After spending the vast majority of this weekend playing in the latest beta, I've come to the conclusion Wildstar will follow in the footsteps of SWTOR rather than forging it's own path.

Here is why.

First off, don't get me wrong and think I'm saying it's a horrible game or anything. I rather like the races, the settings, lore, art direction, so on and so on. The animations, while over the top at times, are lively and fun. The environments are packed with activity, from the plethora of mobs to the people standing around the towns talking (even saw some guards reference ALIEN at one point about "6ft tall creatures with sharp fangs and acid for blood). The bodies of water you can swim in actually have currents that push your character towards a shoreline. The paths you can take when you create your character are a cool idea, allowing you to undertake certain quests/events in the world (such as the Explorer can explore and setup radio antennas or the Settler can collect materials to build buff stations and such). All that's just dandy.

What gets to me is the UI is very buggy for one thing. I guess they just recently overhauled the UI though, so that's expected I guess. Although I think this should have been done much earlier since they are only a month from launch. Not only is it buggy, but it just doesn't mesh well. Too many keybinds for every little thing. Interact, loot, answer your communicator, and a couple other actions are all separate keys instead of being on one like most other MMOs. You can't bind jump and swim up to the same key. Same goes for sit and swim down. Little things like that, it just makes keybinding a nightmare.

It's also suppose to be an action combat style game, think TERA only sci-fi. The controls in TERA are seriously perfection, they did action combat right. Moving the mouse moves the camera around, allowing you to aim attacks and turn your character. Left button is your basic builder attack, right is normally block but can be whatever you want. Then you have your other attacks/spells that you can bind on whatever you want, normally 1-=. If you need the cursor, it pops up automatically (like when you open your inventory) or you hit Alt (or whatever you bind it to) to toggle between cursor and mouse aiming. You move, strafe, dodge, duck, all that fun stuff with the WASD keys and say F to initiate dodge.

Can't do that stuff in Wildstar. Nope, instead it uses the horrible controls of WoW. You have to hold down the right mouse button to aim the camera and turn your character, left button moves the camera separate from your character and allows you to click target. First off, there shouldn't be ANY click targeting in the action combat style it wants to be. You should just swing your giant axe and hit whatever is in front of you in the swing arc. If you're fire weapons/slinging spells, they should go about their path in front of you towards the center of your screen at the reticle to show where your character is focused. Big issue with click targeting is that for some reason it targets stuff you interact with. Prime example, one of the Dominion starting quests has you burn down trees that has friendly mobs around them that become hostile upon doing so. You then can't attack those mobs because you have that stupid dead tree targeted so you attacks register "invalid target" even though there are no targets, just the mobs right in front of my that I should be able to smack with my giant sword if I want to!

On top of that, you're using the WASD keys to move, double tap to dodge (or a separate keybind if you toggle directional dodge on in options), and your 1-0 for all attacks. Even your basic builder attack you are spamming goes on the bar. Now that would be fine if the game played like WoW, where you just target a mob and fire your magic tracking arrow at it and dodging/blocking was based on a stat system that just randomly happens but doesn't move your character. No. Wildstar wants you to aim your shots, and manually dodge out of harms way, and constantly be moving all while trying to spam those attacks.

There are a lot of people on the forums telling people to "go buy an MMO mouse like the Razer Naga, solves everything". Well, sorry to be "that guy", but that solves nothing. If the game is going to basically require an MMO mouse, it better be included in the purchase. Those mice look awful to me anyways, I don't want 12 buttons on the side of my mouse where my thumb goes. That just screams hand cramps to me.

There are addons that lock the camera to the mouse, and allows you to move the camera just by moving the mouse. Ok, that's getting closer but there are some flaws with this. I've been using Steer and some other keybind addon to accomplish this, where Steer allows the camera locking and the other allows you to map left click and right click. So I set it up as similar to TERA as I could (mind you that means binding 1 and 2 on my action bar to the mouse buttons rather then them having their own slots to place attacks in like TERA) and proceeded to play that way. It works okay at best. When you bring the cursor up like when in the inventory or having to respond to your communicator, your attacks will still fire off if you click the buttons at times. It also doesn't seamlessly transition from cursor to camera aiming like it does in TERA, half the time it seems to get confused and I have to click several times. It makes some quests a real pain because they require the use of an item, and to use that item you have to manually click target the mob. Found myself killing them more often then not by accident.

No, Wildstar needs TERA style camera control built in. Reticle in center of screen to denote character focus for range attacks, which NPC you're looking at, which mob you are specifically looking at for those quests that require an item be used, easy any keybinding to toggle to cursor and back, auto cursor pop-up when you need it, no click targeting at all, and so-on. These devs want an action combat style game, then they need to go play some more TERA rather then focus on how WoW has always done things. WoW's controls work because it isn't action focused, it's magic tracking arrow and automagical dodging.

Anyways, I'm more than positive I could keep going, but those are my main points why this game will just be another SWTOR. If Wildstar was straight up TERA controls with everything else it has going for it, it might actually have a chance once all the UI bugs are worked out. As it sits now, I'm no longer hyped and won't be buying. I'll check it out again once it goes free.