WoW’s questing system was inspired by a playtest that didn’t work out as planned, because the testers didn’t play MMOs and had no idea what they were supposed to do: ‘I ran out of quests right away!’

The idea that World of Warcraft was ever light on quests sounds like blasphemy at this point. Why would you ever make a game about killing seven wolves not because an NPC asked you to but just for the fun of it? But that’s how MMOs like Everquest worked back then, and it’s how the…

Read More

Playing World of Warcraft with a controller might become my preferred playstyle thanks to this excellent gamepad-friendly addon that’s letting me enjoy Azeroth from my couch

After a few years of lapsed subscription, Midnight’s launch has lured me back into World of Warcraft. But as someone who works from home, the thing I want most at the end of the day is an escape from my desk, keyboard, and mouse—an impulse that can cut down on my prime dwarf shaman hours….

Read More

One Australian gamer was denied a replacement for DRAM kit bought just two years prior and was only offered a refund of original price, four times less than its cost today

One of my biggest regrets over the last year is not picking up more hardware before the memory crisis, yet it turns out even thinking ahead may not save you. One customer bought a DDR5 memory kit back in 2024, and upon finding it (broken?), now they’ve been offered its worth… from 2024. As covered…

Read More

Europe’s game rating agency takes aim at in-app purchases, loot boxes, and ‘unrestricted communication’ with new ‘interactive risk categories’

European game rating agency PEGI is about to make life more complicated for some game developers, as it plans to expand its system later this year with new “interactive risk categories” specifically targeting games with loot boxes, in-app purchases, or unmoderated in-game communications. Videogame age rating systems were initially established over fears about the presence…

Read More

Arc Raiders received ‘substantial negative PvP sentiment’ during testing, causing the devs to second-guess its big pivot before realising it was really frustration with weapons and matchmaking

After Embark Studios’ “playtest battles” and slew of competing plans caused it to pivot Arc Raiders away from its PvE boss-killing roots, it decided to add PvP to spice things up. While the rest isn’t quite history (development was still far from simple), it would be a defining factor in how it became the PvPvE…

Read More

ZA/UM doesn’t want ‘to invite too many comparisons’ to Disco Elysium with new game Zero Parades—’We didn’t feel like we wanted to repeat our greatest hits’

Seven years on from Disco Elysium’s release and we are once again getting a game with the ZA/UM studio name on it. Zero Parades is a CRPG spy thriller that—when I played its demo a few weeks ago—felt very Disco-Elysium-shaped indeed. Which is weird, because when our Wes Fenlon chatted to principal writer Siim Sinamäe…

Read More