Last night marked the end of WildStar’s beta phase, and WOW did the developers decide to throw one heckuva send off.
The end of beta event began at 1 am my time, so that meant a quick power nap last night and plenty of black coffee this morning. But regardless of how tired I may be at the moment, I’m thrilled that I stuck around to see the entire show the devs put on for us last night. Several of my guild members jumped into our voice server so that we could chat and laugh as we watched all the ridiculousness unfold.
The beta realms were treated to shows by 1-2 developers in each faction’s home city. On my realm, Olyssia, the Exile city of Thayd played host to Cougar, WildStar’s Director of Operations, and CRB Grug. The 2 devs herded us into relatively open areas where they then spawned mobs, dungeon bosses and raid bosses on top of our heads as we attempted to dodge level 50 enemy telegraphs with something like 1 FPS.
It was SO much fun.
We died repeatedly, thanks in part to some of the bosses camping the graveyard. (I’m sure that was completely NPC AI at work and not at all another joke from Cougar and Grug.) Cougar in particular decided to change his model and size once every few minutes, though the crowd favorite was certainly this amazing lopp.
Predictably, we followed the lopp as it hopped around Thayd – because who wouldn’t follow an adorable lopp anywhere? And, also predictably, this resulted in the deaths of basically everyone in Thayd when Cougar once again dropped a raid boss on our heads.
Other festivities included “cheat codes,” some of which were more helpful than others. A command which appeared to auto-level a player to 50 actually opened this. A different command made your character learn every available mount in the game, though unfortunately we only had a few minutes to run around on our new mounts before the servers went down.
So many thanks to Cougar and Grug in particular, but also the entire WildStar team for such a fun and chaotic end to the open beta. I can’t wait to get back into the game once the head start begins on May 31 so that we can see what other surprises you have in store for us.
Moxie & Moonshine 