WildStar
As a Content Designer on WildStar, I worked on its story, gameplay systems, and UI.
The Challenge
WildStar was a massively multiplayer online RPG set on the fictional planet Nexus, a lush science-fantasy world built by Carbine Studios and published by NCSOFT. It launched as a subscription game in 2014 before going free-to-play in 2015. The world was rich, the player base was passionate, and the design challenges were unlike anything I'd tackled before.
As content designers, my team shaped the storyline, character backstories, dialogue, and gameplay systems, including rules, scoring, and difficulty tuning. We also designed the game's UI: menus, settings, customizations, and interfaces that needed to react dynamically to environments and player exploration. It was design at the intersection of narrative, systems, and real-time interaction.
The Approach
Online multiplayer was our most ambitious feature and the hardest to ship. It touched every part of the stack and depended on things outside our control, like player hardware, network reliability, and server load, so defining "done" for a live feature meant designing for iteration from the start.
The work continued after launch, as our team moved into maintenance, patches, and downloadable content, fixing what needed fixing while keeping the game fresh. We closed with a thorough post-mortem on what worked, what didn't, and what we'd carry into the next project.
