A tantalizing question mark on World of Warcraft’s 2024 roadmap has a lot of the community talking and guessing, and MMO blogger Kaylriene looked at this unusual instance of Blizzard withholding patch info as an example of how datamining might be harmful to a game’s operation.
“In a way, this kind of puts the game in a weird spot, where the assumptions about what makes WoW healthy or not are kind of being challenged by all of this,” the essay observes.
Read on for more MMO essays covering FFXIV, ARPGs, New World, and more!
Tales of the Aggronaut explained why he now mains ARPGs: “More than that ARPGs gave me all of the complexity and loot chase that I craved, but the ability to take all of it at my own pace. I could play rich and mechanically interesting characters and did not need other players to accomplish any goals that I set out for myself.”
Heartless Gamer is bummed about the New World delay: “The Season 5 delay was not unexpected. The update has a major change for the game as the dev team has re-written the entire combat engine in a new scripting language called slayer script. The team has said this change will allow them to move faster and fix more issues.”
Recollections of Play is happy to be back in FFXIV: “My thought process over its hype went something like why don’t I just start FFXIV fresh on the Xbox with all the new players so that when I get to the forced group content we’d all be new to it and I wouldn’t feel so terrible about being bad at the game because I’m new just like everyone else.”
The Ancient Gaming Noob has five ideas for special WoW servers: “I love this idea and I hate this idea. And I only love it because I believe it would prove the point that nobody really wants this as an option. So yeah, what if we had Darkfall rules in a WoW Classic context?”
Dragonchasers is hooked on exploring virtual worlds: “I loved No Man’s Sky because I enjoyed flying to different planets and seeing the sights, and the fact that I could lift off, fly to another planet and land without any loading screens.”
Kay Talks Games is happy for the social glue that games provide: “Once online gaming took off, things really changed. I can remember so many stories about the impact World of Warcraft had on gaming circles, since it was such a huge mainstream success. Playing an MMO is still a popular way to make friends while gaming, since entire friend groups can form around guilds.”
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.
