game design
EVE Evolved: Solving EVE Online’s botting problem
Practically every MMO on the market today has had to contend with botting and the range of issues that come with it, and EVE Online...
Choose My Adventure: Wrapping up our adventures in Project Gorgon
There's a familiar situation to players of tabletop games wherein a sidequest becomes more important than the main quest, and you wind up taking...
EVE Evolved: A matter of balance in EVE Online
Throughout its almost 15-year lifetime, EVE Online has walked a fine line between developing new features and iterating on existing gameplay. Development has to...
Saga of Lucimia discusses running after your corpse when you die in a pit
Show of hands, readers: How many of you have had great fun dealing with corpse runs, trying to retrieve your gear from the spot...
Tale of Toast is entering early access next month
Tale of Toast is an insidious title that sucks the unwary player in with colorful and innocent graphics... then kicks his or her butt...
The Daily Grind: Are there character options in an MMO you want to enjoy but never like?
Demon Hunters are a class I really want to enjoy in World of Warcraft, but I've never really succeeded at that goal. This is...
The Daily Grind: What MMO has the worst possible maps?
When I think back about the ways in which MMOs have improved over the 15-ish years I've been playing them, my thoughts invariably turn...
Crowfall is spicing up its maps with ‘adventure parcels’
The maps in Crowfall are assembled in a combination of procedural and hand-crafted generation. Individual bits are hand-crafted, but the maps as a whole...
CCP is working on ‘a new and highly ambitious MMORPG’
Even with massive downsizing and the end of its virtual reality ambitions, CCP hasn't quite thrown in the towel just yet.
One of our tipsters...
EVE Evolved: 2017 EVE Online year in review
We've reached the end of another year, and it's certainly been a busy one for EVE Online. This year saw heavy gameplay iteration, with...
MMO Mechanics: 2017’s MMO Mechanics in review
I cannot quite believe that we're saying goodbye to 2017 and ringing in 2018 so quickly: It certainly doesn't feel as though an entire...
Gaming industry roundup: SWBG2’s poor sales, Gambling Commission, slot machines, and parody games
Don't agree that lockboxes, lootboxes, and gambleboxes were the biggest story of the year? We've collected so many news tidbits just on that over...
EVE Evolved: Calling time on EVE Online’s five-year vision
When Andie "CCP Seagull" Nordgren walked onto the stage at EVE Fanfest 2013 and delivered her long-term vision for the future of EVE Online,...
LOTRO Legendarium: Fixing Lord of the Rings Online’s grouping problem
One of the quirks -- and frustrations -- of MMORPGs is that there never seems to be one game that truly has it all....
Massively Overthinking: Taking risks in MMORPGs
Last weekend, Brendan wrote a great column on how to stay safe from gankers in EVE Online, noting that the newbies are commonly given...
The Soapbox: Inconvenience is not immersion in MMOs or anywhere else
Inconvenience is not immersion.
This strikes me as something rather ridiculous to type; to mildly paraphrase Dan Harmon, it seems like should be one of...
EVE Evolved: Three top tips for staying safe from gankers in EVE Online
EVE Online is renowned for its cold, harsh universe and relatively few rules, and we've all heard the horror stories over the years of...
MMO Mechanics: What can be learned from Guild Wars 2 Mountgate?
Most often, MMO Mechanics articles focus on the gameplay mechanics that both make the MMO genre unique and those that diversify MMOs from one...
Divining the details of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite from a Pokemon Go player’s perspective
When we first heard rumors about a Harry Potter version of Pokemon Go, I said I could barely imagine what the game might be like before...
EVE Evolved: EVE Online’s CCP Games is gambling with the livelihoods of employees
Last week we broke the story that EVE Online developer CCP Games is backing out of the virtual reality games market, closing its Altanta...
