Gamers looking to dive into the planet Nexus now have their chance. Wildstar, a massively multiplayer online RPG from developer Carbine Studios, is now Free-To-Play.
The game launched in June 2014 to solid reviews, but as is often the case in the MMO market, retaining a monthly subscription model was too difficult to sustain. Starting September 29, all of the game's content is now accessible to players at no cost. The developers state:
We place no restrictions on any of the game's content. Every zone, every dungeon, every raid, every battleground... they're all available. All players will be able to create characters of every race, class, and path, and choose any tradeskills they like. Characters can achieve level 50 and path level 30, just as they can under the current system. There are some initial restrictions on services and social functions-which can be unlocked through the Cosmic Rewards system.
Neither Carbine nor game publisher NC Soft has revealed what the game's subscriber numbers were like prior to the F2P move, but it's hard to imagine they were good.
In a revealing chat with Forbes Magazine, game director Mike Donatelli outlined some of the struggles the game faced coming out of the gate. In development for almost five years, It was conceived from the ground up as a hardcore MMO tailored to a subscription model.
In today's free-to-play gaming landscape however, many players are hesitant to commit huge amounts of time and money to RPGs such as this.
"Five years ago the landscape looked different, So fast forward five years and we're getting ready to launch the game and then you look at the landscape and I think we were one of just two MMOs that year that launched with a subscription and everybody else was launching free-to-play." Says Donatelli to Forbes.
