MMORPG - MMOCrunch

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 […]

Bioware’s forthcoming MMORPG, widely tipped to be Star Wars-based, is on everyone’s mind at present. I can’t mention it here, or on my personal blog, without a flurry of responses. People are crazy for it. People want to think about it. People want to talk about it.
So in the timeless words of C-3PO, “Here we […]

You know folks, the more I poke around the Bioware forums of late, in addition to throwing the odd piece on my personal blog, the more I realise how completely at odds I am with some people re: the concept of playing Jedi in its upcoming Star Wars MMORPG.
Jedi, people tell me, should be freely […]

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting annoyed that MMORPGs are increasingly turning into RPGs that just happen to have other people running around in them and which want a monthly fee of US$15.
Timely example: Age of Conan. You play the first 20 levels, set on the island of Tortage, pretty much by […]

It’s funny to be 33 years of age and starting to feel really old in the MMORPG community. Sitting below me are at least one, and probably two, new generations of gamers, all with their own ideas on what makes for a good MMORPG - and all of these ideas are wildly different to my […]

Well, Mike left Age of Conan, but I’m still, grimly, hanging in there.
I guess the first thing I want to say is that AoC is definitely a work in progress. This is curious because the game was held up twice, if memory serves, as the developers promised launch dates that ended up whooshing by […]

As more and more MMORPGs get released year after year there seems to be an influx in the ability to do things outside of the standard PvE content that traditionally accompanied these games, essentially what we considered to be “the grind”. Developers have added PvP, extensive crafting systems, and sometimes even some sort of […]

Everything goes into some sort of beta phase these days whether it’s a website, an MMO, a single player video game, or even a product. Beta has become a natural phase for nearly everything we buy and consume today and despite our favorite MMOs going through a rather lengthy closed and open beta process it […]

In continuing with my recent article on the evolution and revolution of MMOs and their lack of truly bringing anything 2.0-like to the industry, the advent of an MMO hybrid often comes to mind. The genre today has many MMORPGs and a few MMOFPSs, but we really have no MMORPG-FPS games out there, a hybrid […]