WildStar, the upcoming massively multiplayer role-playing game from Carbine and NCSoft, is trying to reawaken your love for the MMO genre by mixing what you know with some much needed innovation. It's still an RPG, but movement and aiming will matter more. It will have 40-player dungeons, but also player housing and town building features. Kept a secret until now, its take on in-game guilds seems to adhere to the same philosophy: familiar, but with a few noteworthy twists.
The recent post to WildStar's official website starts off by listing the expected guild features. Guilds can share vaults, assigns ranks, and tax guild members so 5 percent of their loot will be added to said vault. If you want to represent your guild allegiance, you can project a custom “holomark,” designed with 4225 possible combination to choose from. Pretty standard stuff.
Way more interesting is WildStar's Influence currency, which is how Carbine plans to get guild members to play together. You earn Influence no matter what you do in the game as long as you're in a group with other guild members.
Of course, the only reason you'd want to earn Influence is if you can spend it on useful stuff, which is divided into three main categories: Guild unlocks, such as a bigger vault and player summoning, guild-wide buffs, and consumable items.
There are six guild buffs to unlock, which, when activated, last for 7 days, real time, and they affect every member of the guild no matter where they are in the game world. These buffs can boost the rate at which you earn money, experience, reputation, and Influence.
Consumable items allow you to access the guild vault from anywhere in the world, or use individual buffs that stack with the guild buffs.
It sounds like an interesting way to make guilds meaningful beyond raids, and we look forward to trying the system when the game is live. To find out more about WildStar, check out our last hand-on impressions .
