In a recent essay over at Inventory Full, the author looks back at a couple decades-plus of MMO gaming to recall how fast and insistent various titles were in trying to get players to group.
“Thinking of the other immediately post-WoW MMORPGs I’ve played, from Star Wars: the Old Republic to Lord of the Rings Online to RIFT to Wildstar, I get the feeling that the more grimly they hung on to the old concept of forced grouping, the worse they fared.”
Read on for more essays about Overwatch 2, Elder Scrolls Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and more!
Chasing Dings looked at Google Trends to see what MMOs are the most talked about: “These two games are always on the verge of breaking through, but a huge gap still separates them from the front runners. TESO ties into the stories of the Elder Scrolls franchise, extending the various settings into a new age. RuneScape 3 is a modern re-imagining of the original RuneScape that still preserves the innovative skill-based leveling.”
Massively Multiplayer Fallout gave some first impressions of Torchlight Infinite: “There’s a game under all of this clutter, and a decent one at that. It’s an ARPG and as a fan of mindlessly killing thousands of mobs, I can dig it. But for every 15 minutes Torchlight Infinite is letting you enjoy yourself, it occasionally kicks you in the head just to remind you that it can.”
Tales of the Aggronaut takes Blizzard to task over Overwatch 2: “Even after reading through the carefully shaped statement… I still feel like there just isn’t any reason for me to pay attention to Overwatch 2 from this point forward. They dropped the parts of the 2019 vision for the game, that I cared about.”
MMO Juggler did an Elder Scrolls Online trial (raid) on a lowbie: “The genesis of this was a dare more or less, given the level scaling and how people go on about how normal mode is so easy, a challenge was issued: take a group of low level characters into trial content and clear it.”
The Ancient Gaming Noob looks at both sides of the new Amazon LOTR MMO announcement: “And I strongly suspect that anything Amazon produces will bear only a superficial resemblance to what LOTRO offers today.  I opined eight years ago, as we passed through a past LOTRO anniversary, half the game’s lifetime ago now, that the era of making anything as sprawling and chaotic as Turbine’s vision of Middle-earth seemed done and gone.”
Kaylriene made fast progress through WoW’s Mythic+ content this season… and feels conflicted about it: “I think the bittersweet thing is weird, in that I expected it to be more of a journey. I expected to meet resistance at points, to have a grindier path before me, to have multiple posts documenting the journey, but not even that long after I wrote my early experiences post, BAM – Keystone Master.”
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.
