Best east coast colleges

E-sports programs and scholarships at universities stopped being newsworthy years ago once they were a dime a dozen, but a new one from Ohio’s Ashland University has caught the mainstream media’s eye because it’s reportedly the very first to include Fortnite. “Ashland’s esports team, which will begin competition next fall, will arrange four-player teams that practice regularly and compete together,” says the university. “AU is at the forefront in adding Fortnite to its offerings, which already include League of Legends, Overwatch, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Rocket League. Eventually, [head coach Josh] Buchanan’s hope is that collegiate leagues will be set up for official Fortnite competitions.” Open tryouts will begin for the 2018-2019 school year. The best players can snag “up to $4,000 based on player skill level and academic requirements” in scholarships. In other Fortnite news, Tencent says it’s … [Read more...] about Ohio college begins Fortnite e-sports team and scholarship

The past couple of weeks has been wild as we dispatched writers to GDC in San Francisco and PAX East in Boston to gather up and bring back everything they could on the MMORPGs large and small on the spring convention circuit. In fact, as I type this, we’ve got Brendan in Reykjavik for EVE Fanfest too! So for this week’s Overthinking, we’re rounding up our coverage and then reflecting on the best and worst as we pick out what most excites, surprises, and disappoints us: First the roundups, then our thoughts. Read on! PAX EAST 2018 Massively Overthinking: The best of PAX East and GDC in 2018 Ashes of Creation looks back at PAX East while promising a Q4 alpha Ship of Heroes posts a timeline for the first half of 2018 PAX East 2018: An interview with the big griffon statue PAX East 2018: Hands-on with Pantheon Rise of the Fallen PAX East 2018: Catching up on Legends of Aria’s improvements since the last PAX PAX East 2018: Frostkeep’s MMO Rend … [Read more...] about Massively Overthinking: The best of PAX East and GDC in 2018

Play Final Fantasy XIVIt’s easy to have little to no idea about how Final Fantasy XIV is localized. Obviously the localization team has advanced beyond the days of Final Fantasy Tactics (which apparently was translated by someone with Babelfish and a rampaging hangover), but it’s still pretty easy to picture the localization as a matter of the Japanese staff dropping a stack of untranslated text on someone’s desk with a laugh and a note to have fun figuring it out. The note, presumably, would also be in Japanese. This is not just wrong, but it bears absolutely no resemblance whatsoever to the actual localization process. I had the chance to talk with main scenario writer Natusko Ishikawa and localization lead John Crow, who helpfully went into some details on both the localization process and their personal feelings about the story and characters therein. You can also check out the embedded footage of the panel below, which goes into more detail on the writing … [Read more...] about PAX East 2018: Final Fantasy XIV’s main scenario writing and localization

Yes, it’s that time again, time to drive up to Boston and take part in the annual collection of games and poorly laid-out convention halls that makes up PAX East. There are panels to be attended if you can get in line early enough, merch to be bought, and most importantly for our purposes, interviews to be had. Are you excited? Well, maybe not! Sometimes it feels like the best information about MMOs comes out of small conventions devoted to specific games (like EVE Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and World of Warcraft, although that last one is arguably not small in the least). Yet there’s always a bunch of MMO stuff at the various booths just the same; the convention is just more often a time to reach out to players and press who may not follow MMOs studiously, so that tends to be the focus for presentation. But enough explaining the situation; let’s turn the microphone over to you, as it were. Is there anything about MMOs you hope to see at PAX East? A game or two that … [Read more...] about The Daily Grind: We’re headed to PAX East – what do you most want to see?