Christmas or the winter holidays or whatever you want to call it is still a long way off, but Carbine Studios has deflated festive anticipation early this year by cancelling the celebrations in WildStar. Halloween’s been struck by the same bullet.
Content designer Kristen “Caydiem” DeMeza took to the forums to explain why the Grinch and whatever his Halloween counterpart is called were unleashed on Nexus.
DeMeza clarifies that the studio didn’t have a year of content already prepared, so the cancellation of the holiday events don’t equate to removing anything that was already completely finished.
“I’m seeing the ‘12-16 months’ worth of content prepared’ thing bandied about, and this is actually the result of a statement being repeated enough where the words change enough to change the meaning. Prepared isn’t the correct term and was never actually said to my knowledge. The correct term is ‘in pre-production,’ which is closer to planned than prepared. Pre-production means the content exists in design documents, concept art, and maybe a prototype or two. It hasn’t even begun becoming real content yet. Having a lot of things planned out like this is great, as you can then shift the schedule according to what you see your game needs as things progress on live. Having a fixed schedule that didn’t change in reaction to live game information would have been a mistake, and the schedule did shift accordingly.”
Of course, Halloween and Christmas are set in stone, schedule-wise. And unfortunately, bug fixes and work on the Drop 3 update took priority, which means there will be no Winterfest or Shade’s Eve.
The latter was close to done, which makes it even more of a shame. Winterfest, on the other hand, was just a “rough li’l bit of content” when the plug was pulled. There’s always next year.