My flatmate got Final Fantasy XIII the other week, meaning I got to play it quite a bit – what, with me owning both the Playstation 3 and the HDTV the game runs on. Once again I will give you my complete undecided review: Today you’ll hear ten good things about the game, on Friday […]

The football world cup is on and millions (if not billions) of people who usually don’t care much about sports in general and football in particular are watching it and cheering for their respective teams. I am one of those people, finding myself highly entertained not only by my team’s matches but also by other […]

Various other bloggers have voiced their disapproval for Blizzard’s new “RealID” system. What it does is to allow players to add friends to their buddy list using those players’ email addresses instead of their in-game handle. If you accept such a friend request, the other player will not only be able to see your real […]

Elemental damage and its counterpart elemental resistance have been part of computer role-playing games for ages now and they keep on showing up even though they are actually quite bad design, in my opinion. Today I’ll step through a few different implementations of such systems, point out the issues and see if I can find […]

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 […]