sci-fantasy
Vague Patch Notes: How widespread free-to-play impacted MMORPGs
In 2009, Dungeons & Dragons Online went free-to-play, which was a pretty big deal at the time. It was especially important to me, since...
Raph Koster’s new MMORPG is called Stars Reach, and yes, it’s basically Star Wars Galaxies 2
It's June 26th, Star Wars Galaxies' 21st birthday, and I'm sitting on Google Meet talking to none other than MMORPG founding father (and SWG...
Guild Wars 2’s new housing looks like WildStar’s islands plus the old Hall of Monuments
Ever since ArenaNet announced Guild Wars 2's Janthir Wilds expansion, there's been considerable debate among core Guild Wars 2 players and dedicated MMORPG housing...
Massively Overthinking: Unfair stigmas that follow MMORPGs
A few weeks back, our team was discussing the intersection of survival sandboxes, MMORPG virtual worlds, and gankboxes - and how hard it is...
MMO Business Roundup: Activision owned cheatmaker EngineOwning
Welcome back to another quick roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent business news! Business business business and all that.
EngineOwning got owned - File this one...
Vague Patch Notes: Why do so many MMOs fail?
We talk a lot about MMOs that fail here on Massively Overpowered. I wrote a whole column about how our standards of success are...
Perfect Ten: My top 10 favorite MMOs across two decades
Normally in these Perfect Ten lists, I'm very outward-facing. I like to create lists that are as helpful or amusing as possible for others...
Perfect Ten: 10 favorite features that pairs of popular MMOs share
Even though all MMORPGs compete for our time, affection, and -- above all else -- money, it doesn't mean that they can't get along....
Skyforge is celebrating its ninth anniversary with the return of Aelion Day
Here's some happy news for your Thursday: Skyforge has made it to nine years of life here in North America, or close enough as...
LOTRO Legendarium: 27 practical benefits of LOTRO’s player housing
There's this ongoing common perception in MMOs like Lord of the Rings Online that player housing is good for one and only one purpose:...
Working As Intended: The top 10 hot tubs in MMORPGs
It's been a running joke for a few years that I always put hot tubs in my MMO houses whenever possible, and once that...
Vague Patch Notes: Why in the world do you want the Riot MMO to be a thing?
Let's make something clear right up front: If you came into this column eager to head for the comments section to say, "Well, I...
Skyforge finally launches Demons 2024 Season (and compensation) after several delays
About a month ago, MY.GAMES roused itself from its slumber and told Skyforge fans that in spite of its "long silence," development of the...
Perfect Ten: MMOs where you can play as robots and cyborgs
Robots are, let's face it, very important. You might say that's not true, and to that I say: When you get to write the...
Skyforge devs promise that ‘development of Skyforge continues’ in spite of long silence
It's been a disturbing long time since we heard much out of Skyforge - it's been two months since a Discord update and a...
Not So Massively: Stormgate isn’t delivering a revolution (yet)
Stormgate's marketing is laser-focused on studio Frost Giant's plan to deliver an "RTS revolution." With StarCraft II still popular but slowly waning as it...
Massively OP Podcast Episode 456: The MMO housing show
Justin and Bree tackle a theme proposed by the listeners, as this show is all about MMORPG housing, including why housing matters, post-launch housing patches, placement tools, prefab vs. custom houses, housing as part of the gameplay loop, apartments vs. instanced vs. open-world housing, incentivizing housing use, taxes and monetization, and integrating housing into MMO ecosystems.
Vague Patch Notes: What City of Heroes Homecoming means for the wider MMORPG industry
As you have probably noticed from the fact that I have been writing about City of Heroes nonstop since the Homecoming server got its...
The Game Archaeologist’s ultimate MMO archives v7.0
Once again we put a wrap on another year of MMORPG news, opinions, and -- most pertinent to this column -- history. In a...
WildStar roleplayers open and develop a socially-minded rogue server called Genesis Prime
For the past few years we've been peeking in with hopeful looks at Nexus Forever, the rogue server project for WildStar that we first...