Tag: crafting

Ultima Online wasn’t the greatest game of all time, and it’s not even my favorite, but because it was first, and because it’s so old, it’s had a long period of time to make mistakes and learn from them (or not). And because it’s a sandbox, it’s made those mistakes across a broad spectrum of MMO design, rather than being…

Most of the reviews I’ve read of Glitch have been relentlessly trendy, evoking poetry, trying to find deep meaning in a Flash game that involves tickling pigs and drinking cocktails and wise-cracking with magic rocks. Beau even called the game hipsterish, but honestly, I don’t see it. It’s a cute game. It’s a crafting sandbox. It’s what FarmVille would be…

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…

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,…