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Massively's hands-on with WildStar's character creation
Character creators are a big deal to me. If I didn't have to make my characters quickly enough at launch to avoid losing my precious names, I would probably spend the better part of a month before clicking "create" the first time. So you know that the first thing I did when I sat down to play WildStar's recent press beta was to play around with the character creator. All right, that's the first thing everyone does: You have to make a character, but I was playing that to win, people. Character creation in MMOs usually falls short of what's offered in games like The Sims and Saints Row IV. At the low end you have games like Final Fantasy XI (pick a race, pick a face, pick a hair color, am I seriously done now?), and at the high end you've got Champions Online or the dearly departed City of Heroes. WildStar does not hit the high end, but it does do some things pretty nicely, even if it also misses some opportunities.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: In the case of Tankers
If there's one thing that's always bothered me about the archetypes in City of Heroes -- the vanilla game, that is -- it's that none of them has a name that's particularly evocative, even though there are tons of examples that each archetype can draw upon. Today's archetype is a perfect example, one that covers Superman, Colossus, Giant-Man, Captain Marvel, even certain incarnations of more variable characters like Iron Man. But the name "Tanker" fails to conjure up images of anything beyond a dry recitation of party roles. Yes, this week we're discussing the third of four melee-heavy archetypes with the Tanker, as was hinted at the end of the last column. It's also the archetype closest to its two predecessors, coming with almost identical power selections in a slightly different order. But the Tanker's powers get prioritized in a very different way, so whether you're new to the game or just the class, let's take a look at how to make your Tanker as tanky as possible.
