When Pantheon recently announced that it would be adding coin weight to its inventory management system, little did the devs know that they were reigniting a long-buried controversial topic in the MMORPG world.
Blogger Belghast already did the MMO coin weight thing, and he’s not eager to return to that era: “The fact that this community wants coin weight back in the game tells me that they have a deeply masochistic streak. I think more than anything it also sets a tone for the type of game that Pantheon is trying to be. If you have coin weight then you are likely probably also going to have full item loss on death and corpse recovery, and on top of that the ability to lose levels. Essentially it sets a tone for a game that I really don’t want to personally play, because I would never freely return to a game that put me in the sort of negative positions that EverQuest did.”
Read on for more MMO essays, with topics on interactive dungeon elements, pointless MMOs, Fallout 76 impressions, addiction to No Man’s Sky, and more!
GamingSF: Interactive objects in dungeons are great
“I’ve written before about interactive objects in MMORPGs, a feature I wish more games made use of to a greater extent. Dungeons & Dragons Online has so many different ways in which your characters can interact with the environment, whether through collectable objective-related things, dungeon progression objects such as traps and levers or just loot giving objects such as the barrels, crates and chests.”
MMO Fallout: Why does Eternal Magic exist?
“Eternal Magic has everything you might want out of a modern Chinese MMORPG. Stolen assets? Check. Shameless pay to win? Definitely. A borderline nonsensical, half-translated story? You betcha. Auto-pathing? Assuredly. Graphics that look like prototype-era World of Warcraft? You’ve come to the right place.”
Virtual Bastion: Wastelanders is good, but it’s still Fallout 76
“This remains an MMO variant with other player-characters populating and depopulating Appalachia. The general look and feel of the game is better, but it’s far from perfect. And though Wastelanders is single-player friendly, I have to admit that grouping made a lot of the fetching and searching and unlocking seem less burdensome.”
Common Sense Gamer: DDO Druid build
“Let me start by saying that the Druid Class in DnD has never been meant to be a complete generalist and the DDO Druid incarnation is no different. Just like other classes with multiple specialization areas, the DDO Druid can either be very effective in one role, or epic level garbage in all of them. You are either a healer/buffer/cc caster or a DPS caster or a melee or a summoner.”
SparkoMarcoGaming: No Man’s Sky addiction
“I think I should focus on the storyline first rather than the exploring and building so that when I eventually move onto another game, I’ll at least have played the storyline out instead of spending all my time just flying around even if that is fun.”
Mailvatar: The handy guide to Instruments in ArcheAge
“ArcheAge has many portable instruments that you can play anywhere and anytime, and also stationary ones which you need to place in your house before you can use them. Some of the latter only serve as props and cannot play sheet music though, so beware.”
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.
