WildStar calls off Christmas, Halloween content
At least it didn't use a spoon.
Developer Carbine has, as Alan Rickman's Sheriff of Nottingham once did, called off Christmas. The Halloween and Christmas content for MMO WildStar has been scrapped.
The reasoning, in essence, is that there are more important things to do.
The Shade's Eve (Halloween) content may have been "more or less done", as the developer pointed out, but it still needed "rigorous testing" - a resource the QA team couldn't stretch to accommodate.
Carbine could have sacrificed QA time on upcoming content patch, Drop 3 - and on the mega-server clusters - but it chose not to.
"Would we have liked to get Shade's Eve in? Of course! But with finite resources we picked giving Drop 3 the most thorough testing it could get," wrote Carbine's Kristen “Caydiem” DeMeza on the WildStar forum, "and it was the right call."
The Winterfest (Christmas) content "wasn't in the same state" and would have required a lot more work to be ready in time for Christmas - "a tough prospect with everything else cooking".
"Holidays are great, but they're not as important as making sure the live game is working well," wrote Caydiem.
But does all this signify bigger problems for NCSoft's newest MMO?
"[WildStar] certainly does have a perception/PR issue with people because they're just reading negativity everywhere, and it's easy to jump on the bandwagon," Martin Dean from WildStar raiding guild Enigma told me. "It's easier to write a headline than to do another analysis of it.
"All-in-all, is it sensible to concentrate on server tech and big content ahead of what is important to people but is essentially filler content and not the core purpose of the game? Yes. Will it make people happy? No."
