Blogger Yeebo Fernbottom has a beef with MMOs, and maybe you can relate. The issue, as the Yeebs sees it, is that in the endless pursuit of class balance, we’ve ended up with a field of boring professions that are too close to each other.
“However I also can’t help but feel like we have lost something that originally attracted to me to MMOs. Different classes used to (and in older MMOs generally still do) have wildly different capabilities. This forced you to approach the game from a completely different perspective when you played different classes.”
Do you agree? Disagree? Chew on that and several other essays from fellow gamers in this edition of Global Chat!
Virtual Bastion: Fallout 76 and ESO —A Novice’s Views, One Year Later
“My most significant takeaway from playing the game in 2019 was that it was very inconsistent. I never knew from one session to the next if I was going to have a great time or an awful time. Experience points trickled out like molasses in winter, enemy scaling was terrible, and the simple act of getting through a single quest was sometimes maddening, especially when high-level hordes ‘accidentally’ entered the match. All these factors still hold somewhat true in Fallout 76 in 2020, but, to Bethesda’s credit, significant improvements have been made.”
Going Commando: SWTOR’s on Steam, but what does it mean?
“This is one of those things that’s simultaneously huge and completely irrelevant, depending on how you look at it. It’s huge because it’s undoubtedly a good thing for the game – launching on Steam is the digital download equivalent of selling your product on Amazon, which is to say that it gets put in front of a huge number of eyeballs that wouldn’t otherwise have known about it. Lots of new players plus more money for the developers are good things in my book!”
Nerdy Bookahs: Jumping into GW2’s Path of Fire again
“For some weird reason, I suddenly felt the urge to play Guild Wars 2 again. Since I am now focusing on the warrior and had only played through the expansion with my mesmer before, all the maps are still locked for her. That is, I don’t have waypoints for them yet and still need to go there. I also don’t think I had seen all the expansion maps with my mesmer, so I am just starting over again with my warrior to see them all in chronological order.”
GamingSF: MMORPGs — just for fun
“I do a lot of meetings and project organisation at work, so for my hobby and freetime to be dominated by scheduled ‘fun’ really isn’t for me. Granted I’ve had regular tabletop RPG games for weeks or months at a time, but that’s not a high-performance gaming situation and the groupsize is much smaller. If I want the large group boss fight experience, I can get my fill from world boss fights, public quests or zone-wide activities in a number of different MMORPGs.”
“Maybe we do end up with the A/B cycle of good/bad expansions. I hope so more for Blizzard’s sake than my own. There are a lot of eyes on this expansion, and if the cash cow that is WoW no longer produces, we are all aware that Mr. Kotick is more than willing to take action to solve it. Way too many people lose in that event.”
Kaylriene: Morally grey stories done right [Shadowlands spoilers]
“However, in what I think is an unintended form, the story of Shadowlands has a great bit of morally gray storytelling I love. To get into it, let’s talk about Bastion and the Kyrian… What really has sold me on it via the beta, however, is the surprising depth of the story, despite how much of that I think is unintentional in a way.”
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.
