You’ve probably heard that Lord of the Rings Online is following in the footsteps of Dungeons and Dragons Online by becoming Free to Play. That’s right, there’ll no longer be a subscription fee to get your foot in the door. Instead you’ll be expected to pay real money for all sorts of in-game items, some…
Category: MMO Musings
Mixing Mage Mechanics
One of the frequent accusations a Mage suffers from in Warcraft is about our buttons. Apparently we have two of them and we spam them repeatedly. We ignore everything else on the screen – for all we care we could just have a couple of small icons at the bottom, with large yellow numbers appearing…
The Composer and the Engineer
Note: Minor mention about revised levelling system. Nothing that isn’t common knowledge already. Over the last few months I’ve been using the Refer-a-Friend system to level up some new alts. It’s been a bit of a struggle – even with the perks and bonuses I’d forgotten how much of a grind the experience can be….
Getting Real About Idents
Social gaming has been kicking around for a while. Anyone with a Facebook account knows what it’s like to be flooded with requests to join some game or another. Usually these games are joy-stealing fun vampires, purely designed to drain away any thought you had that they’re designed to entertain you. They thrive on being…
Hitting the Reset Button
Videogames seem to be full of choice these days. It could be the moral choices presented by games like Mass Effect 2, or the theoretical choices of gear selection in World of Warcraft, Heck, it can even be something as straightforward as choosing a driver in Mario Kart. But if you lost your saved game…
Evolution or Revolution?
I’ve been thinking recently about something that Tobold mentioned on his blog about Blizzard’s continued game development cycles. In it, he rightly describes that Starcraft 2 has a similar look, feel and playstyle to the original game. He also mentions that the Diablo 3 gameplay footage has a similar look and style to the original…