Its a feature, not a bug. No game is immune from bugs, but the effects a bug can have are magnified by the multiplayer, persistent nature of MMOs. Often bugs go unfixed for months, if not years. Whether its not developer's inability or ignorance of such bugs, they often end up being fixed features of a MMO. Something for players [...]
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Playerunknown's Battlegrounds has taken the PC gaming scene by storm this year and continues to make new highs every week. It recently surpassed Dota 2 as the most popular game on Steam, reaching peak concurrent player numbers exceeding 1.5 million. With that sort of success, PUBG and the Battle Royal genre it popularized was sure to draw copycats. We saw [...]
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This week marked the passing of an era in online gaming. Everyone's favorite lawless sandbox Eve Online was hit by another in-game political scandal. A major player Alliance called Circle of Two (CO2) was betrayed by a high ranking insider and subsequently fell apart. Over a trillion in ISK along with the Alliance's Keepstar Citadel capital HQ was stolen in [...]
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On September 14, 2017 Pearl Abyss, the Korean studio behind Black Desert Online, went public. Two weeks prior, the company held a news conference detailing their history and their plans for the future. As part of that conference, the company released a slew of interesting numbers pertaining to their business. These included revenue numbers, unit sales, staffing numbers, and so [...]
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Omer published a column yesterday claiming "We need more aspirational content in MMORPGs." The post sparked quite a discussion on the MMORPGs subreddit so we thought we would revisit the subject this week on the podcast. There's been a steady lowering of difficulty in modern MMORPGs. In the past, less than 1% of the WoW playerbase even attempted the original [...]
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We need more aspirational content in MMORPGs. Nowadays whenever new content is released for a modern MMORPG like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV it's typically cleared pretty quickly. Mythic Emerald Nightmare Xavius, the hardest World of Warcraft: Legion Raid at the time, was cleared a mere 18 hours after launch. Deltascape Savage 4.0 in Final Fantasy XIV was [...]
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Today marks the start of the Founders Program for The Amazing Eternals, a first person hero shooter by Warframe developer Digital Extremes. While we have no hard number on the level of interest for this title, the fact that their homepage crashed day one indicates at least some buzz. The Amazing Eternals follows a in the footsteps of several hero [...]
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Forcing players to complete tutorials are often a necessary evil from a game design perspective. I personally don't like these kinds of tutorials but I can see why games have them. When given the option to skip a tutorial, players may do so only to end up frustrated down the road. Anytime I run into a mandatory tutorial I typically [...]
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With the lackluster launch of LawBreakers earlier this month and the announcement that SkySaga would be ceasing development, we felt it was time to return to the topic of extended, public development cycles. In an interview with Eurogamer, Cliff Bleszinski of Boss Key Productions said that he regrets allowing the alpha test to be streamed because it "deflated some of [...]
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Over the past several years we have seen a boom in high end computer peripherals. Ever since Das Keyboard help popularize mechanical keyboards back in 2008, there has been a proliferation of high end (and high priced) keyboards, mice, headsets, and even mouse pads. While many of these products offer little beyond RGB 'gamer' aesthetics, those of us who spend [...]
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