Tag: MMO

Confession time: How long do you stick it out before you abandon a terrible MMO dungeon/raid group?

Terminally Online (Image credit: Future) This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice. Ah, […]

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Why I love player housing in MMOs

WHY I LOVE (Image credit: Blizzard) In Why I Love, PC Gamer writers pick an aspect of PC gaming that they love and write about why it’s brilliant. This week, Harvey goes home (in MMORPGs). As World of Warcraft: Midnight gears up, Blizzard’s released its player housing early for those who’ve pre-ordered the expansion—I won’t […]

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World of Warcraft: Legion Remix was supposed to be full of lawless fun, but it turned out to be awfully grindy

Blizzard has always been divided when it comes to its old-expansions-revisited Remix mode, and the latest update shows the studio isn’t quite sure exactly what it should be, even when players share their ideas directly. The whole point of the mode, Blizzard says, is wild, frenetic fun: getting super powerful and collecting every transmog armor […]

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Ashes of Creation early access launch times and release date

It’s been quite a while since the fantasy MMORPG Ashes of Creation smashed through its Kickstarter milestones back in 2017, but the old-school playground brings its player-driven civilization to Steam soon with an early access launch of its alpha build. Emphasis on the early phrasing there. Intrepid’s Steam description (and official site) reiterates in quite […]

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Blizzard sees players levitating their homes in WoW’s player housing, ‘even though there weren’t UI controls for that’, decides it’s now a feature, not a bug

World of Warcraft‘s player housing early access is already a treat—with players immediately setting to work constructing all kinds of madcap, HOA-violating nonsense, as they very much should be. One trick players discovered (outside of being able to sit anywhere) was the ability to send their entire homes skyward. This was a UI bug—turns out […]

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World of Warcraft players are already discovering new tech with its player housing—turns out, you can sit anywhere as long as you’re able to fit a chair inside

World of Warcraft‘s player housing has hit the live servers—as long as you’ve purchased Midnight—and players are already having a blast making all kinds of nonsense. Also, they’ve found out secret, illicit (not really) wizard tech for being able to sit anywhere. I’m a smidge late to the game here, as this was already discovered […]

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Players are piling in to the Guild Wars remaster, and it’s giving the servers trouble: ‘Demand for Guild Wars Reforged blew past our projections’

There’s still nothing quite like the original Guild Wars. It came out before World of Warcraft had crystallized the face of the modern MMORPG, and was as inspired by Magic: The Gathering as it was by Everquest or Ultima. It turned out as more of a co-op ARPG with shared town hubs, dual-class deckbuilding, and […]

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Tom Morello worked on a song for Final Fantasy 14’s latest raid tier after finding out the game’s composer was a huge Rage Against the Machine fan

What do critically acclaimed MMO Final Fantasy 14 and the renegades of funk, Rage Against the Machine, have in common? Probably not much before this week, but now they both contain a shared ingredient: legendary guitarist Tom Morello. Morello was featured on the game’s official X account, where he announced a collaboration between him, the […]

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I’ve been roleplaying in MMORPGs like WoW for 16 years, it’s the reason I’m here writing this headline—and there’s never been a better time to try it out yourself

Terminally Online (Image credit: Future) This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice. It’s […]

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WoW’s new player housing feature’s been out in early access for less than a week, and players have already made battleships, dollhouses, and large hadron colliders

World of Warcraft‘s player housing feature has been out for less than a week—well, in early access, as long as you’ve bought the upcoming Midnight expansion—and I’m delighted to report that players are already going hogwild. For context, player housing has taken notes from every other popular MMO’s housing system and basically rolled it into […]

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FF14’s Yoshi-P reveals why he’s finally lifting glamour restrictions—he’s got his own preferences, but it’s ‘no longer the time to force them on players’

Final Fantasy 14‘s making a huge, revolutionary update this month with the release of patch 7.4—it’s removing all glamour restrictions. If that doesn’t sound revolutionary to you, you must not understand that the true endgame of every MMO is fashion. In all seriousness, it’s actually a pretty huge move. Previously, FF14’s glamour system, which allows […]

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As NetEase pledges to ‘replace’ a No Man’s Sky model in its survival MMO, Sean Murray says they played themselves because the asset’s busted anyway

Next time a commenter points out a typo in one of my articles, I’ll just say it’s to make potential plagiarists look stupid. After No Man’s Sky players on Reddit (via GamesRadar) questioned the provenance of an asset in survival MMO Once Human—suggesting it bore a marked resemblance to a similar object in No Man’s […]

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Debate: What is your objectively correct keybinding setup for your current MMO, and why is everybody else wrong?

Terminally Online (Image credit: Future) This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice. Every […]

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Benedict Cumberbatch is World of Tanks’ new ‘Holiday Ambassador’, starring in a bizarre (and expensive) Christmas advert that has very little to do with either tanks or Christmas

There are times when World of Tanks feels less like a videogame and more like a giant ad budget looking for something to be spent on. This year, all those huge sacks with dollar signs on them have been thrown Benedict Cumberbatch’s way, making him the game’s newest “Holiday Ambassador” and the star of an […]

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World of Warcraft: Midnight might be the MMO’s biggest expansion yet, and it’s coming out in March

It’s a momentous time for World of Warcraft. The next expansion, Midnight, will shift how the game is played for everyone with sweeping changes to the most popular combat mods and the long-awaited introduction of player housing. This new era for the MMO will begin when Midnight launches on March 2. Blizzard dropped the release […]

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‘Most of the innovation in gaming has happened on PC’ says EVE Online studio boss: ‘When I love a game, it’s so deeply PC’

The PC is still the center of innovation in gaming, according to Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games, which is known for long-running, esoteric space MMO EVE Online. “I think most of the innovation in gaming has happened on PC, to some extent on mobile, just because of sheer volume,” Pétursson told me at […]

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Guild Wars 2: Visions of Eternity is the MMO’s best annual expansion yet, but the real test is going to be whether it can keep up the momentum

In 2023, ArenaNet switched to an annual expansion plan for Guild Wars 2—smaller, but more frequent expansions that rolled out in stages across an entire year. The benefit has been a more consistent release schedule. But there are downsides too. The first of these expansions, Secrets of the Obscure, felt like it was trying to […]

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WoW game director steps in to reassure players that its AddOn overhaul is a work in progress, and the temporary death of cosmetic mods is simply ‘collateral damage that we are working on repairing’

World of Warcraft is currently chipping away at the mammoth task of calling curtains on combat UI mods—called AddOns—to try and wrangle some control of the 21-year-old MMO back. After all, if you can automate just about everything, then you need to build classes, raids, and boss fights around a batch of third-party installs, which, […]

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Where Winds Meet has the most buckwild ‘mounts’ I’ve ever seen: Getting chased by jaguars, standing on a goose, or just cranking a normal run animation to turbo-speed

MMOs have lost their way. Time was, everyone and their grandma had a WoW sub, and they all spent their evenings getting up to great larks in Azeroth. Now? A wasteland. WoW still has plenty of adherents, no doubt, but it’s not that strength which in old days moved Earth and Heaven. And nothing really […]

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NCSoft launches MMO with terrible monetisation—puts out emergency broadcast 15 hours later, promising to fix it while its wax wings melt: ‘We were complacent and unthoughtful’

I’ve seen some monetisation-related disasters in my time, but I think this one might be up there with the worst—NCSoft’s Aion 2, which launched in Korea and Taiwan November 18, has caused no end of problems for the company immediately after launch. Including, potentially, causing its stock price to tank a whopping 15%. As for […]

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Old School RuneScape just got its first new skill ever and players are psyched about it, apart from the guy the game accidentally branded ‘Morbid Loner’

Old School RuneScape has been around for, oh, about 12 years now, and in all that time it’s never gotten a new skill. Players have been working with—and making great sport of—the set of skills it inherited from the original RuneScape, which itself last got a new skill (that’d be Hunter) all the way back […]

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Guild Wars celebrates 20 years with a ‘Reforged’ overhaul that’s free for existing players, and offers the whole shebang to newbies for $20: ‘It was a good time to give it a refresh’

Guild Wars released in 2005 and, even in the wake of the all-conquering World of Warcraft, offered an MMO experience that was distinct and freeform enough that, 20 years later, you’ll still find people saying it’s the best MMO around. OK, these days they’re probably more likely to be on-board with the superb sequel, but […]

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WoW’s proposed transmog overhaul is 1 step forward, 2 steps back, and has Azeroth’s fashionistas rioting: ‘Blizzard truly are the masters at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’

World of Warcraft: Midnight has a huge task ahead of it—fixing the arms race of AddOns by nixing combat-related mods (and thus having to provide its own offerings), installing Player Housing for the first time and, relevant to the problems I’m about to get into, overhauling the transmog system. For the uninitiated, transmog (sometimes called […]

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Blizzard hit the $90 dinosaur mount emergency button to fill the gap before the next WoW expansion and players are already dumping millions of gold into the ether to buy it

It’s a bit of a quiet time for World of Warcraft as players wait for the release of its next expansion. In this pre-Midnight lull, there’s not much to do except prepare yourself for the removal of combat mods and the sweeping class balance changes. This, along with it being WoW’s 21st anniversary, is probably […]

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FF14 director Naoki Yoshida has big plans for the MMO after Dawntrail’s roughspots—hinting at A Realm Reborn-style overhaul

Final Fantasy 14 has been in a bit of a weird state. Endwalker’s post-launch patches failed to hit the ground running, despite the main expansion absolutely nailing the climax of its 10-year story. Dawntrail carried these problems forward, and with a lukewarm main quest, it couldn’t rest on that good ol’ patch story hype to […]

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In defense of tab-targeting: MMO devs have been trying to put dodge rolls in their games for 10+ years to avoid WoW, and it’s never worked

Terminally Online (Image credit: Future) This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer’s very own MMORPG column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice. I […]

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World of Warcraft director ‘doesn’t expect blind faith’ in its plans to unshackle the MMO from popular combat mods: ‘We take none of this lightly’

As World of Warcraft’s next expansion nears release, players are preparing for the first time in the MMO’s history where combat mods, or addons, won’t offer much help. The most popular ones simply won’t work when Midnight arrives as part of Blizzard’s plan to level the playing field for all players. Unsurprisingly, this hasn’t gone […]

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Horizon: Steel Frontiers is an MMO based on the PlayStation series, and it’s coming to PC and mobile (but not PS5)

[Horizon Steel Frontiers] Announcement Video – YouTube Watch On Guerrilla Games and NCSoft have announced Horizon: Steel Frontiers, an MMO take on the PlayStation open world series about taking down huge robo-dinosaurs in a lush post-apocalypse. Similar to the mainline games, the objective is to take down the machines, but this time you’ll do so […]

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Mark your calendars: World of Warcraft will finally have player housing after 21 years when The War Within’s final patch arrives next month

The lull before a new expansion hits World of Warcraft has been dragged out for months in the past, but this time Blizzard isn’t going to hold back the new stuff for very long. A patch is coming on December 2 that will act as a prologue to the Midnight expansion, and it’ll mark the […]

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