Volnus

It does well great to have a pet that helps you through the game.

Pets are probably one of the best features to ever appear on online games. Just like how it’s easy to share a bond with a pet in real life, the same is true with online pets. You start getting attached to their characteristics from how they look to how strong they are in battle. For World of Warcraft, I think the Hunter class really popularized pets, especially for combat.

It is great to have those ‘companions’ in games. I have more than 30 pets in AQ3D and love all of them.

Bitcoin definitely sees use as an option to buy things and there are video games out there which can be bought with it.

It is good to see having a lot of options for payment but I really wonder how many people using that method. Not so much in my opinion.

It’s great that there are alternative payments, but one of the biggest disadvantages right now for the adoption of cryptocurrency is that cryptocurrency uses a lot of energy, so it could become problematic as we see more companies adopt it. But I mainly see cryptocurrency as being a secondary payment type than a primary type, even years from now. I do think cryptocurrency is a bit over-hyped though.

MOBAs like LoL and Dota 2 have large prize pools and their popularity does explain the sizes of said prize pools.

Who would believe gamers could gain those amounts of money 20 years ago? Thanks for sharing.

RPG Maker has spawned many great games and it’s definitely going to see more use.

RPG Maker’s a fantastic game development tool. Ever since Flash games died in mid-January, I’ve been seeing more RPG Maker games pop up on the Internet, specifically games created from the RPG Maker MV game engine. You can actually do a lot of creative stuff with RPG Maker like create a bunch of stories, your very own puzzles, your own mystery-solving game, or your own battles. It’s probably the easiest way to get into web game development.

Now that you can actually apply corruption effects to your gear makes gearing up more manageable.

Although I have never played the game, it’s gameplay and reviews have always been appealing.

Thanks for this awesome editorial! I don’t play WoW myself but definitely will recommend to my friends who play it.

I definitely think it is, been playing and seeing a lot more friends get into it now that we have a break due to the pandemic.
Hopefully this gets them to come up with good updates and feature improvements for many games

Pretty much all games have seen a rise in players due to this pandemic, not just “battle royal” games.

It’s going down pretty steadily now though.

Fortnite’s been losing popularity for some time now. I think the release of newer games has been causing a decline in the battle royale genre in recent months, especially with games like the first-person shooter game Valorant and the social deduction game Among Us.

In fact, I think if the lockdowns have done anything to change gaming, it probably increased the popularity of social games like Among Us, Animal Crossing: New Horizons (which is about to be the #1 most sold game on the Switch), and many more social games. You have to realize that before the lockdowns, many people were more productive in their life, so these aren’t the types of people that would spend all day in competitive genres like battle royale, but would be more like the types of people that would enjoy lax genres like social instead and would enjoy playing with families and friends.

To win in Warcraft 3, you need to familiarize yourself with different races you can play as and understand what you need to when playing with said races. What buildings to build, what heroes and units to use, what creeps creep, build expansions to keep your economy going, when to attack, defend and retreat, when to poke your opponents, what enemy heroes, units and buildings to focus on. Keep playing and you will get to the point where you pretty much don’t have to think about the basic things and get to focus on that action.

These are good tips and they apply to pretty much all games I can think of

Thanks for those useful tips! Will definitely try them.

Familiarizing yourself with the game is probably the most crucial part. It’s very common for new players to get into a game and they barely know much about the game, so sometimes they even miss a thing or two that could help them. One thing I will add is that practicing is also helpful since it builds muscle memory; and it intertwines with familiarity of the game as well, because as you keep practicing, you’ll learn what to do to not lose.

Offline games can also provide these same benefits but of course those are not being talked about.

The games also help you learn to be a part of a community and develop social skills, or open up. It exposes you to people all across the world and that broadens your perspective too.

Thanks for that awesome and educational editorial.

Interesting read, but I think this is more about getting into creating and managing databases than actually learning network programming. And why limit yourself to Microsoft anyway with SQL Server, especially since that limits you in some ways, like being tied to Microsoft’s Azure service? There are plenty of other databases out there like Oracle’s MySQL, DynamoDB (you’ll probably use this if you deploy your own games, apps, or services through AWS [and I think AWS is a lot better than Azure]), Redis (in-memory), and MongoDB (which is popular among web developers, and could be useful for web game development). And there are plenty more to explore than just these ones, but these are just some of the popular databases.

Network game programming would require understanding sockets (and there’s usually a sockets library for most major programming languages, so it’s not hard to learn), understanding protocols like TCP/IP, and some other things.

I hope airships do make a comeback, it’d be great to have the experience of traveling in one and seeing the world from up there.
Also they’re really cool tbh

Airships are alright, I guess; they look more like they’re for leisure than for important traveling even if they are somewhat fast. And I think it’s just wishful thinking rather than a realistic view of transportation, since airships would probably cause problems of their own (like environmental issues such as disturbances in bird migration or issues with traveling itself such as air-borne traffic [which would be exacerbated by replacing current modes of transportation]). Like we might as well just bring back the Concorde as well, which was also considered luxurious traveling but even faster. I think airships are more like a Victorian-era steampunk dream.

A club sword? I can only imagine using a sword as a club and that is actually a thing, it’s called half-swording.

The concept of the hydra sword is very nice, something like that could do good damage and also ensure agility.
I’m only wondering if the handle would be able to balance these well, it would require initial practice to get skilled with this sword

Artisan Cobra is looking pretty cool!

Nice!

That Artisan Cobra kind of reminds me of a kukri just from the angle of the blade. When it comes to swords, I think there are thousands of ideas out there. Ogre’s aren’t really known for wielding swords, but I’d imagine that if they did wield swords, it would be a sword with serrated blades, since those kind of swords tend to look spiky (a little similar to how clubs are spiky).

There are a lot of bad video game movies out there because video games aren’t exactly the easiest source material to utilize well.

Pixels is another good movie that I like which has most classic arcade games brought to life (literally)

The Ocean’s series happens to be one I could watch repetitively and not get bored

I played the initial 2 seasons of fortnite before I stopped for some reason. These seem like good tips for when I choose to explore again!

This global epidemic has given many more opportunities to play video games.

I am using this lockdown to genuinely take time for myself and play more than I usually could amongst other things, it feels nice.

There are tons of online games out there for different devices (phone, computer, console), different operating systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, iOS), different genres (platformer, shooting, action), etc. that you really can’t run out of games to play. The amount of games available these days are far more massive than three decades ago, even one decade ago.

Having a good internet connection is essential if you want to play games which require it.

Costa Rica seems suitable best for people who can’t afford the high cost of living, but the amenities are sure great for all of these places

A great guide for people who would plan on moving to boost their gaming career and enhance the experience.

United Kingdom has seemed like a great place to visit, but not so much to live. It’s usually rainy, and during the summer (especially during heatwaves), there’s no air conditioning (since air conditioning is more like an American luxury). I wouldn’t mind the rain, but the lack of air conditioning would probably make gaming feel uncomfortable.

Also places closest to the equator like Costa Rica and Thailand, I’d probably also avoid. Hot and humid weather just feels terrible.

Like just look at the top three countries ranked highest in air-conditioning (Japan, United States, and Korea) and you’ll see that there’s a pretty strong correlation between quality of living and gaming. I would say that those should be the countries to consider.

Mobile technology has certainly gotten better, although I feel like some companies focus a lot more on camera features than processors. Maybe with the new Apple M1 chip (launched in November 10), the next iPhone iteration could utilize that processor. I’ve always felt like the ARM architecture was lagging behind the Intel architecture, since ARM’s trade-off focuses on longer battery-life than performance, but the architecture has definitely improved over the years.

These also apply to offline games as well.

This is true, games are one place where I work on developing my social skills.

I think it depends on the game you play. Some games really are a waste of time, rots the mind, lead to anti-social behaviors, or are addictive, but other games are just the opposite. And it’s also about perspective, because maybe one person views a game with a certain attitude, but another person has a different attitude on a game.

I did expect to see Overwatch and Hearthstone on this list.

League of legends and overwatch are good choices. Haven’t really checked the others yet.

Almost little to no difference to what American demographics play, since these games are pretty much universal. I was kind of anticipating that some game I’ve never heard of filled with Japanese text or anime characters would make the list, but I guess that’s just too specific. Or at the very least, more games with Japanese publishers, but I am a bit surprised there aren’t a whole lot of games by Japanese publishers on the list; Monster Hunter World by Capcom makes sense though.

There are also apps which help you save money and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to look up some of them.

Google Opinion Rewards isn’t exclusive to Android. As far as I know, it’s been around for iOS since late 2017, though the service may not have been available for certain countries. I like Google Opinion Rewards, but the service is far better on iOS devices than on Android, because you could transfer your rewards over to PayPal (iOS) instead of Google Play (Android). The surveys can be somewhat infrequent; I think you get better results if you travel a lot and if you live in a highly urban area.

If it’s free then a student who is fond of games is going to at least consider trying it.

I’ve played a few on that list, especially pubg and minecraft and they’re really great games.

Kind of surprising, because when I went to school, most of the popular online games students were playing were mobile and social games. I guess when you don’t have to carry around miniature computers (phones) all day, you can just play games on your own computer and have more freedom to play games you want, especially during lockdowns.