Massively Overpowered

A lot of Crowfall is going to come down to the environments. That might seem a little bit odd or silly, but if you consider it for a moment, you realize that it's absolutely vital for players to have structures like keeps be exciting places to attack or defend, not just straight rushes from an entryway to a goal....

I didn't game as much as I would have liked this weekend, but I did manage a smidge of Elite: Dangerous, a bit of Windward, and a tiny bit of Assassin's Creed: Rogue. Yes, I know I'm terribly late to the party on that last one. But this Daily Grind isn't about what I played, it's about what you accomplished....

Were you too busy gaming this week to pay attention to MMO news? Get caught up every Sunday evening with Massively Overpowered's Week in Review! Hey, remember EverQuest Next? Daybreak does too, which is why it announced on Friday that it's shifting developer attention to the unreleased title. There are caveats, of course; Daybreak won't commit to a 2015 release, and...

When I last checked in on indie PvE sandbox Villagers and Heroes a year ago, the Steam launch was busy rocking the game with dramatic changes that sent a lot of veteran players running for the hills. Even back then, developer Mad Otter was discussing a revamp of the game to nuke the controversial energy mechanic that propelled the game's...

Last week, Heroes of the Storm launched. But that was the past, and Blizzard is all about looking ahead to the future. Part of this forward thinking is the preparation of a meaty content expansion for the game called Eternal Conflict. Eternal Conflict's keystone features will be a brand-new map, Battlefield of Eternity, as well as an additional character. The...

Gaming giant Nintendo is no stranger to online play, but its online play usually comes with distinct limitations on the game that features it. The Animal Crossing series takes the best advantage of online play, creating small, shared worlds (player towns) where players can interact and actually talk to each other through direct text input and voice chat. Even so, many game options, such as doing...

Black Desert is exiting its Korean open beta this month. Developer Pearl Abyss and publisher Daum will be merging all the game's servers into a single megashard "and perhaps a multiple channel system," Steparu reports. He goes on to summarize his experience with the fantasy sandbox after nearly a year of playing its various beta stages, and it's not all...

When EverQuest's newest progression server Ragefire came online then took an immediate nosedive, I sprang from my chair cheering. Hey now, don't aim those eye daggers at me! Hear me out. My revelry was not because I wanted the server to fail and die. Quite the opposite, in fact: The reception it received, and the fact that so many were...

The wheels in my head have been turning over non-combat mechanics in MMOs for a while now, perhaps because of the buzz surrounding Wander, the latest MMO to ditch combat entirely in favour of less violent interactive mechanics. I have to confess that I'm not a massive fan of thoughtless violence in my MMOs, so I tend to favour...

One of the stranger Final Fantasy tropes is that the more powerful a summoned creature is, the longer it would take for any given game to play its animation. By the time I left the series around Final Fantasy X, summons were getting ridiculously long (like, make yourself lunch and go to the bathroom long). I can only imagine...