I played a little Allods Online during the closed beta and was impressed with what I saw. It felt polished for a free to play game, and there was just the right balance of WoW clone and original features to give it a broad appeal. This week the cash shop opened, and boy are the… [more]
Earth Eternal is a new browser based MMO from Sparkplay Media, a company formed by Matt Mihaly and Chris Kohnert of Iron Realms Entertainment. I’ve been keeping an eye on the development because of the MUD connection and recently got around to trying it out. This isn’t going to be a review of the game,… [more]
I’ve been following Mortal Online for a while now and was tempted to purchase the game to join the beta, but when I saw the price of 69 EUR I decided to wait and see for a while before diving in. Looks like I made a wise decision as by all accounts the beta isn’t… [more]
There are a few ways that you can handle skill advancement in your game: Increase over time Increase through use (either success, failure or both) Purchased with gold, experience or some other token Increase with character level In the next couple of posts I am going to examine a few of these methods, starting with… [more]
This is a regular sight on my World of Warcraft server. I know it’s not the greatest screenshot, but hopefully you can see that it’s a website address spelled out with corpses. As you might expect, the website is selling in game gold. I notice a lot less channel spam these days and I guess Blizzard… [more]
I know I said last time I was going to look at areas where graphical games could learn from text MUDs, but I don’t think that’s a very interesting topic. I think it’s far more useful for those of us working in text to look at what we can learn from the big budget modern… [more]
This article on Massively about the Hero Engine MMORPG development platform made me smile. Yes I suppose the fact that multiple developers can work collaboratively on the same server while seeing the results of each others work in real time is pretty revolutionary. At least for graphical MMORPGs anyway. The concept is probably quite familiar to… [more]
