When I think of a themepark that represents the epitome of a quest-grind anti-dynamic world, I think of Rift. Leveling from 1-46′ish (I never hit 50), I never once felt like I was doing anything dynamic. Trion and other developers are continually pushing this idea that content like Rift’s zone invasions are dynamic, but I [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Rift’
Dynamic. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
March 6th, 2012
69 Comments
Defining the grind
March 2nd, 2012
31 Comments
We had a really good discussion going on Ventrilo tonight about what grinding means. So many times people think grinding is a negative, and it’s used by many I know as a reason for quitting a game. In my opinion, unless everything you are doing is 100% dynamic all the time, you are grinding. I [...]
MMOs are not given room to grow anymore. Launch perfect or die!
January 16th, 2012
29 Comments
When World of Warcraft launched in November 2004 is was new, it was shiny, but it really wasn’t as polished or infallible as people think of it today. Aside from WoW’s launch issues, which mostly stemmed from Blizzard not anticipating the demand, WoW had issues that crop up in most contemporary MMOs. WoW was evolving [...]
Best and Worst Games of 2011
December 29th, 2011
11 Comments
This year was stellar for gaming! Great hits released for nearly every genre, every platform, and every style of play. To begin our roundup of 2011, we want to share the games we feel were the best and worst or most disappointing this year. These are games we played and we’re weighing them on our [...]
Zero Class Diversity These Days
September 21st, 2011
31 Comments
If you stop and think for a moment about the classes in MMO’s these days, none of them are really unique anymore. Roles are no longer class based. Instead, roles are being defined in archetypes and classes are being lumped into those categories. World of Warcraft is, once again, a great example of the dumbing-down [...]
Numbers themselves do not matter
May 23rd, 2011
17 Comments
Random thought for this morning: The number of people playing a MMO does not in itself really matter. It doesn’t matter that one game has 11 million subscribers and another has 150k. What matters is whether or not those numbers sustain the quality of gameplay that the developers intended the game to have when they [...]
Evaluating the response to Rift’s Event
April 16th, 2011
50 Comments
The first ‘event’ in Rift, strategically placed around the end of the free month, has had some issues. Among them are lag, queues, and unexpected results from the event progressing too quickly. Stuff happens. What I don’t understand is why they or anyone would be surprised. They gave out a very large number of free [...]
Addressing Trion’s claims about Rift
April 8th, 2011
83 Comments
A member of the K&G community (Howdiedoodie) pointed this article out to me from CNN on the subject of Rift taking on World of Warcraft. I warn you in advance that I am going to be highly critical of Rift. I find the article to be 99% hyperbole and 1% wishful thinking. I’ll start by [...]
