The high cost of Oculus Rift brought a lot of discussion to the MMO blogosphere recently, with writers taking sides for and against the price, the platform, and the possible future of virtual reality gaming.
“I guess for me virtual reality has been this failed promise for so long that I have doubted that it would actually really arrive,” Tales of the Aggronaut wrote. “It gets even more risky when you start thinking back to horror stories of peripherals touting new and interesting ways to play games that didn’t make it,” Overly Positive cautioned. “VR is a part of the future, not the future,” In An Age noted.
When the dust settles, will people buy? Nobody can seem to agree on this. “I am more concerned with it being the price of ‘scare away adoption’,” Sagacyte said. “The Oculus Rift goal to make VR more of a mainstream thing seems to contradict its pricing,” The Tankquisition stated. “That price, for all the loud complaints it has yielded, doesn’t seem to be hurting the popularity of the pre-orders,” The Ancient Gaming Noob observed.
Beyond virtual reality, our round-up of MMO blog posts today includes an exploration of emulators, a criticism of Guild Wars 2’s philosophy shift, and more!
Inventory Full: Vanguard and Warhammer Online emulators
Bhagpuss has been exploring the grey realms of MMO emulators, having taken a dip in both Vanguard and Warhammer Online revival shards. If you’ve ever been curious what you might find on these, read on!
“I made a Squigg Herder, one of my top five all-time favorite MMO classes,” he wrote. “I fiddled with the UI a bit and then wandered out and started plinking. The place was heaving. The server holds a thousand players and I was in the mid-900s when I logged in.”
Waiting for Rez: End game in Black Desert Online
Iron Weakness was curious what endgame activities lay in store for Black Desert players, so he did a bit of research into the matter and decided to share his findings with the world. He also penned a piece on the pros and cons of the game so far as he saw it.
One such activity? Horse breeding! “BDO has an elaborate system for catching, leveling, and breeding horses. One of the activities you can do (once you’ve leveled the taming skill by riding a donkey…) is go out into the wild, lasso a horse, and make it your own. Horses come in several ranks but the higher level ranks must be reached through breeding. Horses also have their own skills to level, there is gear and cosmetics to craft for them, and they can participate in races for prizes as well.”
Occasional Hero: Philosophy shifts in Heart of Thorns, and why they’re wrong
Chaos Constant is less than pleased with the approach that Guild Wars 2 took with its first expansion. Mostly, he sees the devs flip-flopping on design that was in place from the start — and he doesn’t think it’s helping anything.
“The one-to-cap leveling time is shorter and easier than any other game I can think of (there’s a reason why I have three 80s in Guild Wars 2 and in most games I’m lucky to even have one). Perhaps if the game hadn’t done this so well with Central Tyria it wouldn’t have felt so jarring to be presented with such a grind when we got to Heart of Thorns in the form of masteries. And it doesn’t help that many of them seem so contrived. ”
Ravalation: The day on which virtual people made me cry
Have you ever had an in-game experience that was traumatic enough that it evoked a strong emotional reaction — or even made you cry? Ravalation had in Lord of the Rings Online a while back, and she recalled this experience in which a dungeon group made her snap.
“So they wanted to do the Watcher and needed a competent lore-master for it — but then they told me I was not allowed to roll for anything, because they had promised all the loot to a fellow kinship member,” she wrote. “Much to my own surprise, I broke down in tears behind the computer at this point. Aware of the silliness of my reaction, I tried to understand what I felt.”
7 Days a Week: An unfortunate incident in the chapel
Kids can get their parents into a lot of trouble if not adequately supervised. Xannziee knows all about that, as his daughter ended up sparking a full-blown massacre in Elder Scrolls Online because of her devious pickpocketing ways.
“So she had to kill each and every one of them and became mass murderer with a huge bounty on her head before we could leave the chapel with rosy cheeks of shame. We left dead bodies laying all over the floor, but at least they were in the chapel already, blessed I’m sure.”
Healing the Masses: The call of Camelot Unchained’s PvP focus
Camelot Unchained certainly has its strong supporters who deeply respect what the game is trying to do. One of these fans is Jewel, who puts her finger on the game’s PvP focus as the primary draw.
“It looks fantastic so far,” she gushes. “A development [team] focused on creating solid foundations for PvP first and layering features on top. A game that has learnt from the past mistakes of the many MMOs before it and is putting these lessons into practice, and a game that isn’t afraid to innovate and truly create something unique.”
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.
