Posts tagged culture 
Storyboard: Over, done, finished, finito
The best stories have an ending. And if you want to tell a decent story in a roleplaying format, you're going to need some sort of an ending eventually. The problem is that most endings have a pretty strict sense of finality to them, and really ending your roleplaying kind of implies that your ...
The Soapbox: Evolution of a class
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. In 1974, the first roleplaying game was published under the ...
The Daily Grind: Do you think there's too much group mentality in MMO discussion?
When it comes to MMO design, people tend toward certain viewpoints. Some players think that immersion requires an open world, open PvP, and open targets; others think it just requires an interesting story and a player willing to invest. There are people who think that cash shops are a short step ...
Storyboard: You guys must be the party
A couple of weeks back, I wrote an article about dealing with a major ongoing storyline in an MMO. For those of you who neither read the article nor can spare the time to click the link and read it now: It talked about the problems presented by having a storyline and offered a few different ...
Choose My Adventure: Atys refugee blues
Last week's polls were enough for me to get started in the world of Ryzom over the weekend, so I took my first steps back into the game that I haven't played for quite some time. I still remembered how some of it worked, thankfully, but there were a lot of elements that I'd almost completely ...
Garriott talks riding rockets, Man on a Mission movie
Richard Garriott may not be making the MMO sequel that many of his fans crave, but he is the subject of a new documentary film called Man on a Mission. VentureBeat.com recently corralled the elusive creator of the famous Ultima franchise for an extensive interview. The piece is mainly focused ...
CNN observes the migration habits of the elusive wild gamer
We all know that one guy who flits between MMOs with the same attention span as an ADD goldfish on cocaine. Heck, we've probably been there ourselves a few times. Well, CNN's Geek Out blog has decided to take a look at the migratory patterns of the MMO gamer in his natural habitat, and the ...
The Daily Grind: When do you alt?
We know that some of you love to roll alts and some of you just play one character until the end time. This question is not about that. No, today we want something that's much more fundamental but yet subtly more important -- when do you make those alts? When do you click back over to character ...
The Mog Log: Weakness is strength
If you think about characters in the online Final Fantasy games compared to the console-based equivalents, you have to come to a kind of demoralizing conclusion: Your character online is pretty weak. In Final Fantasy XI, you can cap out your Black Mage and you'll still never learn Ultima. In ...
Choose My Adventure: I fell into a burning ring of Ryzom
After an intensely close vote, the winner for my destination in this round of Choose My Adventure is Ryzom! And I do mean intensely close; up until the polls closed, it looked very possible that the vote would end in the favor of Lord of the Rings Online or even a straight-up tie. But the readers ...
