Until the day comes where our brains are connected via cable to the VR games of the future, food in games will remain something you’ll just have to imagine as being tasty. Yes you’ll never get a lick of that three story extra chocolate cake you somehow scarfed down in 0.1 seconds. I wanted to write a piece on food in MMOs because I was hungry, but also because I figured it’d be something fun to think about, whilst also bringing light to a topic that’s largely skimmed over. What place does food have in MMOs on a design level?
Level 1 Troll - An MMO Critique
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Food in MMOs
Labels:
cooking,
ff14,
ffxiv,
food,
game design,
mmo,
mmorpg,
worldofwarcraft,
wow,
wowclassic
Saturday, November 2, 2019
World of Warcraft Classic - Review
Introduction:
15 years later, and here we are again. World of Warcraft,
that game so popular that even non-gamers heard of it. To the dismay of many
mothers and low GPA college grads, it still holds itself has the most played
MMO in history (probably), and for good reasons. But with each expansion, with
each change, certain crowds felt isolated, to the point where it was far too
removed from the original to keep playing. Over the years dedicated players
have petitioned Blizzard for original, Vanilla servers of the game, and now
here we have it. And I, in my absolute madness, will be making my first ever
review of this 15-year-old game, an MMO no less. Holy crap, heaven have mercy
on me I must be crazy.
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
The Problem with Flying
Riding on a dragon will always be bad-ass! |
Flying, the ability to move through the air freely. Be it
for work, for transport, or for pleasure, it’s a wonderful and invigorating
experience. In MMOs the ability to fly is often asked for by the player base,
typically by mount of course. It’s a pretty cool idea don’t you think? Who
wouldn’t want to ride on a dragon, that’s badass!
One of the earliest examples of using flight in video
games in an interesting that I know of is the first Final Fantasy (I am sure
there are others). By the time you acquire the Air Ship in that game you have
traveled to or explored most of the game’s world. Using air travel allows you
to avoid the hassle of retracing old grounds, let’s you get straight to
specific places in faster time, and the most important part, it can grant
access to new places that were previously inaccessible. Sounds fair, doesn’t
it? It’s a pretty sweet reward late into one’s adventure, and even opens up new
content! But the MMO genre is different from a single player game. As I always
tend to emphasize, you are not alone in the world of an MMO, you play *with*
others, cooperatively, competitively, or passively. What may work in one genre
does not necessarily mean it will work in another.
Monday, May 20, 2019
Legacy Servers
Classic WoW will release August 27th, 2019 |
The
release date of Classic World of Warcraft has finally been announced, along
with the release of the beta the day following the announcement. So I figured
now would be an appropriate time to write about a rather new concept for the
MMO genre, legacy servers.
Legacy
servers for MMOs are servers that host an earlier version of said game. This
can come to be as a result of high player demand or developer obligation when
transferring their game to a significantly updated version. Usually the
likelihood of a legacy server coming into existence by the original creators is
slim, but does increase with age. For this reason private servers, illegally
hosted versions, are made to help quench this demand.
And who can blame them? When you buy a game
you buy it for what it is, that iteration, and arguably changes to said game is
a valid reasoning to be dissatisfied with the product. However MMOs are a bit
different, well, their nature is anyways. Massive MULTIPLAYER Online games do
not have their players in a vacuum, rather they play with hundreds of thousands
of other players, and satisfying a single individual is not on the table, and
usually is not even realistically possible. Creating servers for every version
of an MMO AND keeping the same “feel” of the game cannot be done, after all
other players are part of the experience and splitting them up would be less
than ideal. So for years an MMO will be updated pushing away and bringing in
players, until a significant demand for a particular version is reached, at
which point the team behind the game may consider re-releasing an older
iteration as its own entity.
Labels:
classic,
haveandhearth,
legacy,
mmo,
runescape,
server,
wow,
wowclassic
Friday, May 10, 2019
Wait, that’s Racist!
In my last piece I talked about how I wish for more
obscure races in MMOs and briefly went into theoretical gameplay mechanics that
could be done with them. I would like to talk on that a little more, but this
time more in the fantasy political realm and how racial discrimination IN A
FICTIONAL FANTASY SETTING can actually be beneficial.
As some of you may know, some of the earliest MMOs can
have their roots be traced back to Dungeons & Dragons, and type of pen and
paper game where imagination (and the Game Master) is your only limitation! A
human, an elf, a dwarf, and a really short guy go on an adventure, a tale as
old as Lord of the Rings (because seriously, where did you think you heard this
from if you didn’t play D&D?) And throughout their journey each of them
contributes in some way. Perhaps the elf is exceptional with the bow and can
take out foes at a distance, the dwarf sweeps through hordes of goblins, the
human swindles others with his looks, and the midget crawls into places where
Health & Safety would panic. Each of them have an ability, but what about…
social status?
Labels:
discrimination,
finalfantasy,
guildwars2,
mechanics,
mmo,
mmorpg,
race,
worldofwarcraft
Wednesday, May 1, 2019
Playable Races in MMOs, Where are the Monsters?
Recently I learned that
in Vanilla World of Warcraft one of the ideas for a playable race that never
got implemented were the Naga, a sea serpent race. So this got me thinking
about how most MMOs have rather boring and uninteresting playable races. (We’ll
get back to the Naga a bit further down).
Character creation in
MMORPGs tend to boil down to 2 armed, 2 legged, humanoid, 3 sizes: small,
normal, and large (the large races often have a slight hunchback), and their
female equivalences being standard humans with a few more jiggle physics and
different coat of paint. And while there’s nothing wrong with having
traditional fantasy races such as Orcs and Elves, I seldom see anything
different. Even Final Fantasy 14, a game that I did enjoy playing, its races
were rather disappointing with the more “unique” ones amounting to bad cosplay.
If you’re going to include cat or dragon “people” into your game you could do a
little more than just slap on ears and a tail. Maybe throw in that good old
fashion hunchback, or add some more fur or better yet just get rid of that damn
human skin. Why the fuck does a dragon have tits?!
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