Posts tagged risk 
EVE Evolved: Risk vs. reward in lowsec
In EVE Online's early years, one of its core design philosophies was adherence to a strict risk vs. reward balance scheme. There were riches out there to be found, but to get them, you had to put yourself in the firing line. Police ships patrolled high-security space to keep players safe from ...
Hands-on with End of Nations
Real-time strategy games aren't exactly in vogue at the moment. The genre is far from dead, but modern RTS games, with the notable exception of StarCraft, don't tend to appeal to as broad an audience as do MMOs. Trion Worlds and Petroglyph's proposed answer to genre stagnation is the upcoming ...
The Soapbox: Applying Neal Stephenson's Innovation Starvation to MMOs
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. You've probably heard of Neal Stephenson. The celebrated sci-fi ...
Massively conquers two Empire and State developers
Massively sat down with Empire and State developer Toby Ragaini not so long ago, and we were excited to see exactly how the team's promised game of political intrigue and power-grabbing would play -- so excited that we nabbed a second interview not only with Toby, Director of Game Development at ...
The Daily Grind: The consequence of PvP
PvP has been an important part of the MMO genre right from the start, but it hasn't stayed the same in any way. The earliest implementation in Ultima Online made PvP completely non-consensual and wholly one-sided: you could be killed at any time, and the victor gets to take everything on your ...
Wormhole exploration hearkens back to EVE Online's early days
EVE Online's latest Apocrypha expansion has elevated the exploration profession to new heights. The addition of roughly 2500 new and uncharted solar systems, expanding the game's galaxy of New Eden to over 7500 solar systems in total, brings what can honestly be called 'true exploration' to the ...
The Daily Grind: How difficult do you like your crafting?
Once, long ago, when you wanted to craft in EverQuest, you had to know precisely what it was you wanted to put into your crafting box/bag/spit/etc. - or you could sit there swapping things in and out in combination for hours. Once you'd hit upon a combination that would create something, you then ...
Skirmish warfare coming to Pirates of the Burning Sea
The Flying Lab Software developers working on Pirates of the Burning Sea have done a lot of writing about the avatar combat changes of late, but it's clear that they're still aiming to improve ship-based PvP on the high seas. Pirates of the Burning Sea is going to get a major new feature as of ...
Anti-Aliased: The Darkfall prophecies pt. 2
The double-edged sword to this is that the player is going to require a time investment. It's going to take more than stats and big numbers to win battles in these parts, and those things take time to learn. Knowing the environments, knowing how to gauge enemies, and knowing where to go in case of ...
Anti-Aliased: The Darkfall prophecies
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/Anti_Aliased_The_Darkfall_prophecies'; Darkfall. Everyone talks about it. Our mailboxes get flooded with requests about it. Comments regarding the game are both frothingly energetic and intensely angry. Just writing a piece about it can get a writer ...
