Remember the offhanded link I posted a while back to the spurned EQ2 ‘fan’ site that quickly turned into a community manager’s worst nightmare? At some point it turned from juicy drah-ma to full-on psychotic dev stalking. I wonder, if I searched their archives, if there would be complaints from players about how developers ...

Dave Rickey tears himself away from Eve long enough to write stuff

Seems Blizzard is doing some minor change involving warlocks. Seems warlocks are unhappy about it. Seems that you have to be over level 60 to even notice this - since my own warlock just dinged 58, my reaction was immediately “Uh, OK“, since like every other caster pre-60, my itemization involved high levels of INT, resulting in [...]

I’m not at GDC this week, which means I missed this fine talk.  In 2005, City of Heroes saw its European launch, soon followed by City of Villains. But, Emmert said, “What I really delivered was a City of Heroes experience with a slightly evil twist.” I’m sure the rest of the City of team [...]

I've talked quite a bit about attribute systems in the last few posts. So, let me step through how I would create an attribute system in a game. This might give some more insight into what my motivation was for the previous posts.

Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, Intelligence, Charisma. I can recite them without looking at a list. Playing D&D for several years will do that to you. But, what do they mean? Okay, as a D&D geek I know what most of those do. But, I still have to look up some stuff, especially for the earlier editions. I don't have ...

Shadowbane says gg, next map plz The Shadowbane Team decided that it would be best for the longevity of the game to reset all server and character data and start from scratch. I can understand why they’re doing this, but… wow. There’s some implications there.

It appears that Perpetual’s version of Star Trek Online has been cancelled. I had an interesting conversation at work about this today. Rather than try to overanalyze or punditize it, I’ll just quote it verbatim! Me: “Did you hear about Star Trek Online?” Producer Dan: “Big shock there… that’s an ...

This week's challenge is going to be short: describe a way to cheat in an online game. Some more thoughts in the full article.

No, this isn't a gold farming post. That comes later this week. I got Rune Factory (http://www.natsume.com/games/RuneFactory/index.html) for the DS for Christmas. This is a fantasy version of the Harvest Moon games. These games are built around the rather interesting premise of farming. You wouldn't think it would be compelling gameplay, ...