game design
Massively on the Go: Niantic games under Scopely may not be so bad, actually
In case you missed the news, Pokemon GO's Niantic has finally confirmed that it is indeed offloading its games to Scopely. Oddly enough, it...
Massively on the Go: Pokemon Go’s Unova Tour was functional but no fun
Pokemon GO's just announced the next Go Fest, but the recent Unova Tour LA Tour and now the Global Tour have both recently concluded,...
Vague Patch Notes: Talking about power creep in MMOs
"Power creep" is a nasty term when talking about video games, and usually whenever it gets brought up, it gets brought up as a...
The Soapbox: Difficulty is a means to an end in MMORPGs
A few weeks back, I took a peak into Corepunk's early access build, and I promptly got my ass kicked by even the most...
Pantheon Rise of the Fallen plots Druid class and PvP servers and wrestles with ‘game-breaking’ bugs
There are a lot of things to ruminate on for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen's latest news post, which is once again looking back...
NCsoft Q4 2024: Guild Wars 2 and Blade & Soul are doing great, with Aion 2 waiting in the wings
The MMO company financial news just keeps coming this week as now we've got NCsoft's Q4 2024 financial report, and no, this one isn't...
The Riot MMO just lost yet another key staffer, this time its technical director
Don't panic, but another top dev has moved on from Riot Game's Runeterra MMO, what we usually refer to around here as the Riot...
Massively on the Go: Pokemon Go’s Legendary Flight lands with a thud
Niantic's problem isn't that players are over or have forgiven Pokemon Go's Dynamax/Gigantimax raids - it's that the company keeps pushing them in the...
Massively Overthinking: MMOs that suck in interesting ways
This week's Massively Overthinking is entirely inspired by a fantastic argument made by YouTuber on Bluesky. Iron Pineapple declared that "a good game can...
Lawful Neutral: All the big MMO-related law stories from 2024, from Palworld to Blizzard
2024 was another quiet year on the gaming legal front. I think various AI dramas and associated legislative hand-wringing sucked all the air out...
Design Mockument: What should Guild Wars 3 look like?
We know that Guild Wars 3 is happening... probably. I mean, we have no specific details about Guild Wars 3, other than the fact...
Design Mockument: In defense of visual ability customization in MMORPGs
I will never know who it was working behind the scenes at City of Heroes who first had the idea to let players customize...
Albion Online continues patching up Horizons with armor, weapon, and potion buffs
The application of patches to the Horizons update continues for Albion Online, and this time around it's everyone's favorite kind of patch: the item...
Casually Classic: WoW Classic Classic is more than just another hit of nostalgia
Out of all of the things that I didn't expect to be on my 2024 MMO bingo sheet was "Getting absolutely sucked into a...
Massively on the Go: Pokemon Go’s Max Raid and Gigantamax Battles aren’t helping the community
"What's the incentive? They look cool? It's not worth it." This is the player sentiment I've been seeing after people have spent some time...
Dual spec and no buff/debuff limits are coming to the WoW Classic anniversary realms
The fresh anniversary realms for WoW Classic are perhaps not as true to World of Warcraft's past as some might want, or perhaps they're...
NCsoft Q3 2024: NCsoft teases Aion 2 for 2025, says Throne & Liberty sales ‘surpassed internal projections’
It's been one hell of a quarter for NCsoft - and we mean that for every interpretation of the phrase.
As readers might recall, in...
Vague Patch Notes: Solipsism and what it means for playing MMORPGs
We've been talking for the past couple of Vague Patch Notes columns about the fact that MMOs are, as a genre, defined by having...
Stars Reach releases video footage of its movement tech from earliest testing to now
When writing up a post about last week's Stars Reach dev blog on character movement, I kept thinking one thing: This article needs a...
Perfect Ten: The reward categories for killing a major enemy in MMORPGs
If an enemy exists in an MMORPG that you are supposed to kill in some fashion, it is going to offer you some kind...
