Some of my favorite things in MMOs are the special holiday events that take place. Well, that won't be happening in WildStar this year as developer Carbine Studios has canceled both Halloween and Christmas. But before we go speculating about a drop in subscribers as the reason, Carbine says the decision has to do with bug fixing and ensuring the live game works well.
"Now, holidays are great, but they're not as important as making sure the live game is working well. We took the time we needed to fix things players were already experiencing — all of the departments — and that meant that the schedule changed to account for it. But Halloween and Christmas weren't interested in our bug fixes and didn't change their schedules for us," Carbine explained.
Even though the Shade's Eve (Halloween) content may have been "more or less done," Carbine said it still needed "a lot of proper, rigorous testing." That's something WildStar's QA team just didn't have time for as they still had Drop 3, which was ultimately, at least in Carbine's eyes, more important to focus on.
"Would we have liked to get Shade's Eve in? Of course! But with finite resources, we picked giving Drop 3 the most thorough testing it could get, and it was the right call."
Winterfest, or WildStar's Christmas event, was in more of a "fun, but rough" state when it was canceled. Even starting it up now, Carbine said it would be "tough" to have it out in time for Christmas.
"We'd much rather deliver something that's full-featured, fun, and high quality," the developer added. "I've been doing holiday content in this industry a long time, and I really want to show you folks what we cooked up, because I'm very proud of it. I hope you'll enjoy it next year."
[WildStar]
