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 [...]

Apparently, trashing Farmville was the trendy thing to do at the recent GDC (Game Developers Conference). The discussion and trashing have continued on various game developer blogs as well. The common arguments include: “these aren’t games”, “these games suck”, “this is a fad”, “these companies are scammers”, etc. The common fears include: “this is the [...]

… 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 [...]

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 [...]

I want to revisit a favorite issue of mine. New Grind, Just like the Old Grind: Quest Heavy Advancement.
When people read that article, they often get the wrong idea. I don’t hate quests (or missions). I don’t think a 100% mob grinding game is the way to go. What I hate is when a game [...]

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 [...]

While often fodder for amusing videos and funny jokes, the way “noobs“ are derided in MMO culture is a very disturbing thing. While it is nothing new for insular hobbies or communities to be hesitant to embrace newcomers, MMO Elitism seems to take this to new levels. “Leet“ (or 3l33t, or elite) players take newbie [...]

This story has been reported in a few places, and of course EA makes it sound like they just parted ways, but the ugly truth is pretty obvious. Warhammer grossly underperformed, and as a result Mark Jacobs has been sacked. While I feel he and EA/Mythic did a horrible job overall with Warhammer (despite it [...]

I am really getting sick and tired of every MMO turning healers into pseudo-DPS classes. I don’t know who started this trend, but whoever it was needs to be chained up with the guy who invented bind on pickup crafted items, thrown into a pit, and have lotion lowered down to them while being reminded [...]

This is an abbreviated version of the story designed to get some discussion going. For the full story, with all the details, read my article here: Wikipedia’s War on Gaming History and Threshold RPG .
1) Wikipedia is full of people gunning for an administrator promotion. In the current climate, the easiest path is getting articles [...]

I had so much fun trashing raiding as it exists in current graphical MUDs over here, I might as well take another hack at it. I will explain how raiding as it is generally implemented in graphical MMOs provides a false, deceptive, and personally damaging sense of accomplishment.
False Sense of Accomplishment from Raiding
One of [...]

I love MUDs, MMOs, virtual worlds, (insert your favorite term). I love making them. I love playing them. I love talking about them. I hate raiding. I hate the current obsessive focus on a MUD’s “end game.” There shouldn’t be an end game. The draw of open ended, online multiplayer worlds is that they don’t [...]