Improving Roleplaying: Props, emotes, Titles, Class Design, and Dressing the Set

This is the fourth post in a series about improving roleplaying in MMOs. Previous posts are: 5 Issues with Roleplaying in MMOs: why we can’t just live the dream Improving Roleplaying: Starting Zones Improving Roleplaying: How to find other roleplayers? We’re really getting somewhere with roleplay now. You’ve created a character, worked out some kind [...]

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Links for the Summer’s end

Hope you all are having a good weekend. It actually isn’t raining here which is astounding because it is both August Bank Holiday and Festival weekend (I’m not going this year but can hear it from my house). Peter Molyneaux reckons that Americans find it harder to play evil characters than Europeans or Japanese. Write [...]

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Finding the game to suit your mood

Over the last couple of weeks, my patterns of game playing have changed. I’m still playing the same games as before we had a death in the family, but I have noticed that I am playing them in different ways. I’m enjoying the social contact and escapism in my MMOs, but I also have a [...]

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CCP to announce new Vampire: The Requiem MMO at PAX?

This is the big rumour going around at the moment. A Vampire MMO is going to be announced by CCP/ White Wolf at PAX next week. If you thought the buzz was strong about Dust, prepare to be blown out of the water. And the proof? They’ve hired a nightclub in Seattle (Heaven) for the [...]

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In which voice chat leads to revelations

If it hadn’t been for voice chat, I never would have known there were so many different ways to pronounce words like: shaman pyrite Moria melee (people who pronounce it ‘mealey’ make me twitch though) the name of just about any NPC I guess that in games like SWTOR that are fully voiced I’ll just [...]

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Lifetime and 6 Month Subscriptions to Champions Online are Back!

Cryptic caused a stir earlier this week when they announced that the tempting subscription deals offered to early adopters for Champions Online were sold out. The playerbase was consternated and confused. On the one hand they’d been told that the subscriptions would be available until August 31st, and on the other that they were limited. [...]

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Social engineering in Cataclysm. Will it make better guilds?

Tobold writes about the Guild Advancement system that Blizzard plans to introduce into WoW with the next expansion. You will be able to earn ‘guild xp’ for your guild by activities such as completing quests, earning reputation, killing raid bosses, PvP, and so on. As your guild increases in guild level, up to a max [...]

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Looking at trailers

There have been a lot of games going through open beta events recently (Aion, Champions Online, Gatheryn, lots of others which I haven’t been following) or releasing trailers to keep fans excited about releases that are yet to be dated (Cataclysm, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, etc.) Aside from [...]

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Improving Roleplay: How to find other roleplayers?

This is the third post in a series about improving the RP experience in MMOs. Previous posts were: 5 Issues with Roleplaying in MMOs: Why you can’t just live the dream Improving Roleplay: Starting Zones So you’ve created your character, you’ve run it through the starting zone and had some ideas for a backstory and [...]

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So how did the Blizzard team react to the Cataclysm leak?

The Escapist sat down with WoW Production Director J Allen Brack at Blizzcon and this is one of the questions that they asked. How did the WoW team react to the Cataclysm leak?: They “went through the five stages of grief, really. It’s hard to not have this initial irritation, where you work on something, [...]

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