For the last two years on the Fourth of July, I’ve posted up my Perfect Ten list of my favorite Perfect Tens Justin and Eliot have done since New Massively was born. It started as a joke, but it was fun and people liked it! So our Independence Day tradition is back again, although this year I’m sorry to say nobody’s written about the sexiest MMO monsters this time.
Yet.
In honor of those of you stuck at family gatherings today where you’re super bored or stuffed to the gills or wishing you could just drown it all in beer, I’ve picked out my favorite Perfect Tens from the last dozen months and rounded them up for you below so you don’t even have to hunt for something fun to read. Just hunch over your phone and tell them you’re doing Very Important Work! I do it all the time!
Perfect Ten: Helpful tips for returning to City of Heroes in 2019
With the (community-led) rebirth of City of Heroes in 2019, a rather interesting problem has arisen for this superhero title: Namely, players who never tried out this game before are getting their first experience with the game without realizing that this is a pre-World of Warcraft MMO that operates in a different way than modern gamers might expect. Since the game's been offline since 2012 and some of the guides and instructional videos have fallen by the wayside, finding useful tips for getting into City of Heroes isn't as easy as you might expect. With that in mind, the Massively… Continue Reading
Perfect Ten: The most poorly managed MMO sunsets of all time
MMOs shut down. This is just kind of a reality. It's an unpleasant one, but we also are collectively aware that it happens and not much can be done to prevent it. Some games fail to get an audience or are no longer viable or whatever, and then you need to wave goodbye. Sometimes the game is shut down for bad reasons that are mostly a result of corporate greed, and that sucks, but at least most of the time the people in charge of the game manage those last few days with respect and dignity. Then there are the sunsets that… Continue Reading
Perfect Ten: Disney movies are all MMO experiences
As a general rule, I feel about Disney films the same way other people feel about the MCU films: They're fine, I'll watch one if it's on and it's decent, they sometimes reach the point of being particularly good but never drop below watchable, but I have no deep emotional attachment to them as a whole. My familiarity with them as a fixture of my childhood means that I have, say, an outsized emotional attachment to The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, but that's kind of where it stops. However, we were discussing the Disney film oeuvre as a whole in… Continue Reading
Perfect Ten: Totally rad ’80s cartoons that would make bodacious MMORPGs
In another reality where our passion for MMORPGs is matched only by the power of nostalgia for the greatest era of cartoons, we would no doubt witness studios scrabbling over one another to secure licenses to some of the more inventive and tubular franchises from the 1980s animated scene. While we continue to wait in our reality for this to happen, I would like to put 10 cartoons from the '80s out there for studio consideration to be made into full-fledged MMORPGs. To make things even more interesting, I'm not going to go for the obvious picks, like your G.I.… Continue Reading
Perfect Ten: 10 MMOs I’m optimistic about in 2019
It's still early enough in 2019 to do articles about the upcoming year, right? Well, I'm doing this one anyway, so if it's too late then we'll just have to deal with it. It's easy to get caught up in talking about major issues in the genre, or community debates, or arguing with anthropomorphic versions of various game studios ad forget to point out that there's stuff in the genre that I'm actually just... optimistic about. That isn't to say that any of the games on this list are unambiguous good things with no problems or that there's no possibility… Continue Reading
Perfect Ten: The worst MMORPG expansions of all time
A great MMO expansion brings so much to the table: fresh excitement for a game, new classes, innovative features, expanded vistas, additional races, and more. Pull it off right, and studios rake in big bucks while a spike in player interest sends the crowds in to see the current popular thing. That's a great MMO expansion, and we all have our favorites. But a bad one? One that goes down in infamy as the worst that the game had to offer? One that stinks up the joint, repels players in droves, and makes good, functional things far worse? Those are… Continue Reading
Perfect Ten: The healthiest live MMORPGs at the end of 2018
Another year is coming to a close! That means we're doing all of our usual end-of-year recaps, and that also means that we're once again taking a look at the healthiest games at a glance for the end of 2018, which is always a fun ride because there are always people who assume that we must be insane for having game X on the list, why isn't game Y on there, and so forth. As is stated every year, this is a list compiled and put together using a variety of sources, including a glance at obvious metrics of the… Continue Reading
Perfect Ten: MMOs that desperately need proper player housing
Here's something pretty encouraging to me: When I sat down to work on an article listing MMOs that really could use but lacked proper player housing, I honestly had a hard time coming up with a full 10 titles. The more I looked at the popular titles in our gamespace, the more I realized that most of them -- not all, but most -- have adopted some sort of personal housing system. For someone who loves and champions player housing as a vital feature for MMORPGs, I think this is really neat. What is less neat is the fact that… Continue Reading
Perfect Ten: Failed MMOs that could have succeeded with more love
Hindsight is 20/20. Unless you're blind in one eye from nostalgia, in which case hindsight is 0/20. In any case, you understand that it's easy to look back upon MMO history and announce where things went wrong and how those mistakes could have been avoided or corrected. We have the luxury of time and perspective with these things. Yet it is also an enjoyable exercise to play the occasional edition of Alternative Gaming History. It's the activity where you start with "What if..." and then go on from there to imagine different possibilities and outcomes. Today I want to engage… Continue Reading
Perfect Ten: Suggestions to make World of Warcraft Classic feel more authentic
One of the things that I tell people going back to Final Fantasy XI now is that the game is, well, a different animal - not just because of patches but because you can't really transport you back in time to 2003 and replicate that precise experience. I can intellectually remember what it was like to play that game on a dial-up connection, for example, but I can't really bring that experience back, nor can I flash back to a cultural zeitgeist surrounding the game. There's no talk of FFXI Classic on the horizon, naturally. But there is World of… Continue ReadingWant more? Here are our Perfect Ten Perfectest Perfect Tens from 2018 and 2017 too!
