Wildstar Announces Subscription Model: Come and get you some C.R.E.D.D!

If you’ve been looking for the next great time sink to waste your life, lose your real life friends and spend your vacation days logging in and wildin’ out…then this is probably your game. In fact, just do yourself a favor and put it on the desktop right beside FFXIV: A Realm Reborn and just save yourself that extra 0.2 seconds.

WildStar is a slick, stylized, and imaginative new MMORPG developed by Carbine Studios  and published by NCSoft. It also boasts a variety of awesome features, which means a first month subscription is happening for me by default. WildStar promises adventure of epic proportions, where players will be able to carve their paths through unknown territory as Explorers, eff things up as Soldiers, carve a living from good old planet Nexus as a Settler, or unlock the secrets of the known world as a Scientist. Not to mention playable classes include fluffy bunny eared women, psychotic cat people, space zombies, mech killing machines, and rock mercenaries. Yes, you read that right.

And depending on the player’s combination of race, class, path, and faction, it’s sure to offer plenty of challenges and surprises to the gaming experience. So of course it’s no surprise that if you want to get in on this awesome, you gotta pay!

At launch, WildsStar will feature an exchange similar to the Gem exchange in Guild Wars 2, or EVE Online’s PLEX currency. With the initial $60 purchase comes a 30 day subscription and three “guest” passes for a week, because Carbine is considerate and, of course, they don’t want you to be alone in your newfound addiction. After the first 30 days, players will have to keep their accounts topped off with monthly charges, game cards, or  C.R.E.D.D. (Certificate Of Research, Exploration, Destruction, and Development because cool acronyms are apparently very persuasive.)

C.R.E.D.D. can be bought directly from Carbine at $20 a pop, and then sold/or bought for in-game cash. This of course, has the additional benefit of allowing players to rack up dough in-game, buy C.R.E.D.D. off other players, and then never have to worry about spending another cent. So it’s Free-to-Play/Subscription Based + Buy to Play? Or something? Of course, if you prefer things the old-fashioned way you can just subscribe to the monthly subscription, which will as of now will tentatively run you $14.99/month.

According to WildStar producer Jeremy Gaffney, C.R.E.D.D. was created with the understanding that sometimes gamers are willing to cough up money to purchase a new game, but not to continue to do it for the long-term. So this way everyone wins – if you want to pay you can always trade C.R.E.D.D. to make bank in-game, and if you’re a broke college student like moi you can just horde enough gold to buy C.R.E.D.D in game. Sounds like a good idea, or at least until the usual MMORPG inflation hits. But we can just cross that bridge when the time comes. WildStar is expected to be released sometime in Spring 2014.

So….good idea or is WildStar merely making a laughingly cute attempt to make one last stand for the subscription model before it inevitably goes F2P? Speak on it below!