Massively Overpowered

While other studio teams are powering down for the holidays, it looks as though Star Citizen's crew is keeping up the pace. The team just put out Alpha 2.1 today, bringing with it the flyable Freelancer base and Sabre fighter, as well as several fixes for the Crusader region. Alpha 2.0 has seen over 80,000 players explore it since...

Ahh, 'tis the season: When goodies galore are hidden inside a magical closet and gigglegibber goblins give out gifts. Yes, it's Frostfell time! And in EverQuest II, that's quite possibly the most anticipated live event of the year. Whether you've been gone a while and just lured back by the or you've been counting down the days in Norrath...

Every week for the last few years, we've expanded on our "Daily Grind" theme with a Leaderboard poll. On the one hand, seeing the numbers and bar graphs is a quantitative sort of magic that we don't often get from our other articles. On the other hand, it's really obvious when a certain game's community is swarming and brigading a...

To celebrate the holidays -- and promote its newest patch -- RIFT is giving everyone patron access for seven days. Patron access is RIFT's subscription service that comes with several bonuses, not the least of which is the game's new affinity system. Trion Worlds points out that all patron players who log in will rack up affinity points every day. This...

Christmas means different things to different people. Some folks imbue it with family-oriented festivities, others consider it a religious day, and others just think of it as a free day off work (or a quick way to make some overtime pay!). Before I had kids, I sometimes gamed on Christmas. For many years, my husband and I lived far from family and didn't always...

We gave out a lot of awards this month for things games did in 2015, and we talked about what we think will happen in 2016. But what about what we wish would happen next year? Do you have hopes and dreams about our genre's upcoming year? If you could make one single wish about the coming year of MMOs,...

The first month of operation is a tumultuous time for any new title. Devilian feels as if it were just announced, but it launched back on December 10th, and the community has been plowing through its content along the way. The newest producer's letter for the game takes a look at the overall launch environment, which was positive aside...

Massively OP's end-of-the-year awards continue today with our blooper award for Best MMO Milking Sim. And the winner is... Project Gorgon What, did you think this award was just an excuse to pick on early access or crowdfunding "milking"? Not this time! Project Gorgon is the best MMO in which you can milk animals. In fact, Justin tells me you can milk other...

If you've ever thought that the Bartle test was a bit outdated, game analytics consulting firm Quantic Foundry has a new gamer psych chart for you. This past week, it released its Gamer Motivation Model, which groups gamer types into three "clusters of motivations" joined by "discovery" and "power" bridges. In the bottom-right orange cluster, there’s an Action-Social cluster that combines the interest...

Being able to clearly understand what a card does and how it can be used is the subject of a new designer insights video from Hearthstone. Lead Designer Ben Brode explains how an online game differs a little from a physical one in this regard: "Consistency is wildly important in physical card games. Because in a physical card game the only...