Muckbeast

Bill Roper is out at Cryptic Studios. Whether it was truly a departure due to his “entrepreneurial spirit” becoming “restless”, or Cryptic coming to their senses, we may not know for quite some time. If anyone knows an insider, a little bit of inside info would be very welcome.
Anyone who has played any game he [...]

Primordiax will be hosting a crafting fair for both crafters and buyers on:
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010, 10pm EDT
The event will take place in the three inns of the main three cities:
Rolling Stone Inn – Askagard
The Skiffing Beetle – Chemer
The Gyrosmith Inn – Troj
Crafters, bring your wares to sell!
Adventurers, bring your coin [...]

One of my Bright Hub writers recently wrote a very interesting article: WoW Character History.
What was most interesting was the sheer wealth of information that is available to players about OTHER players. History of guilds joined and left, gear, last time logged on, and more. Upon reading this article, I was actually shocked and would [...]

Primordiax had a “soft opening” on April 22. We didn’t publicize it much. We wanted to get a small group of early adopters in and then take their feedback and make improvements.
After a month and a half of that, we are ready for anyone and everything to flood the gates. Some basic information about Primordiax:

Free [...]

This is a good issue that was raised on the Keen and Graev blog with their post: Guilds are simply too important.
I can definitely see where he is going with the argument, and I agree to a great extent.
There was a time on MMOs where a guild could be formed for any manner of reasons [...]

I have written about this topic many times before. The two biggest examples are:
Raiding Provides a False, Deceptive Sense of Real Accomplishment
Fed up! Raiding sucks as a sole form of end game content.
This would be a pretty dull post if all I was doing was encouraging you to go back and read those [...]

1) Ryzom is now open source. WOW. All source code and art are being made available under an open source license. The Free Software Foundation provided additional details. There is also a detailed FAQ about what this all means. What I find most interesting here is the release of art assets [...]

One of the biggest reasons I am a huge proponent of the F2PV$ (Free to play, virtual currency) model is that it is much easier to lure back your customers. They can return at any time with little or no barrier to entry (possibly just the download of a patch or a re-download of your [...]

After many, many years of (too frequently interrupted) development, Primordiax officially launched on Thursday, April 22, 2010. Primordiax is a hybrid text and graphical MUD/MMO with a primary focus on providing a true virtual world experience. While Primordiax does feature some traditional MMO game aspects (combat, loot, gear, etc.), that is just one part of [...]

Threshold RPG – http://www.thresholdrpg.comEvery spring Threshold RPG likes to spice things up by putting on tons of special events for its players.
Plannned for the next 6 weeks:
1) Double XP Teaser: Friday (March 20) night and all day Saturday (March 21) players earn double experience points.
2) Double XP Weekend: Friday, March 26 [...]

Permadeath was never a tremendously popular feature in MUDs, but it was common enough that it did have a certain following. Some players consider permadeath a vital component of roleplaying, and they feel it adds a significant amount of excitement and tension to a game.
I certainly understand why no commercial MMORPGs have experimented with the [...]

League of Legends is an MMO RPG/RTS inspired by the Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients (DotA). It also includes RPG elements in the form of a summoner character that gains levels, trains “abilities” called masteries, and gears up with runes.
Check out this review of League of Legends MMORPG/MMORTS.
Let me know what you think [...]

I read a couple of really good blog posts recently that I highly recommend:
From Spinksville:  You cant heal stupidity!
and
From Bio Break: The Long, Hard Road to Console MMOs
and
From Elder Game: 2009: A year of Shitty MMOs.
For reference, you might find this post from Bio Break really useful: MMO Timeline. It includes dates of every major [...]

I am going to try not to get too esoteric or philosophical. Lets eschew things like success as defined by making people happy, bettering the world, adding good ideas/concepts to the game design space, or all sorts of totally unmeasurable things like that. For the purposes of this discussion, lets focus a little more on [...]

I read this signature file on an MMO forum today: “Remember, in MMO’s whoever achieved more than you is a nolifer, whoever achieved less than you is a noob.”
I chuckled at first, but it is sad how true that mentality is.
What do you think causes this?

… while counting their money?
I don’t expect every, or any, MMO to be a WoW killer. But it strikes me as a pretty dang sad indictment of the genre that time after time, big budget, major publisher MMOs come out and fail miserably.
Read on for examples that include Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, and Champions [...]

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while. This article at MMORPG is the final push over the edge.
Most MMOs have gone with the shard/server approach. Each copy of the game has a distinct community. You make characters on a specific server, and the character can only be played on that server. Each [...]

The ugly way Roper drove Hellgate: London and Flagship into bankruptcy is legendary. The greedy subscription model for an action RPG Diablo clone was an exceptionally bad idea. His constant arguing and fighting against respecs was rancid icing on the rotten cake.
In light of that, it was a real head scratcher when Cryptic hired him [...]

By now, many of you have read my article What Went Wrong with Warhammer Online? Is it a failure? Since I wrote the article, new leadership really has not done much to address those issues. In a recent interview, the head dev. of Warhammer put the blame for WAR’s problems on the game being too [...]

I always loved the idea of Guild Wars. I love their business model. I love so many of their game design concepts (full respec in town at will, great end game, many features designed to enhance community and social aspects, etc.). Unfortunately, when I played the game I just couldn’t get into it. The inability [...]