MMORPG - MMOCrunch

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 […]

The advent of basing an MMORPG around a popular intellectual property (IP) is nothing new to the genre as with such a competitive market it seems almost foolhardy not to include one into your game, however, recent subscription data seems to suggest otherwise. Pirates of the Caribbean, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, Star […]

Lately, there has been a lot to talk about in the MMO-verse, with Age of Conan just getting released and a World of Warcraft expansion pack on track for a holiday unveiling there seems to be nothing that can stop the momentum gained by the industry. However, despite all the success being thrown around by […]

There is one MMO that no matter how many times I unsub, I always end up returning to it a few months/years later. It’s not World of Warcraft, or Everquest; I have absolutely no desire to ever return to either of those games. The game I am talking about is Planetside. Time and again I […]

The MMO genre of gaming is not a particularly young one. In fact, I’d say it’s only a few years younger than the modern RTS and FPS genres (I remember playing my very first graphical MMO in 1997). So, suffice it to say, I was a bit surprised when I found out that not one […]