game design

NCsoft Q4 2024: Guild Wars 2 and Blade & Soul are doing great, with Aion 2 waiting in the wings

9
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

5
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

2
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

10
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

3
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...
It's guilded.

Design Mockument: What should Guild Wars 3 look like?

10
We know that Guild Wars 3 is happening... probably. I mean, we have no specific details about Guild Wars 3, other than the fact...
Sparky!

Design Mockument: In defense of visual ability customization in MMORPGs

2
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

0
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

9
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

1
"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...
hashtag changes, always changes

Dual spec and no buff/debuff limits are coming to the WoW Classic anniversary realms

4
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’

7
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...
moo

Vague Patch Notes: Solipsism and what it means for playing MMORPGs

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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

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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...
no mad lizert

Perfect Ten: The reward categories for killing a major enemy in MMORPGs

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If an enemy exists in an MMORPG that you are supposed to kill in some fashion, it is going to offer you some kind...
fine

Vague Patch Notes: The problem with numbers in MMORPGs

10
I recently saw a post on the official World of Warcraft forums noting that if not for the game's almost infamous level squish, players...

Raph Koster on designing and defining Stars Reach: ‘The Tragedy of the Commons is a lie’

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Playable Worlds' Raph Koster is back with a new dev blog on Stars Reach, and it's not about game design pillars this time; it's...

Massively Overthinking: How much research do you do before playing a new MMORPG?

23
On this week's MOP Podcast, Justin and I discussed our experiences in No Man's Sky (again), and both of us came to the conclusion...
This plan sure worked!

WoW Factor: The mulligan problem in World of Warcraft’s narrative

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In World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, Illidan Stormrage gets killed. This isn't actually a surprising end for the character. Illidan as a person...

Raph Koster aims to make Stars Reach complex but not overcomplicated – and focused on retention

21
You didn't think Playable Worlds' Raph Koster was going to stop at just two pillars of design for his new sandbox MMORPG Stars Reach,...

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