endgame-mechanics
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WildStar will reduce grind, focus on 'a multitude of playstyles' in 2015
Where does WildStar go from here? That's the question that director Mike Donatelli seeks to answer with his latest address to the community. Donatelli says this morning that while he's thankful for the praise the game received toward the end of 2014, there are several areas where the game needs to improve, and thus the team is working on making a better game experience for everyone moving forward. He lays out three chief foci for the team over the next year: listen to feedback to make the game more fun and "less grindy"; support "a multitude of playstyles," group sizes, and levels; and invest, expand, and improve the existing game. Donatelli targets for these plans the first half of 2015, which will contain better-tuned endgame reward systems to fight fatigue along with a wider breadth of content for solo and small-group players. Over the rest of the year, the team plans to introduce a new Contract system to support different playstyles, continue tuning the rewards, and greatly expand the game's customization options. It's a lot of changes, but the Carbine team seems dedicated to making them work.
Destiny unveils more raid details
Destiny is coming out very soon, and that means future players are probably thinking about what the endgame will be like. The latest update on the official site shares some more details about how raids will work in both Normal and Hard modes and elaborates on the differences between difficulties. In short, Normal mode is meant to be far easier and allow for more diverse clearing strategies; Hard mode demands coordination and execution. Opening raids for the first time is meant to be challenging; the devs shared an anecdote about players taking 45 minutes just to get in the front door. The developers are confident that players will be able to tackle raids more quickly once the raids are better known. There's also discussion about the weekly lockout, which will save your progress as you move through the raids. Take a look at the official update for more details.
The Mog Log: Straight on down the line of Final Fantasy XIV's endgame
Well, what do you know. Just before I was going to write a column about Final Fantasy XIV's endgame, the development changed the entire thing. And with such a little change, too. Before Tuesday, the endgame was pretty simple. You had two main instances to worry about and three primals, one of which was only really relevant for a single quest. If you were decked out from all that, you had another challenge to undertake. The actual makeup hasn't changed since Tuesday, but which instances matter and how they're run has, since you now have two ways of getting those all-important Mythology tomestones. For some of you reading, this is all stuff you don't even need to worry about yet. For others, it's the right here and right now that you deal with on a daily basis. So let's look at what the endgame is, what it was, and why I find myself oddly satisfied with it despite the overall sparse landscape.
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: All the news that's fit from PAX
The revelations at PAX East were pretty darn big for City of Heroes, but they had a big advantage over PAX Prime. At the time we sat down in Boston, Going Rogue was months away, and we knew almost nothing about what it would bring us. This time around, it's been out for a couple of weeks, and most of the fancy pieces of knowledge are pretty well established. It would be hard, if not impossible, for the development team to hit us with the same one-two punch. I wouldn't argue that the team quite managed that -- there's no comparison to revealing two new power sets, the endgame system, and video demonstrations of much-awaited sets -- but Paragon Studios sure did manage to drop quite a bomb on us. As I've done frequently in the past, we're going to take this point by point, with a full collection of neat pieces of news that leave me wondering just how much interesting stuff is yet to come from the development team.
