The reveal made Dragonchasers change his mind: “I guess I have to applaud Bungie for trying something new. They freely admit that they’re trying to do something about the frequently toxic environments brought about by matchmaking.”
“I have to say I am not disappointed in the least,” Tales of the Aggronaut enthuses. “In fact at this very moment I am feeling inordinate amounts of Destiny love. Â There were a few things that were released that gave me all the feels.”
That doesn’t mean everyone’s fully on board yet. “I appreciate the changes the game is making, but I had expected a proper sequel to Destiny to actually be a bigger game with actual new stuff to do, stuff that couldn’t be done in the first game,” said Virtual Bastion.
Inventory Full: What’s going on with Shroud of the Avatar?
“It’s more than playable as it stands. I’ve played final betas a week before launch that were buggy, chaotic messes compared to this. In fact, I have yet to run into a bug. It’s often clunky, but it all works. The overriding impression remains not one of a brand-new MMO in early development but of a much older game from a time when many of the modern conveniences we take for granted had yet to be invented.”
David Bass: Questions I ask myself when crowdfunding an MMO
“A ‘core’ team would probably include artists, animators, designers, programmers, and engineers. A ‘bigger’ team would also have QA, a Community Manager, and hopefully some producers/project managers. If any of those core roles are missing, it makes me extremely nervous. For an MMO, if there is no engineer on the list, that’s a huge red flag.”
Through Wolfy’s Eyes: Stop survival, start life
“I’m beginning to see something of a bothersome trend in the form of the survival sandbox MMO, and I’m not really a big fan. Allow me to elaborate on why survival sandboxes aren’t just boring and lazy, but they’re missing the point of the MMO genre and further making things more disjointed.”
Superior Realities: The Division revisited
“‘Immersion’ has become almost as much a buzzword as ‘epic’ these days, but it’s still a valid concept, and The Division has it in spades. And yet I already myself struggling to find motivation to log in, to the point where writing this post seemed a significantly more appealing prospect than actually playing. Why?”
Self Distract Sequence: Take a trip to Vvardenfell
“So far, I’m really enjoying myself in Morrowind. Before getting into the expansion content, I wondered how it would fit into the rest of the game, from a story perspective. The adventure on Vvardenfell seems to be self-contained, so you can experience it and the rest of the content in The Elder Scrolls Online in any order you like.”
Gaming SF: Race/gender-locked classes
“Race locks, and to a lesser extent gender locks annoy me. I came to this hobby from pen-and-paper RPGs where such choices are part of the fundamental creative process when making a new character. That’s not to say that restrictions of race/class combination are totally foreign to the RPG hobby, D&D in its early incarnations had a bunch of them. In general the hobby, and its online equivalent, seem to have moved away from limiting freedom of choice at character creation — though I wonder if the trend is now reversing due to the apparent smaller budgets for new MMORPGs and less ambitious vision this implies.”
Every day there are tons of terrific, insightful, and unusual articles posted across the MMO gaming blogosphere — and every day, Justin reads as many as he can. Global Chat is a sampling of noteworthy essays, rants, and guides from the past few weeks of MMO discourse.
