Belghast over at Tales of the Aggronaut is going through several stages of grief over the news that Anthem has ceased active development. It’s not been a good day for him (or any Anthem fans, for that matter), but it doesn’t stop him from doing a little analysis of the game’s weak spots.
“So each player is going to ultimately have their own hit list for what went wrong with Anthem, but for me personally it boils down to two points,” he wrote. “The first is that the game just needed more content, simple as that. The story that you play through in the campaign felt like the opening chapter of a much larger tale.”
Read on for more MMO essays, including raves about Valheim, issues with Shadowlands‘ covenants, and reactions to Burning Crusade Classic.
24 Hours In: Too much of a good thing
“Valheim remains a great game. If anything I’m more impressed with it now than I was a week ago because the more I see of it the more I like what I see. It’s yet to put a foot wrong, and that’s rare since even the best games invariably have weak points. All the same it’s so good it’s reawakened all kinds of bad gaming habits which I’ve been breaking with for the past year and a half.”
Gnomecore: My problem with covenants lore-wise
“Don’t get me wrong, inside every Covenant the theme pulses perfectly. Every Covenant has a strong flavor, has a strong visual and ambience theme – but together they do not form anything whole, they are simply not parts of a single realm. Whatever approach you take.”
Kaylriene: The Burning Crusade Classic
“In my opinions, this announcement is sort of interesting, because it is clear that Blizzard is brushing against the limits of what the Classic audience will allow. The introduction of paid boosts and paid cloning will likely be met with some controversy, and while I do think that the design intent is kind and thoughtful, it is also undoubtedly going to be a revenue generator and is at least somewhat justified at the business level through the income this will undoubtedly produce.”
Kamalia et alia: BlizzCon 2021 thoughts
“Flying in 9.1, good, good — and even better that earning it only requires completing a 9.1 Covenant campaign, which is something that I’m going to do anyway. I don’t mind flying being only in the four leveling zones; that will take most of the bite out of not having the Flight Whistle. I’m not particularly excited about any of the Covenant flying mounts, though.”
GamingSF: My MMORPG gaming history
“I noticed via Twitter that some MMORPG players were tweeting lists of the games in the genre they had “ever played (even for just for like a day)”. Belghast has done a blog post on the same topic, with a link to the source Tweet, if you’re interested. Such a list is likely to be rather long for myself – I’ve tried a lot of MMORPGs over the years since I started in the genre.”
The Ancient Gaming Noob: The perils of entering the MMORPG market
“As Jennings pointed out, these games have come to belong, emotionally at least, far more to the fans than the companies. It is their experiences and histories now and they won’t let it go. It almost isn’t up to the company anymore because the fans will take matters into their own hands if the developers won’t cooperate. And if the game is going to be running in some form with or without the studio, the studio might as well keep its hand in and make some money from an official version rather than losing what control they do have.”
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.
