Former Producer Stephan Frost Answered Community Questions On The Day Of WildStar's Closing

Today is the last day of WildStar. As we all know now, it had its issues, but few people had better insight into those issues than Stephan Frost. He was the design producer for Carbine Studios' flagship game, though he left the company shortly after WildStar's launch in 2014.

He's now working on an announced title for Nexon, but last night, he started fielding questions from followers and fans of WildStar. We've grabbed some of the best, or at least the most informative, and reprinted them below. You can view Frost's original thread and read all the replies here.

Good question. Finding the fun core loop and building your content around that needs to be the main objective very early on, and really focus on making features that build off of that loop. Negative side, don't make WAY too much stuff, and focus on features for all demographics.

— Stephan Frost (@StephanFrost) November 27, 2018

We shipped a AAA MMO with a butt-load of features. That is one of the hardest things to do on the planet, and I'm proud to have been a part of the team that helped get it done.

— Stephan Frost (@StephanFrost) November 27, 2018

Well I wasn't a designer on the project, but I'd say the one I think we should have pushed more was less focus on a long leveling process, and more focus on a fast leveling but long end game. More PVE end game would have been good.

— Stephan Frost (@StephanFrost) November 27, 2018

Nope, look at WarFrame. They do some cool stuff and evolved the genre, with a pretty fair monetization strategy. I think MMOs like WildStar won't be out as often though, I think that form of the MMO (aside from classic server relaunches) really won't be seen as much.

— Stephan Frost (@StephanFrost) November 27, 2018

Well if you look at the actual Dev Speaks or Flicks, we didn't really push it hard from a marketing sense. The Raids Dev Speak was the only one where we did that, but that was an internal desire from leadership to have Raiding endgame like old school WoW, and we made that.

— Stephan Frost (@StephanFrost) November 27, 2018

To continue that thread, when asked where the directive came from:

You'd see it in forums, hear it on podcasts or conventions, watch it in videos, etc. I believe their thinking was, lets give this audience what they want. I think they ignored the direction WoW went, which is obviously a sign if a game like that stopped it.

— Stephan Frost (@StephanFrost) November 27, 2018

I think personality was the intent. A wry resurrection bot that was tired of rezzing dead players. Mind you I’m just telling you the intent, not defending it.

— Stephan Frost (@StephanFrost) November 28, 2018

Too many things to change, but having a solid PVE end game system would have been a good idea.

— Stephan Frost (@StephanFrost) November 27, 2018

4 dungeons and 2 raids.* Making dungeon and raid content is far from easy with the size of the dungeons design, world art, QA, live testing teams. Making 2 raids is incredibly taxing, and was one of our directives, so that's why it ended up that way.

— Stephan Frost (@StephanFrost) November 28, 2018

Have the game we launched with come out in 2005. :P

— Stephan Frost (@StephanFrost) November 27, 2018

That last one, ouch. Just don't be this guy and have no idea how money and businesses work.