MMORPG - MMOCrunch - World of Warcraft

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 […]

It has been about a month since I’ve trekked through the world of Hyboria and to be honest I have absolutely no desire to go back.  I don’t even have AoC installed anymore on my computer and probably never will again.  For those of you interested in why, I upgraded to Vista from XP, big […]

In my last post, a few gamers brought up the widely debated argument that MMORPGs should not have instant gratification, that you should have to work towards your goals, then eventually be rewarded.  Allow me to say that this argument is complete BS!  Any game that you play should have instant gratification, that’s why they […]

What!?  That might be what your thinking at this very moment, but allow me to explain.   When I first started playing LoTRO I knew exactly what I was getting into.  A MMORPG that was basically a clone of WoW but in the Lord of the Rings universe.  I expected many quests, I knew it had […]