We’ll kick off this week’s tour of MMO blogs with a diverse first impressions piece of The War Within by Kaylriene, who praises the expansion’s zone design and story as well as its general upward trend.
“Each zone is beautiful and full of interesting storytelling items and locations that say so much. The Ringing Deeps are overrun with pipes and give way to an open nature area, while Hallowfall is defined by the light and shadow cycle of Beledar and feels so interesting for it. Azj-Kahet makes me so mad we never got that Azjol-Nerub zone in Wrath because I would have loved to see it and loved to see that style evolve into how good Azj-Kahet is.”
Read on for more MMO essays about New World, SWTOR, EVE, and more!
Dragonchasers offers up some thoughts on the New World console version: “I decided to try out the Open Beta and chose to do it on Xbox. I was, honestly, pleasantly surprised. The game played nicely with a controller; for me it was arguably more fun than when I used to use mouse and keyboard.”
The Ancient Gaming Noob isn’t too kind to EVE’s new blockchain game: “The one thing I did not predict was how shy CCP would be on the whole blockchain thing. It is not getting any sort of top billing. It isn’t in any of its headlines. The press release doesn’t bring it up.”
Inventory Full returned to Star Wars: The Old Republic: “SWTOR clearly does not care one whit whether you play the game or not. In a weird way it’s quite refreshing to be taken so utterly for granted but I’m not sure how wise a choice it is, commercially.”
Yeebo Fernbottom revisited the “Knights” era in SWTOR: “Unfortunately, BioWare seemed to completely lose their way around 2016 with the launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne, and to my tastes, it took a really long time for the game to recover.”
Many Whelps wrapped up Guild Wars 2’s Heart of Thorns: “I was surprised how short the story was for Heart of Thorns. Only 16 chapters and it probably took me around 10 hours in total to complete. I would hazard a guess that the core story felt longer because chapters were broken up by level requirements.”
Tobold predicts that live service games are on their way out in the industry: “There has been a trend in these past years of large game companies making live service games and failing miserably with them. The latest entry, Concord from Sony, probably broke all records by shutting down already two weeks after release. ”
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.
