I’ve never missed a game so much as WildStar. I’ve never experienced the shutdown of one of my MMOs, as players of Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes, and others have, but WildStar is probably the closest thing. It still runs, but the population is severely declined, and updates have slowed to a snoglug’s pace. Worse than that, my guild disbanded, and there isn’t a lot to do at endgame without a group. I’m tempted to go back for the new Homecoming patch that updates housing and adds group plots (a feature that I thought was supposed to launch with the F2P transition two years ago?), but I doubt that alone will keep me in the game. There really isn’t a whole lot out there that captures WildStar’s combat, visual style, or housing system, and I really wish it was found in a game with more active development and community.

The game isn’t without hope, though. Bree pointed out in last week’s MassivelyOP Podcast that everyone knows at this point that this game is a lot smaller than it was originally designed to be, and if NCSoft was going to pull the plug on it based on that, they would have done it by now. It makes sense to me; as long as the game is staying in the black, it’s not like it’s costing them anything to keep the game running and staffed with a skeleton crew. There are probably a lot of MMOs out there surviving on smaller communities than WildStar’s; it’s all a matter of how niche you want to be. But, this is NCSoft we’re talking about, the company that killed City of Heroes for less, so some fears were reasonable, but I think NCSoft learned their lesson from that incident. Americans want their MMOs, even niche MMOs, to be more or less permanent, and if you take them away prematurely, they will not simply move on to one of your other games as they seemed to expect. Many players would rather boycott your company rather than get attached to one of your other games only to have it pulled out from under them, as many have done. Better to keep the game plodding along than take the PR hit of shutting it down.

Sadly, this pang of nostalgia for WildStar comes right before the launch of Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire, and I know that I’m going to be playing that pretty much non-stop for at least the next couple of weeks. Still, I keep WildStar installed on my computer, and I hope to come back and visit soon. I just joined a new multi-game guild that apparently has a WildStar chapter, so hopefully when I’m past my 30 day trial period and can join multiple chapters, I can get back into it.