One of the great benefits of reading the wealth of MMO blogs out there is that you can touch base on a huge variety of games that you might not have time to play. Haven’t gotten around to checking in with the indie sandbox Legends of Aria? The blogosphere has you covered!
While Superior Realities thinks that there’s a “skeleton of a good game” in Aria, he wasn’t won over by the closed beta: “After about thirty minutes of dealing with bugs, spectacularly tedious and old school gameplay, and generally terrible design, I decided life was too short.”
Inventory Full felt that the game had featureless maps but probably deserved a longer look, and Levelcapped said that Aria is “so damn close to being an Ultima Online sequel that it’s both wonderful and blasphemous at the same time.”
Occasional Hero: ESO has my favorite business model
“The final perk is access to all of the DLCs. It’s sort of like renting the DLCs, as I’m happy to play them while my sub is on and ignore them the rest of the time. You could also think of it as rent-to-own, since you could just sub until you have enough crowns to buy the DLCs permanently, but at the rate they’ve been cranking out DLCs, it’ll take a while to pay for them all (not unlike rent-to-own property).”
In An Age: Impressions of State of Decay 2
“Don’t get me wrong, the game is a lot of fun for me. But if you don’t like the base management and/or resource management side of things, SoD2 is definitely not for you.”
JVT Workshop: Neverwinter’s Ravenloft first impressions
“Best parts for me so far are the night and day cycle which changes the spawns slightly. It’s definitely scary to know that the Stalker (miniboss) shows up randomly each night to terrorize some unlucky adventurer. Then there are the hunts which are amazing! No more grinding for bait, now you just hop into an instance with a difficulty of your own choosing, ala Mabinogi quest boards.”
MMO Bro: Healing the rift between player and developer
“Lately the gaming world is abuzz over the brouhaha involving Guild Wars 2 writers Jessica Price and Peter Fries. There are a lot of opinions flying around on who is in the wrong here — personally I’m in the camp that says absolutely no one came out of this smelling like roses — and I’m not interested in rehashing the same arguments that have been swirling around in circles across the Internet. But it does present an excellent opportunity to discuss a topic that was already on my mind: the often toxic relationship between gamers and developers.”
Lina’s Biscuity Burrow: Magical moments of LOTRO player music
“From rather humble beginnings, the LOTRO music scene has grown dramatically in recent years. There are now tons of musicians and bands around, many of which have music as their “end-game” activity. New instruments are added to the music system. Special music converters help musicians prepare songs, special plugins help bands perform songs. Every day, there are scheduled concerts and non-scheduled performances across the LOTRO servers.”
Aywren Sojourner: FFXIV — When glamour is end game
“So, when FFXIV took away the ability to Need on Alliance Raid gear earlier this patch cycle, my hopes were crushed. I didn’t like this change based on principle… but on top of it, I secretly knew that meant that I’d probably never see all the drops required to work on this glamour set. When they repealed that terrible design choice and gave us Need back, I was celebrating for many reasons. This was one of them… even though I’d never told anyone until recently that this silly fic-RP and glamour farm was a thing I’d hoped to do.”
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.
