I’m hardly greedy when it comes to coughing up money for MMOs. On the contrary, I try pretty much every promising MMO right when it is released and I’ve had no issues at all buying the last two expansions for World of Warcraft either (as collector’s editions no less). Now Cataclysm is coming up and [...]

Alright, the title of this post sounds terribly elitist, let me assure you that I have nothing at all against casual players. What I do dislike is if games are modeled to fit their tastes and not mine simply because there are more of them than of me. Especially MMOs, like World of Warcraft, tend [...]

There’s an interview with a developer of Bioware’s upcoming MMORPG The Old Republic over at G4, with a live group combat demonstration in part 2. To be quite frank, it looks awful. The healer is simply hitting the game’s equivalent of “Greater Heal” every few seconds while the tank seems to mostly sit still, shooting [...]

Welcome back to the third post of me hijacking Keen’s series on “Old MMO Mechanics I Love and You Probably Hate” where I tell you that I do, In fact, hate those mechanics but where I also see whether there’s anything salvageable in them. Unlike , most of today’s mechanics really are awful!

We all know how fast MMO content gets stale, forcing developers to produce more and more content to keep the player-base paying happy. World of Warcraft experiences a big loss in active players in the time before a big new chunk of content is introduced, simply because those players feel like there’s nothing interesting left to [...]

This is part two of my three part series dealing with awful MMO mechanics. If you missed the first part, . Today I’ll talk about the mechanics mentioned by Keen in the second part of his own series in which he views them in a very positive light. Today’s mechanics actually aren’t as awful as [...]

Keen over at Keen & Graev recently wrote a series of posts called “Old MMO Mechanics I Love and You Probably Hate” in which he is right about pretty much one thing – that I find those mechanics to be terrible game design. Spawn camping, trains to zone, and being lost at sea for hours [...]

Storytelling in games has always been a difficult beast to tackle. Oftentimes the story simply feels grafted onto the gameplay or vice versa instead of both being a homogeneous entity. In the wait for Bioware’s new MMO The Old Republic, discussions seem to flare up from time to time on the topic of making story an integral [...]

On I talked about how there are too many crafting ingredients and trash items dropping in MMOs. Today I’ll have a look at equipment drops and consumables and actually have examples of games that improved much on the now standard way to do this.

Have you checked your inventory in the MMO of your choice after an hour of adventuring lately? Chances are that it was full of magic items that might warrant another look, slightly less magic items that will be sold to a vendor right away, ingredients for seventy million different crafting professions, consumables that heal you, [...]