Tag: swg

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….

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…

Ever hear the phrase “common sense isn’t very common”? It’s true. Arguments from common sense are logical fallacies because there’s really no such thing. We’re all terribly susceptible to the idea that the things we find obvious are obvious to our peers. After all, what sort of horrible person wouldn’t agree with me on something so basic and simple? If…

But then I took an arrow in the knee. In fact, it was Star Wars Galaxies that urged me to rise above dabbling in thees and thous and transformed me into a smart-ass, quick-thinking pirate queen. I never broke character in spatial chat. Every toon had an elaborate backstory. My guild founded a roleplaying metropolis. I stayed up until the…

Earlier today, I posted to Massively an article titled Ten things to do in Star Wars Galaxies before it’s gone. Truthfully, I had a lot more than ten, but space is an issue in this new tl;dr age. Instead, I held back a few of the more niche suggestions for this very post. I promise the title makes sense later….

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 just two days before I…

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 as much about anticipation and…

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”…