Category: MMORPG.com General News

Dragon Quest Heroes for PlayStation 4 just launched in Japan but Western audiences and fans need not despair. The PlayStation blog has been updated with the announcement that the game will be heading to North America and Europe sometime this year!

I think a change in acronyms is due to match the change. MMORPG has always been a mouthful and sort of sucked all of the immersive qualities out of the genre. MMORPG sounds like a scientific categorization. And, as this column hopefully shows, the semi- or pseudo-MMO market is alive and well within the blurry lines in between genres, so we need some new terms.

All games are hard to make. But when ranking my own personal experiences as a dev, I’d say that single-player games are the most straightforward and predictable of projects (relatively, of course), rescuing failing projects is vastly more complicated, but building MMOs from scratch is the most challenging of all.

The title pretty much says it all in a jumbled mouthful of adjectives drawing on nearly every genre of RPGs out there. Nexon and Socialspiel Entertainment have announced Legacy Quest that is described as a mobile roguelike action RPG dungeon crawler that will be available later in 2015 as a free to play title. If that’s not enough to get your heart pounding, it was also announced that Legacy Quest will feature permadeath but that defeated souls will unlock new traits for the next character.

How do I explain my ongoing affair with MUDs? Sure, we only meet a few times per year, and yes we have been off more than we have been on, but MUDs are something special to me. They fill a need that is often left unsatisfied by conventional MMOs. They just do.

One of the ongoing debates in the games space these days centers around the artistic vision of the developers and is one that has been ongoing for the past ten years or so.

People cheat. That fact is nothing new and just about everyone does it at some point in their life. Don’t believe me? Just ask the IRS. I don’t foresee by bringing up the topic of cheating in my column that I’ll be able to change anything. I don’t imagine it will even prevent one of you from cheating in the future. I do, however, believe it is a dialogue worth having and hope you’ll humor me for a few minutes. I’m interested in your input.

This week Chris and Ryan take to the mics with special guest and new/returning writer, Beau Hindman! We cover the week’s news — including the "business as usual" layoffs at Daybreak Studios and more — before getting to our main topic: What is the State of MMOs in 2015? We break down exactly where the industry is at, from business models to designs to the ultimate question of whether MMOs are long for this world.

It’s an age-old discussion, or at least as old as the MMO itself. Some players love crafting, others tolerate it, while others still ignore the act entirely. But everyone agrees that it’s a necessary feature in the MMORPG. So today’s quest is a simple one… what could or would make crafting more interesting for you as a player?

With over $72 million in funding raised from crowdfunding, Star Citizen is no doubt an ambitious project that has grown over time. That hasn’t happened without its share of criticism. People wonder where the game is by now. Others criticize the developers for consistently releasing new ships to buy for a game that, as yet, isn’t out. These ships aren’t cheap, either.