Wildstar's Strain Ultradrop update will add more zones and monsters this month

If I'd just released an MMO I think I'd dissolve into a pool of exhausted mansludge and refuse to do any work for a month. Not so for the Carbine team, who are already teasing their first major update to Wildstar. The incoming Strain Ultradrop will add new zones, enemies, bosses, gear and emotes later this month.

According to the teaser page , The Strain is a "virulent biological anomaly that has begun to spread across planet Nexus." It's infecting fauna and flora alike, so expect to battle lumpy, mutated versions of Nexus' creatures.

On June 24 Blighthaven and the Northern Wastes will be added, followed quickly by an update to player housing on June 26. The update will largely be targeted at players who have already hit the level 50 cap, and will feature new boss encounters and gear drops, as well as an emote that'll make a big slimy purple mouth burst out of your chest why not. You'll spot a few of those things in the trailer, but be warned—a cartoon goat was harmed during the making of this video.

It's a chunky update for a game that's only been out for 15 days. "We've spent the last six months of beta training ourselves to do ginormous monthly updates," Gaffney told Massively . "We've done huge updates [through beta] on purpose because when we're live, we want to be able to sustain a content pace that is ginormous."

If Carbine can keep up that monthly sprint, then it'll help justify that monthly subscription fee—an increasingly rare animal in the MMO world. Wildstar is great, by the way. Allow Phil to explain why in our Wildstar review .

Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.