Category: Gaming

The finished version of RIFT (as finished as an MMO ever is) confirms most of my published pre-launch perceptions: It’s a strong MMO, perhaps even the strongest of the third-gen MMOs. Perhaps it’s even a transitionary fossil, a link between the WoW-era and the incoming SWTOR and GW2. I find it impossible to judge a game independent of what’s come…

Guild Wars owns a permanent position in my top three MMOs of all time. It’s group-friendly and solo-friendly; it’s all about lateral advancement; and it’s one of a few MMOs employing my favorite pay model. So of course I’m watching Guild Wars 2’s development with great interest. And yet nearly every GW2 announcement from “high level cap” to “open world”…

Over the weekend, BioWare announced a highly unpopular decision to enforce their pre-existing rules about fansites and media, and as usual, I seem to be the only one of my too-nice-for-their-own-good colleagues who agrees with the decision (except these guys!). Essentially, BioWare have determined that, to be classed as a fansite (and to receive the associated perks thereof), a SWTOR…

Last autumn, I had my Ultima Online account turned on for old times’ sake. I bought myself a ride to the most populated server and decided to plop down a house. After a few days of looking, I’d found myself a location, but I still had a book of leftover runes to what are known as IDOC houses. In UO,…

I’m uncertain how to feel about the response to my recent Soapbox column on Massively. It was meant as a mix of ideas — a refutation of parts of a past article and comments, a demand to game developers to stop passing off free-for-all PvP as anything but a cop-out of a game system, and a suggestion that tweaks to…

I mentioned back in November that I’d gotten a day of play with the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO due out next year from BioWare. The embargo finally lifted last week, and my hands-on article was gobbled up by fanboys everywhere. Overall, the response was ego-bloatingly positive, but I did get one comment that gave me pause. On…

Blog posts that talk about why you’ve not posted (and that assume anyone even cares) kinda suck, so instead I’m just going to show off where I have been posting. In November, not only did I lend my voice to another Massively Speaking podcast, but I got back-to-back day-long hands-on sessions with two games: Rift and Star Wars: The Old…

For far too many years, the world of City of Heroes has been plagued by a rule called the cottage rule. A player once asked for a particular superpower to be rethought, and a developer — Castle, actually — responded by saying that changing that power into something else would be unfair to the players. After all, players had chosen…

My boss invited me to guest-host on this week’s Massively Speaking podcast, on which you can hear the decidedly midwestern accents of Shawn Schuster, Rubi Bayer and me as we discuss EVE Online’s upcoming expansions, the Minecraft craze, sparkly vampires or lack thereof in World of Darkness, hack-and-slash freemium game Vindictus, MMO crafting pitfalls, the state of the MMO industry,…

EVE Online is one of those sandboxes I wish I could love. It’s in space. It’s pretty. It’s got partly open PvP. It has neat races and backstory. It has crafting. It has harvesting. It has an awesome trading system, and distance matters. You can make money from players just by moving products across the galaxy. In short, it theoretically…