Michael Bitton

I never got fantasy sports. I saw the posts come across my feed all the time and watched as my friends became insufferable once their fantasy football leagues picked up, but I just never saw the appeal. It all seemed a bit silly. Well, now I think I’ve become that insufferable friend – only with something far nerdier: fantasy League of Legends.

Even with the F2P model now popular in the West, social game developers continue to take the consumer hostile approach with their games, monetizing anything they possibly can. The games themselves, on the other hand, have been evolving. Games like Playdom’s Marvel Avengers Alliance are actually well crafted experiences full of content and nuanced gameplay.

The 10th anniversary of City of Heroes’ release came and went with not much more than a whisper. The game is dead and so the usual jubilation and of course, events to go along with such a momentous occasion, were nowhere to be found. It’s a bittersweet thing to reflect upon. There just wasn’t anything like City of Heroes, and to this day, there still isn’t.

If you haven’t played Heroes before but you have MOBA experience, it’s pretty easy to look at some of the things Blizzard is doing with Heroes and say they’re dumbing things down to reach an even broader audience. I’ll remind you again, the same was said for Hearthstone, and clearly there is more to that story.

The gaming show season truly kicks off this week with PAX East in Boston, and as always we’ll be covering all the stuff you care about at the show. With PAX just days away, I wanted to take some this week to highlight some of the things I’m looking forward to most at the show.

Games like SMITE change things up from the League formula by offering a unique third person perspective, but you don’t necessarily have to change things that much to create a satisfying experience, and that’s where Turbine’s Infinite Crisis comes in for me.

Yep. We aren’t even live yet and I’m already looking ahead to what’s next for The Elder Scrolls Online. That’s not to say that I feel the game is deficient in launch features, but half the excitement of playing a new MMO is pondering about where it will go next. I’ve got a couple of things I’d like to see, so let’s jump into it.

I love League of Legends, but it’s no secret that the game’s community can be incredibly toxic. I’ve been playing LoL since beta and every couple of months I have to take a break from the game as I can only take so much toxicity. Last year, I decided to take a break between Season 3 and Season 4, but then I learned of Riot Games’ plan to implement a Team Builder feature that endeavored to help address one of the primary sources of toxicity in League of Legends: champion select.

Traditionally, at least for the MMO genre, the more information available to players via the game’s UI, the better. As a result, MMO UI designs often end up being deficient in some way, and depending on how much foresight the developers had, the UI is maligned and rigidly remains as is, or the UI is moddable and the player community releases a slew of mods to shore things up.

If you tried to enter the Imperial City in Cyrodiil during any of the recent Elder Scrolls Online beta tests, you were probably disappointed to find out that it wasn’t actually possible to do so. While you get to fight a dramatic looking Daedric Titan at the entrance, defeating said Titan will only lead you to a passage blocked off by a (lethal) magical barrier. It’s clear that Zenimax Online is reserving this space for something significant, but what?

Last week, the press was finally given an opportunity to weigh in on The Elder Scrolls Online with a torrent of previews that flooded the interwebs. The response was decidedly mixed overall, but personally, I can say I’m a fan of what I’ve played so far. Even after putting in time for my previews, I played quite a bit more of ESO over this past weekend and I found myself consistently surprised at all the little things that added up to make an experience I was already enjoying even better.

There’s an Elder Scrolls Online beta weekend coming up this Friday and while I would normally be excited to get in and play, I’m even more excited to finally get my hands on Bravely Default, which releases in North America on the same day.

When we gave Marvel Heroes a 5.6 in our review last June, the game most certainly deserved it. In fact, when I first saw MH at a game convention around six months before launch, I thought it looked terrible. I eventually got a chance to play in the beta and the game was definitely rough, but I could see the potential as it improved towards launch. Still, those improvements weren’t enough, and the game launched a hot mess.

Last week, we discussed why 2014 would be an awesome year for MMOs. The big three MMO releases of the year were mentioned, but took a backseat to some other interesting developments. Today, community manager Mike Bitton offers his take on the three AAA MMOs we're all watching closely.

2013 wasn't an incredibly exciting time for the MMO genre, but 2014 is poised to be an incredible year by comparison. Read on to find out why!