raph koster
Playable Worlds’ lead designer: ‘We’re in the game industry because we love games’
Earlier this month, Playable Worlds' Greg Costikyan, the lead designer for Raph Koster's upcoming unnamed sandbox MMORPG, opened up about the way games get...
MUD creator Richard Bartle’s seminal book on designing MMOs is now free
When MMORPG players encounter the name "Bartle," they think less malt liquor and more a man who helped to pioneer the massively multiplayer online...
Massively Overthinking: Are there any ‘blue oceans’ left in the MMO market?
Level Up Labs' Lars Doucet recently penned a blog post practically begging people not to try to compete with ROBLOX by remaking it as...
Playable Worlds’ lead designer: ‘Our industry does not thrive on ideas’
Raph Koster's startup Playable Worlds is working on an MMORPG. A big one. A big one we don't know much about yet, in spite...
GDC 2021: Star Wars Galaxies was a complex game of corporate greed and fan love
It was an MMO built in about three years, with a miserable launch, a depressing churn rate, and the most infamous patch in all...
Massively Overthinking: Load-bearing playerbases in MMORPGs
Game developer Damion Schubert is known to MMO players for his work on everything from Ultima Online to SWTOR, but as it turns out,...
Eight major unannounced MMO projects that are in the works
There's nothing more tantalizing nor frustrating than knowing that an MMO or MMORPG is in the works but hasn't been formally announced yet. We...
The Soapbox: Reconsidering social media as an MMORPG
At GDC 2011, Raph Koster gave a talk in which he said, "Games are fundamentally social media and always have been." You can watch...
The Daily Grind: Can we please nuke the term ‘filthy casual’ into the sun
A while back, MOP reader Aldristavan tweeted a joke about being a "filthy casual" that leaped out at me so hard I had to...
Playable Worlds’ MMO will leverage cloud gaming to simulate a world and be playable on multiple devices
Over the past few weeks, Playable Worlds' Raph Koster has been kicking out lots of blog posts about what his studio's game is aiming...
Raph Koster expounds on MMO fun, retention, and cynicism in the genre
MMORPG developer Raph Koster has been having words about the MMO industry ahead of the reveal of the MMO that his new studio Playable...
Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster shares the secret of good social design in MMOs
Raph Koster, the game designer behind Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Playable Worlds' upcoming project, has posted yet another essay about MMORPG design,...
Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster on the player-driven economies at the heart of virtual worlds
Playable Worlds' Raph Koster is back with another blog post that serves as a tip-off for what kind of MMORPG he and his team...
Massively OP Podcast Episode 315: The Wrath Baby strikes back
Justin, Bree, Chris, and Tyler discuss Magic Legends' soft launch, World of Warcraft's price hikes, WoW Burning Crusade's beta, Elite Dangerous' Odyssey alpha, Raph Koster's virtual world manifesto, and Monster Hunter Rise's launch, with mailbag topics on when subs aren't worth it and why MMO currencies are just the worst.
Playable Worlds’ hiring page suggests Raph Koster’s upcoming MMO is a AAA sandbox
We're assuming that we're destined to hear a lot more about Playable Worlds' incoming MMORPG in the near future, what with Raph Koster's promise...
Playable Worlds’ Raph Koster posts a manifesto on the future of MMOs
Believe us, we here at Massively OP are dying to know all of the details about the online game project that Raph Koster and...
Five pioneering game titles that laid the groundwork for MMORPGs
The easy (and tired) joke to make is that WoW was the first MMO, but there were plenty of ambitious multiplayer games that predate...
Massively Overthinking: Which MMORPG offers the best tutorial?
MMORPG developer Raph Koster recently put this neat article by experimental game developer Nicky Case on my radar. Case notes that common wisdom is...
Massively Overthinking: Do you need to be the hero in MMOs?
MMORPG developer Raph Koster recently tweeted that he'd had a "debate with some devs who asserted that videogames require the player to be the...
Perfect Ten: The top MMOs to watch in 2021
"MMOs are dead!" "MMOs are dying!" "We didn't get any good MMO releases this past year!"
While I won't argue with the last one there,...
