Our latest coverage of Weekly Raid.
When PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG) launched in 2017 it catapulted the niche Battle Royale genre into the mainstream. Its success was quickly followed by Fortnite which grew so fast that it transcended the video gaming industry and became a cultural phenomena, not unlike Pokemon in the early 1990s. With so much hype around Fortnite and PUBG, it was easy to assume [...]
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As gaming has gone from a niche activity to a mainstream past time, developers have come up with all sorts of ways to entice players to either keep playing, or to at least make daily play a habit. MMORPGs were some of the first to play with such mechanics. World of Warcraft's rested experience, and later daily quest feature were [...]
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G-Star, Korea’s marquee gaming trade show kicks off on November 15 in the port city of Buson. While most of the announcements made at G-Star only immediately effect the Korean market, the out sized influence Korea exerts in global PC & mobile gaming market makes the trade show well worth following for gamers across the world. Odds are the games [...]
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The last time we discussed the EU, the GDPR, a sweeping data privacy bill had just come in force. Starting on May 25, 2018 all companies serving the EU region had to offer users a simple way to view what personal data was being stored on them and an easy way to opt out of said data collection. The burden [...]
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Its finally here! The Western version of the highly anticipated fantasy MMORPG Bless Online had its founders launch on May 28, 2018. Players willing to pay $40, $70, or $150 for the various Founders' Pack flocked on to the single server on launch day. The server soon crashed and NeoWiz was forced to add additional servers. This process repeated itself [...]
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The impact of user created content, including such things as mods, maps, addons, and so on, can hardly be overstated. Entire genres have spawned from mods like Counter-Strike, Dota, and various Battle Royale modes. The dream of bringing the creativity and scale made possible by user generated content into the MMO genre has been around for years. Before Minecraft, Notch [...]
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Ever since the release of World of Warcraft in 2004, the vast majority of MMORPGs have followed the linear quest progression model. While MMORPGs have had questing long before WoW, they were often rare treats tied to lore or unique item. Progression was largely done the old fashioned way: exploration and killing monsters. Questing certainly proved to be a valuable [...]
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It was during the early years of this century that Western gamers first witnesses an influx of Korean games, with the most common genre being MMORPGs. This influx soon became a tsunami that washed literally hundreds upon hundreds of games of varying quality upon our shores. This 'Korean Wave', as I just coined it, left a permanent mark on the [...]
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MMORPGs have been called treadmills and walking simulators. These remarks come from both fans of the genre and its detractors. There is certainly some truth to these claims, many of the core gameplay loops in MMORPGs require repetition and very slow progress. The question this week is whether the genre is doomed to suffer such monotonous and meaningless gameplay, occasionally [...]
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Around 10 years ago, a slew of Asian MMOs & MMORPGs started making their way to the West. These Asian MMOs brought with them a business model that was previously unknown on these shores. Since then, the free to play model has been widely adopted by many studios and is used across a range of genres. While pioneers of the [...]
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