Stalkers get an unusually good rap in videogames – painted as capable stealth specialists or defiant post-nuclear warriors. That’s in stark contrast to the mainstream press, where you’ll most often spot them as defendants in court coverage.
The odd trend continues in upcoming MMO Wildstar, in which to be a stalker is to be a martial arts master with retractable claws. Here’s the latest from Carbine Studios on what that might entail.
Carbine call the stalker an “opportunistic stealth melee assassin”, citing an affinity for speed, evasion, and clever combinations of abilities – ‘stun’, ‘root’, ‘tether’ and ‘close the gap’ are all as useful in combination with those claws as you’d imagine.
As another MMO descendant of D&D’s rogue class, the stalker enjoys a limited capability to turn entirely invisible. Wildstar’s ‘nanoskin’ also enables self-cloning and damage absorption – the latter particularly helpful if you mean to specialise as a kind of dodge-happy tank:
In Carbine’s last devspeak, they covered Wildstar’s spellslinger – “the Nightcrawler in a cowboy hat”. Quite good with the one-line class sells, aren’t they?