Of all the MMOs that fell by the wayside, pushed into the dirt by the relentless popularity of World of Warcraft, Carbine’s WildStar stings the most. A fast-paced sci-fi romp exploding with colour and character, and a setting brimming with potential, its development team boasted not only WoW vets, but legendary RPG designer Tim Cain.
“When I started, I think there were only nine or 10 people working there,” Cain says. “Almost all of them had worked on WoW, or some other really good stuff. And it was such an interesting team, because there was so much potential … We had some really, really great people there. And it’s hard to make lightning strike twice. It’s hard to capture it in a bottle. We could have done it, I can say that.”
WildStar’s development kicked off way back in 2005, but it didn’t launch until 2014, after Cain had already left the studio. A mere four years later, it was cancelled. It took more than twice as long to develop. Even though Cain left before the game was finished, it’s still the longest he’s ever spent working on a game. Double the length of any other project, he says.
“That was kind of the style of the designers, they wanted to test a lot of things. And it seemed like we had an endless runway. But we didn’t. What’s interesting is, I spent three years as the programming director, and then three years as the design director, and that was six years. And until that time, the longest I had ever spent on a game was three and a half on Fallout.”
Of course, MMOs are a more complex prospect than singleplayer RPGs, even considering the rather elaborate ones that Cain often works on. But nine years of development is still an incredibly long time, and comes with some massive risks.
“I remember going to my boss, going, ‘This is not gonna be done for at least another year or two.’ And it wasn’t, for three more years,” he recalls. “They worked on it for a total of nine years, when WildStar finally came out. And that itself causes problems, because games had shifted. What people wanted had changed. Other competitors had come out and showed what you could do. You can make a target and build towards it, but if you take so long, that target’s gonna move.”
Cain never ended up playing WildStar, as he was busy working on South Park: The Stick of Truth over at Obsidian when it launched. “I remember hearing WildStar came out, and I heard all these great things about it. Then I started hearing people go, ‘Well, it doesn’t do this, and it doesn’t do this, and it doesn’t do this.’ I think part of it was there was so much competition … There was a lot of cannibalism going on.”
To put it into perspective, when work began on WildStar, World of Warcraft was still in its vanilla era. When WildStar finally launched, we’d seen The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor was just around the corner.
The competition had also grown steeper. AreaNet had released not just Guild Wars, but also followed it up with Guild Wars 2, there was Funcom’s Age of Conan, a trio of MMOs from Cryptic (Neverwinter, Star Trek Online, Champions Online), BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, Sony’s DC Universe Online, Square Enix’s Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn and Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls Online.
In that decade, the heyday of MMOs had come and gone, and players were starting to coalesce around the mainstays. Carbine couldn’t have predicted the shape the genre would take, of course, but that’s also why incredibly long development periods are such a gargantuan risk. Unless you’re able to peer into the future, you’re kinda just winging it.