Author: Wolfshead
			
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		Role-playing games (RPGs) have long been a bastion of fantasy escapism, providing players with immersive worlds built on medieval European traditions. These games offered heroic adventures, grand quests, and clearly …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		The year 2024 A.D. was an important milestone in MMORPG History. EverQuest, the brainchild of Brad McQuaid and John Smedley had somehow survived for a quarter of a century. Over …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		If Amazon Games plays their cards right, they could see their upcoming Lord of the Rings MMORPG dethrone Blizzard’s aging giant, World of Warcraft. WoW is showing its age, not …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		For almost 20 years, I have been writing articles about MMORPG design. There is one particular intellectual property that I’m very much interested in: EverQuest. Released in 1999, EQ was …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		Hell has frozen over it seems. After 8 years of stealth development, Rob Pardo’s Bonfire Studios has finally released the name of its upcoming video game for the PC. It …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		For the past 30 years, the notion of representation has been incrementally injected into the cultural bloodstream. Even though nobody ever voted for representation ideology, it has crept into all …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		Game development has devolved into a brutal zero-sum battle for the only resource that truly matters: time. Forget the astronomical revenue figures paraded around by industry execs as if they …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		If you wait long enough, a bad penny turns up. I just learned that Steve “Moorgard” Danuser has completed time off from working on Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and taken …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		In the digital age, where the battleground of ideas often takes the form of tweets and viral posts, Andrew Torba, the founder of Gab, has once again thrown down the …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		The nonsensical phrase body type has replaced gender and sex designation in many popular RPGs in the past few years. This is a top-down initiative that has been implemented to …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		One of the most important speeches ever given about the future of humanity was made by Laura Aboli at the Better Way Conference in 2023. Her speech, “Transhumanism: The End …	
	        
        				
							
					
	
	    	    	
	
		With the recent publication of Jason Schreir’s book Play Nice: The Rise and Fall of Blizzard, the topic of the Irvine studio’s demise is being hotly debated. I am reading …