With the rise of online sandboxes and other mini-MMOs (if that oxymoron can exist), several long-time MMO bloggers are praising the virtues and benefits of such approaches.
Among these voices is the Ancient Gaming Noob, who cites Valheim as a key factor in changing his opinion: “I don’t think the MMORPG is going away. There is still something to be said for the big game with many people playing in parallel. But the smaller world, the shared persistent space you and your friends can share… that feels like it has a long ways to go before it seems over-populated as a genre.”
Virtual Bastion judged Skyforge to be fine-but-forgettable after some hands-on time: “My first discovery was that if Skyforge departed from other MMORPGs in one significant way, it was with one’s own character. In a vast majority of RPGs, players start out with nothing and must build themselves up. In Skyforge, players start out essentially as gods, with ‘celestial’ powers and gear already in tow.”
Inventory Full is done worrying about MMO labels: “I don’t even feel the lack of the handful of other players Wilhelm still considers necessary to bring a virtual world alive. While I agree their presence would add much to the experience, I no longer feel their absence invalidates or even diminishes the value of exploring or home-making alone.”
The Lazy Goldmaker looked at the ramifications for WoW’s global auction house: “In economic theory competition brings down prices and profits in a given market. We will now all be facing substantially higher competition. The main factor here is how the dynamics of the AH will work. We will also be selling into a market with much higher demand. Overall it’s not clear that the new material balance will be substantially different to how it already is on a super high pop realm.”
Micki’s Delirium reviewed Dungeons and Dragons Online’s Isle of Dread: “I do like the Isle itself, it’s pretty, it’s large and it has a lot of dinosaurs, the quests themselves were just average. Some were more fun than others, but over all they don’t seem like something I would go back to just because they’re so much fun to run.”
I also want to mention that Blaugust 2022 is coming up next month! If you’re not familiar with this, it’s a month-long community event where current game and hobby bloggers encourage new and lapsed writers to take up their virtual pen and get to writing. There’s a lot of encouragement, promotion, prompts, mentorship, and networking that happens during this month.
You can learn more about it over at Tales of the Aggronaut: “The hope is with each Blaugust that we might spur some lax bloggers back into action and also spread the art form to a new generation. There is something deeply therapeutic about scribbling down a bunch of words and sending them out into the world for others to read.”
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.
