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The Soapbox: The sorry state of ARK Survival Evolved
When ARK: Survival Evolved came on the scene in June 2015, it was met with enthusiasm (dinosaurs!) as well as some skepticism (Early Access). But Studio WildCard quickly won over many fans with the...
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The Soapbox: Pokemon Go Generation 2 still isn’t a real MMO
Pokemon GO Generation 2 is out now, and it feels a lot like an MMO expansion in a lot of ways: We have new features, we have new grinding mechanics, and (of course) the combat system’s been overhauled...
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The Soapbox: Everyone’s being dumb about Star Wars: The Old Republic’s...
A couple of years ago, The Force Awakens introduced us to (among other things) a lightsaber that looks poorly made, like a little kid made it. So Star Wars: The Old Republic added a version of it to a...
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The Soapbox: What the Mass Effect Andromeda kerfuffle ought to teach us about...
Today is the official release of Mass Effect: Andromeda, which was preceded by the frankly baffling decision to allow people access to an early build of the game ahead of time. Or perhaps the final...
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The Soapbox: Why is Pokemon GO still a tech demo?
I’ve been a bit frustrated with Niantic lately. I love some of its ideas, but I watched someone else play Ingress prior to Pokemon GO’s release, and I noticed very similar problems between the two...
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The Soapbox: Lessons Secret World Legends failed to learn from Final Fantasy XIV
I’ve mentioned many a time that I like Funcom quite a bit. I want to like Funcom quite a bit. Heck, I want to be excited about Secret World Legends, but every day or so I get reminded that such a...
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The Soapbox: Your favorite MMO is going to die
Your favorite MMO is going to die. Don’t take it personally, though; every other MMO is going to shut down, too. That includes my favorites and everyone else’s favorites. Do you like Final Fantasy...
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The Soapbox: The disastrous Pokemon Go Fest was just Niantic being Niantic,...
I know I complain a lot about Pokemon Go in my articles here, but there’s a reason for this. I’m a huge fan not just of the Pokemon series but of what Niantic is trying to do with its game on a basic...
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The Soapbox: Getting to the heart of toxicity in MMOs
So we’ve gotten another post from a developer saying that they’re going to really 100% be better about rooting out toxic players from their games. Seriously, we mean it this time. The latest one is...
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The Soapbox: NCsoft’s bizarre silence on Aion’s server merges says everything...
NCsoft done messed up. Again. Yes, I know the studio has already had a few black eyes for other things throughout the years, but this recent punch hit closer to home. So close, it involved multiple...
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EVE Evolved: EVE Online’s CCP Games is gambling with the livelihoods of...
Last week we broke the story that EVE Online developer CCP Games is backing out of the virtual reality games market, closing its Altanta office and selling its VR-focused Newcastle studio. The...
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The Soapbox: The long tail of game development isn’t an excuse for gouging
Don’t be too mad at Star Wars: Battlefront II. It’s a symptom of a problem, not the cause. I mean, be mad at people dumb enough to put the blame for negative reactions on the press, that’s just plain...
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The Soapbox: Inconvenience is not immersion in MMOs or anywhere else
Inconvenience is not immersion. This strikes me as something rather ridiculous to type; to mildly paraphrase Dan Harmon, it seems like should be one of the more automatic things to tell people, like...
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The Soapbox: Evaluating gaming monetization through the lens of Nintendo’s...
Bloggers and journalists throughout the online gaming industry have been talking about monetization a lot lately. It’s not just lockbox/gachapon scandals, or their relationship with gambling, but...
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The Soapbox: Confessions of a serial hoarder (in MMORPGs)
How much is too much? To some, that might seem like a reasonable question. But I knew. I knew. There is no such thing as too much! There was a question raised on Massively OP this past week about...
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Re-examining Asheron’s Call’s Shard of the Herald event on its first...
Although the Asheron’s Call series has now been dead for exactly one year today, it’s far from forgotten by fans. It was admittedly a cult classic, and as the youngest of the “Big Three” graphical...
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The Soapbox: Six responses to the ‘gaming is wrong/evil/an addiction’ argument
I recently went on a rant about gaming, but it wasn’t directed at gaming. It was in defense of gaming. I am so weary of our pastime getting slammed as wrong, evil, or equated as an automatic...
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The Soapbox: Three augmented reality game problems (most) MMOs don’t have –...
I’d like to think that I’m kind of a healthy gamer. While MMOs take a lot of time, the nice thing is that their downtime can lead to forming bonds, or give you time to exercise. Augmented reality...
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The Soapbox: Do MMOs still fall victim to the copycat curse?
When Radical Heights launched, I was inspired to put together a whole Perfect Ten about why trend-chasing doesn’t work for online games. Obviously, my chief focus was on games that wind up being...
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The Soapbox: The western port of Bless Online feels like a curse
To say that the development of Neowiz’s high-fantasy MMO Bless has been somewhat beleaguered would be an understatement. Since the Korean import’s Western release was announced in 2011, it has...
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