Category: Gaming

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…

Since I started working for Massively, the one upcoming game I’ve gotten to check out in person more than any other is a cute little game from Gazillion and the Amazing Society called Super Hero Squad Online under this quaint, obscure IP called “Marvel comics.” Gazillion’s devs have actually secured the rights to Marvel games for something like the next…