Working As Intended is Massively Overpowered Editor-in-Chief Bree Royce’s favorite place to muse about game design, the MMO industry, and worlds gone by. Previous entries published on Engadget. [Follow this column’s RSS feed]
working as intended
‘Magic through serendipity’: Raph Koster on the glorious mess that was Ultima Online
I was a wide-eyed, naive kid when I first stepped into Ultima Online in 1997, and as it turns out, the developers were too.
That's...
Working As Intended: The MMOs we lost in 2017
It's true that we lost a lot of MMOs in 2016 -- bigger and more important ones than in 2014 and 2015. 2017, however, has...
Working As Intended: Guild Wars 2’s new mount licenses are still lockboxes, but they’re not the worst lockboxes
Pretty much everyone assumed that back when Guild Wars 2 planned out mounts, it did so with its cash shop in mind. The game...
Working As Intended: The best and worst of Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire (so far)
I've spent a chunk of the last week moving through the first part of Guild Wars 2's Path of Fire, finishing up the Crystal...
Working As Intended: Why classic Guild Wars matters, 12 years in
The spring season always sees a deluge of MMORPG birthday celebrations: Lord of the Rings Online, City of Heroes, Allods Online, Free Realms last...
Here’s why everyone’s pissed off about City of Heroes NPCs in NCsoft’s MOBA
Yesterday, NCsoft took the lid off a secret it's clearly been working on for a while: The company means to introduce a notorious and...
Working As Intended: Two decades of Elder Scrolls housing
Massively OP explores Elder Scrolls housing through the ages -- starting with Daggerfall, running through Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, and ending with Elder Scrolls Online's Homestead patch, live today.
Working As Intended: Westworld is a sandbox MMORPG on your TV
Westworld has emerged this fall as the geek obsession TV show, a gunslinger's LOST about which people can't stop talking and theorizing and debating....
Working As Intended: A tour of 19-year-old Ultima Online
Wanna feel old? Three years ago, I wrote a Second Wind piece for Massively-that-was on Ultima Online, which had recently been turned over to Broadsword...
Working As Intended: Busting up the MMORPG nostalgia party
Last week, a clever Massively OP commenter, SC_Deadline, neatly summed up the ongoing Nostalrius emulator shutdown as Blizzard "bust up someone's nostalgia party," which...
Working As Intended: The fate of the MMORPG genre
I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that this past weekend was a strange one in the MMORPG community, when gamers across the wide expanse...
Working As Intended: What Star Wars Galaxies got wrong
If you've listened to Massively's staff and readers talk about Star Wars Galaxies a little bit, you might come away with the impression that...
Working As Intended: The MMOs we lost in 2015
It's become tradition to fare well the MMOs that sunsetted in the preceding year, but that wasn't always the case. At the beginning of 2015,...
Working As Intended: Sex, love, and MMOs
In the ongoing, neverending sandbox-vs.-themepark MMO debate, the folks on the side of sandboxes want one thing: more. Actually they want a lot more. They want...
Working As Intended: Ten lessons I learned from classic Guild Wars
Guild Wars -- the first Guild Wars -- celebrates its 10th birthday this week alongside several of my characters who are equally old. I originally...
Working As Intended: Six things I expect from serious MMO PvP
With PvP-encrusted MMORPGs like Camelot Unchained, Crowfall, and even Revival on the genre's horizon, I have a glimmer of hope that the future of MMO...
Working As Intended: ‘Multiplex monotony’ and the death of the mid-budget MMORPG
Back in December, film editor and author Jason Bailey wrote a piece on Flavorwire called How the Death of Mid-Budget Cinema Left a Generation...
