Thanks to a recent piece by MMO Folklorist, I learned something that I had never known about The Secret World: Apparently, in early development the game was to be set in the 1920s rather than present day. And according to this piece, that might have been for Secret World’s betterment.
“None of it is scary, but it’s that exact blend of spookiness and comfiness that The Secret World swings for and comes up short. It’s a different kind of tackiness. One whose imagery outdates us all and therefore doesn’t carry the personal weight that TSW‘s 2000’s inspired horror styling does.”
Read on for more MMO essays about LOTRO, WoW Classic, and more!
The Ancient Gaming Noob has a lot of MMO questions for 2023: “Will Daybreak give up on its ‘LOTRO on consoles’ fantasy? I think they will. But I also think they won’t come out and say it, that they’ll do their usual routine and just pretend it was never announced and was never a thing and Columbus Nova was never part of the deal with SOE.”
MMO Fallout has harsh words for Square Enix’s live services: “Square Enix spent much of 2021 and 2022 modeling itself off of Gamigo, launching titles that had no business being live services that their teams were unable to support, their marketing too inept to actually advertise, their management too stupid to control, and that were doomed to failure from the start.”
Mailvatar revisited Secret World’s scenario missions: “If this sounds stressful that’s because it is. However, TSW is a game that always managed to make me feel like anything’s doable, no matter how impossible it might seem at first, and that I just need to find a way that’s suited for the task and also works for me as a player.”
Priest with a Cause looked back at a full roster of WoW Classic adventures: “The Tauren hunter I originally created because all my friends abandoned me about a month into Classic has returned to being my main, and she’s also the character that made the most progress this year, going from the hodgepodge mix of greens and blues pictured in my 2019 year-in-review post to a mix of tier 2 and 3.”
Tales of the Aggronaut reviewed a year chock-full of MMO gaming: “Fallout 76 has been something I have quietly played off and on whenever the mood hit me, and it wasn’t really that I started actively talking about it until the rest of AggroChat got into it.”
Yeebo Fernbottom takes Standing Stone Games’ customer service to task: “I fully believe that the only reason SSG even has a ticket system is as an escape valve for pissed off customers. They hope that most players will submit a ticket, give up after a while, and then forget about the entire incident that made them submit one.”
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.
