This post is also featured on our Rift fansite and blog, Rift Watchers. Temporarily cross-posting to build awareness 🙂 Little Caveat: I’m not saying that Rift is perfect or “the answer” to what everyone wants in an MMO. Or that it’s necessarily better than any of the games listed below. I’m a lifetimer to LotRO …
As you know, I’ve been taking part in the Rift beta events. The long and short of it is this: Rift is a good game, not immediatelyground breaking, but a fun MMO that will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s played anything post-Everquest. In my opinion, this is the first PvE game that’s actually viable …
The following was written after the first hour of play and several more researching forums and fansites. If anything is misrepresented here, please feel free to share it in the comments below. Follow-Up: As I played the game for another hour or so this evening, I encountered an issue I’d only heard about previously. When …
The more I play through the FFXIV open beta, the more apparent it is that the game is really meant to be a console experience. Everything about it just screams “port.” From the menu design, to the seeming expectation for players to only hop in for an hour or so a day, FFXIV is the …
With open beta registrations still wholly in the dark, I’ve been stalking FFXIV Core all day waiting for an update. Though Square has pretty much said “hold tight” and little else, I’ve found reading the boards to be especially interesting. Up until today, they were largely dominated by the very optimistic but very uninitiated Final …
Gamescom 2010 brings us two videos this week from the MMO big’uns: TOR and Guild Wars 2. Both of them have been met with some mixed reception but, from where I’m sitting, there’s cause to get excited. Let’s start with the space combat video from TOR. Here, if you haven’t seen it yet, have a …
Over the last few years, we’ve seen an absolute explosion in the amount of MMOs being released. A lot of them came about purely because WoW was such a success. The result, it seems, is that these games are being measured against WoW to determine if they’re successful or not. Now, I think we can …
Over the course of my last couple years MMO hopping, I’ve noticed a great divide in how some games approach progression. Effectively, your time in a game can be broken down into a series of micro activities and macro activities. Micro activities would be things such as questing, crafting, and exploring the zone you’re in. …
While listening to the latest episode of The Instance today, I got to thinking about how secretive the video game industry is. There are always hidden features, little selling points, that they dangle in front of us in a seemingly endless stream. The release of new information is always extremely controlled. I swear, some of …
