Wildstar developer says it wants to do WoW right this time

Wildstar developer Carbine Studios thinks it can do better than World of Warcraft . The team aims to reinvent many of the genre's tried-and-true (and pretty tired) systems, includes plenty of content for solo players, and brings back massive scale battles in 40-man raids and 40 vs 40 PvP combat . A new interview with executive producer Jeremy Gaffney reveals that the team was torn on the best way to out-WoW WoW.

Speaking to CVG , Gaffney points out that Carbine was founded by 20 or so veterans of Blizzard Entertainment, developer of World of Warcraft. The founders believed they could do better than WoW: "Hey, we want take that game but do it right this time," Gaffney recalls. The result is a game built by two camps: those who wanted to improve on the formula and those who wanted to do "anything but WoW."

"The team came out with two very distinct ideas," says Gaffney, "one of which was, 'Ok, we're done with WoW, we know what we did right and what we did wrong, and we really want to tweak it and do WoW but better.'" That means returning to the idea of 40-man raids, which Blizzard abandoned in WoW beginning with its first expansion, The Burning Crusade.

The other idea was to break the mold of WoW, by adding 40 vs. 40 death fortresses, housing, and monthly updates instead of major expansions.

Both types of content are available in the game, which launches on June 3. For more, you can check out Phil's discussion of Wildstar's endgame .