Launching today is my first entry in Massively’s newest opinion column, called Why I Play, in which we tell you… well, why we play certain games, as it says on the tin. I chose City of Heroes first, since it’s one of those mid-2000s games that’s had some staying power but is far from being [...]
I spent last weekend trying to decide the best way to end it all — in Star Wars Galaxies, that is, which we learned will be shutting down in less than six months. Star Wars Galaxies was and is a brilliant sandbox game, which I loudly proclaimed in “The Uncle Owen Paradox” Soapbox rant column [...]
Anyone who knows me knows I love sandboxes. There’s something about an interactive simulation that’s a lot more engaging and replayable than yet another scripted themepark. And one of the best aspects of the best sandboxes is a strong player economy. The economy game is basically PvP for smart people. No — observant people. It’s [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
