Working As Intended is Massively Overpowered Editor-in-Chief Bree Royce’s favorite place to muse about game design, the MMO industry, and worlds gone by. Previous entries published on Engadget. [Follow this column’s RSS feed]
working as intended
Working As Intended: A guide to City of Heroes Homecoming’s best player-crafted portal bases
A few years ago, I was wandering around in City of Heroes when someone advertised a cool base in chat. All I had to...
Working As Intended: City of Heroes macros and popmenus for noobs
In my first braindump on City of Heroes for this column, I tried to ease superhero fans into the world of modding the 20-year-old...
Working As Intended: Yes, you can make money as a newbie in City of Heroes
Something I've heard over and over from commenters and even newbies in City of Heroes Homecoming ever since the official license was announced is...
Interview: Survival MMO Age of Water on monetization, sandbox play, and the Q1 early access launch
Way back at the end of 2020, we first caught wind of a new sandbox called Age of Water: Developed by Three Whales Studio...
Working As Intended: How to mod City of Heroes Homecoming the easy way
If you played City of Heroes a long time ago - or even back in 2019, when its secret server blossomed into a public...
MassivelyOP’s complete 2023 awards recap and debrief
As we did in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022, today we're going to recap our annual awards and other articles from...
Working As Intended: The MMOs we lost in 2023
If preserving MMORPGs is your jam, 2023 was not a great year. The one nice thing I can say about it is that we...
Make My MMO: The biggest MMO crowdfunding stories of 2023
Welcome to a special end-of-the-year edition of Make My MMO, the MassivelyOP column where we - well, I - keep tabs on all of...
Working As Intended: The hits and misses of our 2023 MMO predictions
We've been offering up an MMO predictions list for Massively Overthinking for years upon years now as our writers and readers prognosticate on the...
Star Wars Galaxies Legends is launching a brand-new Wookiee treehouse for Life Day
When we were discussing our Best MMO Housing award last week, I joked to our team that I knew about an amazing housing addition...
Working As Intended: My 20 years of Star Wars Galaxies
Last year, when Ultima Online turned 25 years old, I did a piece reminiscing on those early days and marveling that so much of...
Activision-Blizzard and NetEase’s breakup was caused by long-brewing disputes and alleged threats
One of the biggest MMO and gaming stories capping off the end of 2022 and spilling over into the start of 2023 was the...
Activision-Blizzard’s diversity and inclusion goals are out of sync with its corporate action
Activision-Blizzard has released a full-year review of its diversity, equity, and inclusion stats for 2022 this week, and the first thing readers will notice...
For Science: Crit-Rate is another survey-driven attempt to match gamer personalities to games
I have to admit I almost deleted the press release for this story without reading it, but my finger twitched, and let me tell...
Former Trion boss Scott Hartsman illuminates the rise and fall of RIFT
Yesterday, we ran an editorial from MOP's Tyler focused on his reasoning that MMOs are better off showcasing their own special attributes than tearing...
Working As Intended: The MMOs we lost in 2022
Perhaps one of our saddest traditions at the turn of every year is taking stock of all the MMOs we lost along the way....
MassivelyOP’s complete 2022 awards debrief and annual recap
As we did in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, today we're going to recap our annual awards and other meta articles from...
Working As Intended: The hits and misses of MassivelyOP’s 2022 predictions
Every year we do an MMO predictions post full of obvious, not-so-obvious, and totally-out-there prognostication for the future of the MMO genre. And every...
Working As Intended: My 25 years of Ultima Online
Twenty-five years ago my boyfriend, Paul, and I walked into a shop to find a new game to play together. He picked up this...
Working As Intended: MMOs that wish they were Star Wars Galaxies
"My friends and I would skin someone alive for an SWG 2," an old Star Wars Galaxies player recently wrote on Reddit, and that...
