing old school 20 man and 40 man raids that are going to be really difficult. It's OK for not everyone to play those raids. Raids are not supposed to be for everyone. They're supposed to be hard. They're supposed to give people a challenge. And then for the PvP player, we've got a system. Well, we've got arenas and battlegrounds, which are, you know, the normal instance objective PvP arenas ranked, you know, rated small group fights. But we also have a system called war plots. We're not talking a lot about it yet, but it's going to be 40 versus 40 groups forming war parties where you actually build your own fortress. You build it, you customize it. You can decide what paths you want to force the enemy to take. You can actually go into a raid and capture a raid boss and bring him back to your war plot. So that way the other team has to fight against him. And then you bring your war plot to the fight. The other team brings their war plot and you guys just go crazy. That sounds absolutely bazonkers. So tell me about the combat, because that's one of the things that I keep hearing a lot about. I mean, we've been asking people around what are you excited about? We've had some people say Wildstar and we kind of go, why? And they say, well, it the combat is fascinating. Tell me about it. The combat is really fast paced. It's an action combat game. So you're going to have telegraphs when you're using attacks. You're going to have these decals on the ground that kind of show where your attacks land, which means that if you can position people well, you can hit as many enemies as you can fit in that telegraph. And the enemies all have the same types of attacks. You're going to need to need to dodge out of their attacks and position yourself and stun them and interrupt them. And at the same time, we're also making sure that like healers, for example, also have to deal with telegraphs. Healers can do the normal like standing in the back and targeting a guy and hitting their heal, but they can also aim their heels if they want. And so if the group lines themselves up, you can heal everyone at once with a nice line attack. You can drop a big circle around everyone and everybody knows where to stay. And so we want to take some of the responsibility of the healer off of them onto the DPS, where if the DPS are not paying attention to where the healer is, that's their problem. It's not always the healers fault in the fight. Can you talk about the inventory system? Sure. So the inventory, we have a bag system. Got a basic inventory, which is wow, this is really full of crap right now. Standard bag system, you can actually look here. You got a bunch of different bags. You'll earn bags as you play. And you can also actually crafting materials go in a separate satchel. So that way, when you're collecting things out in the world, if you're mining, if you're gathering seeds or whatever, they'll go in a separate satchel separate from your inventory because we got a lot of different things you can collect. OK, so can you show us some of the some of the character customization? You can't show us the customization, but you can at least cycle through a few random creations, maybe talk about what we're looking at. Yeah. So right now we're looking at the Dominion character creation. So we've got four races on the Dominion side. This is the Makari female and we've got a Makari male too. These are giant robots, obviously. And so the character comes to the situation. That was terrible. The character customization is currently a work in progress. I wish I could zoom into the face, but you can see that you can change the color of the hair, the shape of the hair, the her. It's facial hair, but it's actually, you know, antennas and different like technology things on the Makari. The Chua, which we just announced, is a small furry little race. And they've got a bunch of different eye types, hair types. They're kind of cute and they're actually genderless, so you can click on this and it doesn't actually change anything. We also have pink Chua and blue Chua. There's the pink. The Drakken are this crazy, crazy horned, fierce, vicious race. So they got all kinds of different horn types, different hair. They all look super fierce and super scary. So I'm really, really stoked to check it out. Tell us about the monetization model. So we just announced our business model. We're going to be doing a subscription based game. You buy the box and you get 30 days free. After that, you can pay $15 a month to keep playing. However, we're also doing something called cred, which is a actual in-game item that you can purchase with real money. And that cred, if you redeem it, is redeemed for 30 more days of game time. So what that means is that we're actually going to have a market in game where if I'm playing the game for a month and I'm earning tons and tons of gold and I got all this money left over, I can go on that market and spend my in-game gold to buy a month of game time. So I can actually play the game for free if I'm playing the game enough that I love it and have all that money to spend. While someone else who doesn't have that much time to spend, but really wants to get some gold, maybe they want to buy that new mount or whatever, they can spend some money to buy cred and sell it to you on the market. So they get some extra gold, you get a free month, and now everybody's happy and the gold sellers don't get anything. So there you have it, guys. It wasn't that long ago that the word on the street was, oh, monthly subscriptions are dead. But you guys have taken a bit of a unique spin on that and it sounds like it just might work. I guess we'll find out, won't we? Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us, David. This has been absolutely great and good luck. Thanks, man.