MMORPG - MMOCrunch

So WoW appears to be getting a new mount… a motorcycle no less… called “The Hog”. You can see some pictures of it here.
Internet commentators, like Steve Danuser, are already up in arms about The Hog appearing in beta testing:
The helicopter flying mount made by engineers was pushing it for me. Once Azeroth has the […]

It seems that the walls of World of Warcraft are impenetrable as yet another hyped MMO is broken against them, I’m of course speaking of Age of Conan.  Age of Conan was probably the most hyped MMO in the last few years and while the hype helped AoC to break sales records, it didn’t last […]

A little while ago, we had Mike announce that he was done with Age of Conan. I wrote a counterpoint opinion piece saying that I was staying in the game for the time being, although qualified it that unless the game picked up, I’d drop it within another two to three billing cycles. Essentially, I […]

Beam me up Scotty!  Yesterday at PennyArcade they had a comic that illustrated the possible problem that might arise in the upcoming Star Trek MMO with traveling.  As with any MMO, developers must decide how easy traveling will be in the game.  How early should the player get a mount or vehicle.  Will there be […]

Tonight, SOE demoed its new Free Realms game at the FanFaire. You can get a quick sense of the game via its brief Wikipedia entry. Call me a silly old sentimental gamer who should know better, but it looks quite amazing and strikes me that a lot of people, adult gamers included, could make great […]

I was reflecting on something I said on the BioWare forums, recently, about skills-based character progression, which can create all manner of “hybrid” characters, versus the more common (and, let me be honest, more boring), concept of levelling a particular class of character in MMORPGs.
It occurs to me that there are people out there who […]

You know, I never thought to write this up when it happened at the time but, the more I think about it, days later, the more it niggles at the part of my brain which is reserved for conversations that aren’t allowed to run their full course and leave me with more questions than answers. […]

Steve Danuser has tossed up some interesting thoughts, as always, on his Moorgard blog. This time they relate to how growing up and moving on from a game is really no different to, say, growing up and not watching Sesame Street anymore. Why? Because it’s kind of weird to expect those characters to grow up […]

The MMORPG industry is a strange beast, isn’t it? I mean, can anyone really make any sense out of it? Everywhere I go on the Internet - forums, blogs, etc - I see discussions about the genre which typically feature the same kinds of comments, over and over again:
* People hate endless quest grinding to […]

You know, I’m just as guilty of doing this as anyone else (so please don’t think I’m throwing stones and being holier-than-thou), but the last decade, or thereabouts, has seen an increasing rise in gaming communities acting like they “own” a game before it comes out and the developers of that game are somehow obligated […]