Playing in the Rift beta brought up an old question in me. How do you get players to care about anything but levelling up before they get to the maximum level?  and I still like what I wrote there. Today I’ll take a different approach to the topic though.

When I’m playing games then there’s little that’s more annoying than some boring event that makes me wait instead of allowing me to continue playing the game. Loading screens are one example of that, unskippable cutscenes – especially repeated ones – are another. If you’ve raided World of Warcraft’s Icecrown Citadel on horde side you surely know […]

Last year I managed to milk Blizzcon for    , this year I’ll barely get one. Sure, the Demon Hunter class for Diablo III was announced, but everyone knew a ranger-type class was coming and she doesn’t really do anything that’ts exiting to talk about. She looks cool and she throws ‘nades but that’s about […]

I don’t think there’s ever been more whining about World of Warcraft in the blogosphere than in the last couple of months. The decline of WoW has been stated as fact and its demise predicted. Well, it seems Blizzard is still doing something right – they just announced a new peak in subscriber numbers at […]

There’s a post by our favourite Blizzard-employed crab out there in which the Ghostcrawler talks about the playerbase’s obsession with efficiency and min-maxing. Larísa has a strong post on the topic as well, and the discussion in the comments is huge and well worth a read. Faithful readers will already know that I’m an avid […]

World of Wacraft had a Bejeweled add-on, then a Peggle add-on and they were fun, but really not much different from playing Bejeweled or Peggle as stand-alone. Now WoW is getting a Plants vs. Zombies questline right there in the game, not just as an overlay using the add-on functionalities. It is quite awesome.

I’m the kind of guy that likes to plan and analyze his games. I absolutely didn’t mind using spreadsheets to optimize my performance in World of Warcraft – I even have a spreadsheet tracking all my games of Momir Magic, helping me identify trends in the randomness of that game. As much as I enjoy working like […]

Data transfer technology has come a long way since I first stepped onto the internet and the amount of gamers that are using an internet connection that cannot be classified as broadband is probably minimal. Still, downloading patches for games can still take quite a while and downloading full games or expansions for them even […]

From time to time you will see the question popping up of whether video games can be considered art or not. I won’t really get into that topic, but one thing that comes with art is interpretation. It seems to be a very common pastime of intellectuals to interpret works of art (be they literature, performance, or […]

I’ve always been opposed to Blizzard’s raid design philosophy in Wrath of the Lich King which allows players to jump into the top-end raid dungeon without ever touching the previous ones. This is accomplished by making gear equivalent to what you could get in the previous dungeon so easy to get that there is absolutely […]