If you’re unfamiliar with the MMO genre, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s on its last legs. New titles optimistically launch with sub fees before quickly ditching them as interest wanes, and even the bastion that is World of Warcraft is beginning to struggle as subscribers depart in their droves. Or so some would have you believe.

In truth, the landscape for MMOs has never looked healthier. A cursory glance at the year ahead picks out The Elder Scrolls Online, Warlords of Draenor and EverQuest Next as particular highlights, with even veteran game companies like Bungie and Ubisoft looking to enter the fray with the likes of Destiny and The Division respectively (forgoing any delays, of course).

But with such big names poised to enter an arena that traditionally asks you to champion just one title, thanks to the dual constraints of time investment and fees, the idea of releasing a brand new and unproven franchise is a daunting one. Few would undertake such a challenge, yet not all developers out there are content with maintaining the status quo. A precious handful are prepared to take risks and that’s where Carbine Studios’ WildStar comes in.

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The biggest issue facing an unknown property is that people make assumptions. The first thing WildStar’s creative director Matt Mocarski is keen to drill home is the fact that it isn’t for kids. Sure, on the surface WildStar may look like it’s overflowing with cutesy characters but dig a little deeper and you’ll find a comic world bursting with crude jokes and filthy language. If Warcraft proves anything, it’s that you can have a cartoonish aesthetic and still mean serious business in the MMO space.

“ When a new MMO comes out there are a ton of people buying the box. A ton. Millions buy the boxes, then the subscriptions end up dying over the course of a few months.

“It’s a big challenge when people see the game and their first preconceived notion of the thing is that it’s shallow or for kids,” Mocarski explains. “We like to look at it like Team Fortress 2; it’s a little more timeless? Sure it may appeal to a younger crowd, but it has a broader appeal overall. When you look at stuff like Disney and Pixar, you see a lot of stuff that’s angled towards kids but so many adults latch onto that as well.”

The old adage of never judging a book by its cover seems as relevant as ever, then. But while the aesthetic similarities with the likes of Team Fortress 2 and Pixar’s output are by their very nature shallow ones, at the core of Carbine’s gameplay is a very real homage to the likes of BioShock Infinite and Dark Souls II.

At first it seems incongruous – after all, what could a sci-fi MMO take away from two of the most successful single-player franchises of recent years? Put simply, the answer’s ideology. While the team at Carbine may spend their days creating games, that’s not to say they never play them. Like many of us, Mocarski admits the entire studio hasn’t failed to notice the slow erosion of difficulty among modern titles. But he points to Bioshock’s 1999 mode and the incredible grief the Dark Souls series has caused many gamers as proof that we’re finally looking for challenges once more, and it’s something he’s happy to provide.

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“Not that it’s not accessible or not for the casual player, but there are elements of WildStar that are designed for the hardcore because we miss that as developers,” he says. “I think you see a resurgence of that type of thing when you look at games like Dark Souls. Dark Souls is a hardcore game that so many people can’t play, but it’s gotten really popular as a result. Then there’s the 1999 mode in BioShock Infinite. I just think the trends show that we’re reaching a much broader audience in our games and as a result we’re seeing a lot of titles that, for lack of a better word, are on-rails.

“ But the original audience that was the foundation for the gamer community? They want that older nostalgic feeling of a challenge.

“But the original audience that was the foundation for the gamer community? They want that older nostalgic feeling of a challenge. And that’s not for everybody; it’s not for my mum who goes out and buys a Wii. That’s for the few million people that started this industry and likes that challenge. I think we’re seeing a resurgence of that in games. We hope to go back to that in WildStar.”

We’ve gone into detail before about how WildStar plans to have a brutally difficult endgame for those seeking a challenge, along with 40-man raids, so comparisons with the golden age of WoW were always on the cards. But an accusation levelled at the developer frequently is whether Carbine set out to pick up WoW’s cast-offs, making a cheap carbon copy rather than an original piece of work. When asked about this, Mocarski is surprisingly candid.

“It wasn’t necessarily our goal to say, ‘Okay we’re going to pick up the people who have quit playing WoW and we’ll bring them over to WildStar’, but it was a hope,” he admits. “Who doesn’t want that audience?”

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What if that audience doesn’t exist anymore? What if the supposition I set out with at the start of the article, that the MMO industry is flourishing, is a false premise? Are WildStar, The Elder Scrolls Online, Warlords of Draenor and others of that ilk chasing a fool’s errand? Mocarski doesn’t think so. “I’m very happy that there are still MMOs being made because it means there’s still an interest,” he enthuses. “The marketplace has been very rough on big MMOs. I mean, you haven’t seen anything replicate the success of WoW since WoW came out.

“ You don’t have to be a 12-million-sub game to be successful. If you're an MMO out there and you have a million subs, you're a hit.

“Stuff like The Old Republic has been very successful and games like Rift have done very well for themselves, but I think the trend that we’ve seen is that when a new MMO comes out there are a ton of people buying the box. A ton. Millions buy the boxes, then the subscriptions end up dying over the course of a few months. And that’s on the game developers; for some reason they released a game that didn’t have that sticky quality. But people are interested in MMOs and I think that’s really encouraging and why the market is so saturated.”

The reason so many perceive the genre to be in trouble stems largely from the drop off in players after the first free month; true, in many instances gamers are choosing not to subscribe, but they still shift a huge number of boxes in almost every case. So while the interest is there, developers don’t always do what it takes to sustain it. Even the presence of a subscription fee as in the case of WildStar needn’t be an obstacle to success. The opportunity is ripe for one MMO to come along, which manages to reimagine many of the nostalgic features we all crave into something new.

A caveat though: Is this likely to be success at the level previously only experienced by World of Warcraft? In all honesty, it’s unlikely. The days of 12 million subscribers are probably gone for good. Our understanding of success in the MMO space has been irrevocably skewed by the freak event that was WoW; for most MMOs, securing a fraction of its subscriber numbers is enough to recoup development costs and ensure servers can be stabilised and content pumped out for years to come.

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“You don’t have to be a 12-million-sub game to be successful,” Mocarski says. “I think if there was one thing I want people to know it’s that you don’t have to be that. If you’re an MMO out there, any MMO, and you have a million subs you’re a hit. You’re a huge hit. WoW kind of skewed the numbers for everyone, where they look at that 12 million and it’s the same thing with console games right? If you’re not a GTA and you don’t make $2 billion in your first day or whatever they made, that doesn’t mean you’re a failure! It just means you’re not going to get a big headline saying you’re the fastest-selling thing ever, and that’s far from the end of the world.”

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Junior Editor and veteran MMO player. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter