Skycandy

Last Sunday, I partied with colleagues Eliot and Matt in Allods Online, which refused to cooperate with our simple desire to group. We were complaining over Skype about petty annoyances like not being able to team up on the newbie island and having to roll off for dropped quest items when in Allods’ defense I argued how much better it…

Beau Hindman, a Massively writer who is as zany as he is endearing, long ago penned an opinion piece titled The road (much) less traveled. In it, he argued that MMOs ought to give players strong, palpable reasons to travel and explore the amazing worlds we so often take for granted in our rush to what is so frequently a…

Massively’s Mike Foster coined this lovely phrase last week. “EVE Online offers me many opportunities to engage [a] sense of curiosity and my love for ‘horizon gaming,’ which is my term for playing just to see what comes next,” he wrote. Not for gear. Not for levels. Not for ganks. Not for socializing or achievements or a fat gold purse….

When Tiny Speck announced that it was closing its weird and beautiful browser MMO, Glitch, studio founder Stuart Butterfield famously blamed it at least in part on the game’s lack of guidance — there just wasn’t enough hand-holding. “A lot of people were just like, ‘I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do,’” he lamented. “Some people took…

In the struggle to save City of Heroes from extinction, activists (masktivists?) are faced with two challenges: convince NCsoft to keep or sell rather than sunset the game and convince the greater gaming community that it’s worth fighting for. There is already a team working on the first, so I’d like to tackle the second. The first step is to…

Guild Wars 2 has been one of the biggest games of the last few years for my guild, rivaled perhaps only by Cataclysm and SWTOR. Considering we’re just about 15 years old — we reckon by the founding of our first incarnation at UO’s launch — I’d say that’s a point in GW2’s favor. Any title that can compete for…

Am I cursed? It seems as if every game I’ve really fallen in love with in the last few years is being killed off, one by one, even the teeny-tiny ones like Zentia. Go ahead and laugh, but I still feel the loss of Star Wars Galaxies deeply, and my main consolation when it happened last year is that at…

I want to go home again, and I’m not alone. When Ultima Online launched in 1997, its housing system was both wonderful and terrible, like much of the rest of the game. If your keys were stolen or lost, your house was compromised forever. Homes didn’t decay if abandoned, so they took up space and prevented others from placing, and…

It’s rare that my (mostly useless but endlessly fascinating) academic field of study overlaps with my actual job, but last week’s SMITE fiasco did just that by mashing Indian mythology and comparative religion with video games. So. Hi-Rez Studios is working on a MOBA game called SMITE, in which participants play as figures from various real-world religions as they run…

E3 has made me realize that The Elder Scrolls Online thinks it already owns us. When TESO was first announced, all — and I do mean all — of the exclusives went to GameInformer. What’s GameInformer? It’s not a no-name site, but it’s not really on the radar of MMO players. I rarely find anything there of value for our…