I loved that there was a lot lore and text to read through in the quests, I'm a huge lore fan so it worked out in my favor. The customization options were amazing, Housing especially was very fun to figure out how to create something completely new. Housing and Role-Play were probably my favourite parts of the game. The ability to customize the housing plot any way you wanted to, allowed for nearly endless scenario's for Roleplaying. I created 2 characters, a scientist and a settler as such I got a lot of lore and I got to create several structures in the world.
That said I found the settler path to become a chore after the first month as most players had power leveled to max in order to hit the end game content as such I ended up alone creating structures by myself which took a lot longer than I would have liked. I'm not a power leveler, in my opinion doing that kind of thing takes away from the wonders of the game. As such it took me a couple of months to reach max level, and even so I found the game to be very grindy.
In fact there was a grind in pretty much everything there was in the game, which made me wonder....why am I paying ~$15 a month to work instead of having fun ? The crafting was interesting but involved playing a mini-game where you had a chance of getting exactly what you want. Coming from Guild Wars 2 this seemed strange. In my opinion if you had the materials, and the necessary crafting level then you should be able to craft it, not play a RNG game to have a chance at creating it. I found this annoying and going through the levels I found I leveled my character faster than my crafting skill as I just couldn't bare to continue playing the mini game anymore.
As of October 2014 here is my verdict :
I am rating this game a 7/10 based on how much I enjoyed playing the game. In terms of graphics yes I will give them the full 10/10 because the world did look quite beautiful and at times a bit awe-inspiring. I had heard that Wildstar was being aimed at the more hardcore crowd of MMORPG players, it wasn't until I played it for a few months that I realized that I probably didn't count as a member of this hardcore crowd. If you are a hardcore MMORPG gamer I do recommend giving wildstar a try, if you are not such a player hold off... this game is extremely punishing in terms of how much time and effort you have to put in to get much out of it.
