MMO Week in Review: Star Citizen’s alpha roadmap (April 16, 2017)

April 16, 2017 8:00 PM

Were you too busy gaming this week to pay attention to MMO news? Get caught up every Sunday evening with Massively Overpowered’s Week in Review!

Just when you think it’s gonna be a dead holiday weekend, Star Citizen drops a zinger in the form of a massive roadmap for 2017 and a summer ETA for alpha 3.0 — though it’ll have fewer features than originally anticipated.

Meanwhile, TERA launched Honorbound, Blade & Soul released its Secrets of the Stratus update, and BioWare delayed SWTOR’s 5.2 patch to this week, so there’s something to look forward to!

Read on for the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions.

THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES

Tamriel Infinium: Am I playing Elder Scrolls Online wrong? - [AL:ESO]Elder Scrolls Online and I have had an on-again-off-again relationship for the last several years. A lot of that relationship stemmed from my being steeped in another online community in…

Perfect Ten: Conversations with anthropomorphic concepts of MMO studios - Every so often, a man needs to have a conversation with some anthropomorphized concepts. I do that every few years. In the past, I've usually focused on more philosophical concepts.…

A trimmed-down Star Citizen 3.0 alpha is coming this summer - You can stop fidgeting about what might or might not arrive in Star Citizen this year: Cloud Imperium has released its promised development roadmap for the rest of 2017. The…

The Game Archaeologist: SOE’s The Agency - The graveyard of Sony Online Entertainment and Daybreak Game Company is certainly full enough to be considered a threat if there was ever a zombie uprising among MMORPGs. From PlanetSide…

SWTOR sits on a brand-new superweapon - [AL:TOR]Now that we've watched The Last Jedi teaser trailer a few hundred times and steeled ourselves for a potential Death Star Number 4, SWTOR would like to interest you in…

Massively OP’s spring and Easter MMORPG event roundup - Bunnies and eggs! Flowers and grass! Lots and lots of chocolate as we hoard every Cadbury thing we can find! (Or maybe that's just me?) Yep, Easter is this weekend,…

WildStar looks forward to more Prime difficulty content over the next year - The first major WildStar patch of 2017 unlocked the Primal Matrix and added the Prime difficulty level for select dungeons. What's next for the game? According to the newest state…

Massively Overthinking: MMOs, from hardcore to casual and back again - Massively OP reader Suikoden wrote this great question to the podcast -- too good to let just Justin and me answer it. It's a two-parter! "Back when I used to…

Choose My Adventure: Learning to appreciate Black Desert - [AL:BDO]First and foremost, I'd like to thank the many people who informed me about how to hide the UI in Black Desert. I shouldn't have needed to be told that,…

The Survivalist: Massively OP’s guide to survival games, single-player and beyond - As Massively OP is centered on the "massively" part of gaming, it makes sense that my first guide to survival games was focused on multiplayer titles. Similarly, The Survivalist will…

Study claims playing Pokemon Go is associated with happiness attributes - A research team from the University of Wisconsin–Madison has a paper out this month purporting to show that Pokemon Go play essentially makes people happier, or more specifically, is associated with…

Pantheon explains its crafting, harvesting, and perception systems - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen's April newsletter has arrived, and in my mind it's one of the better ones in recent memory, but that's because it has a long feature…

Valiance Online is developing stunning special effects - When Valiance Online puts out its next playable alpha build, it may just be the visual effects that will send players jumping up and down for joy. "I think the…

Carbine cracks down on WildStar Primal Matrix exploiters - Let this post serve as another reminder that cheating is bad, and if the game is too hard or time-consuming for you to win at, the solution is to get…

EVE Fanfest 2017: EVE Online plans amazing new PvE gameplay - [AL:EVE]Today's EVE Online is a far cry from the empty but hopeful sandbox released back in 2003, having constantly re-invented itself for over 14 years and put together some incredibly ambitious…

Star Trek Online announces the end of STO Gateway - [AL:STO]One of Star Trek Online's lesser-used features is about to be chucked into a black hole, never to be seen again. On the official forums, Cryptic announced that it will…

Lord of the Rings Online plans two-month nostalgia hunt for 10th anniversary - [AL:LOTRO]Don't expect the same-old fireworks display from Lord of the Rings Online as it hits its 10th birthday this month. Well, there will be fireworks, but more than that, too.…

Elder Scrolls Online bets you’re gonna roll a Warden in Morrowind - [AL:ESO]Even if you don't care a fig for the province of Morrowind or Elder Scrolls nostalgia -- in which case, what sort of alien creature are you?! -- you might…

Blade and Soul’s newest patch revamps class progression and adds new regions to explore - The latest big patch for Blade & Soul has arrived, and it brings with it some major changes. Class trees and skill points, for example, are gone altogether. In the…

Conan Exiles goes on sale for 20% off, recaps its update progress so far - It's been a whirlwind spring for Conan Exiles, with the survival sandbox racking up hundreds of thousands of sales while pumping out updates left and right. Funcom would apparently like…

PSA: The Elder Scrolls Online kicks off its free play week today - [AL:ESO]If you don't yet own The Elder Scrolls Online but want to see if it's worth owning ahead of the Morrowind update, you'll get your chance today. Starting at 10:00…

TERA launches its Valkyrie patch Honorbound today [Update: It’s live now!] - [AL:TERA]At first it was called the Paragon. Then, players revolted, and it was renamed to the Valkyrie. But whatever you call the newest class in TERA, it still spins around…

BioWare delays SWTOR 5.2 for a week, might be working on KOTOR 3 and a ‘semi-MMO’ - [AL:TOR]Let's rip off this band-aid quickly: There will be no SWTOR Update 5.2 today. BioWare announced on the forums that it is delaying the patch, which contains the MMO's first…

The Daily Grind: What gaming mouse do you use for MMORPGs? - A couple of months ago, I went on a tear desperately trying to find a new mouse both for work and for MMOs and general gaming. My mouse was great…

Pokemon Go counts 65M players, plans gym raids and co-op gameplay - Niantic's latest Pokemon Go post might seem like a mundane thank-you note for all its many awards, but there are two bits buried within worth noting. The first revolves around…

Revelation Online deals with infestation of adorable and cuddly raccoon-people - [AL:Rev]If there is a species of land animal that MMOs haven't made into a weird or adorable NPC race, developers haven't met them yet. Case in point, Revelation Online's Volopine,…

LOTRO Legendarium: Playing second fiddle to the Fellowship - [AL:LOTRO]Back when Lord of the Rings Online was being developed as Middle-earth Online in the late 1990s, the original concept was to plop players into the Fourth Age after the…

Wargaming says betting is ‘a natural part of sports’ and therefore online games - Earlier this month, we covered SuperData's report on the state of gambling practices in digital games, in which one of the analysis firm's claims was that Valve's ordeal last year…

Experts caution against VR dangers - With virtual reality headsets becoming widespread and the gaming industry jumping on board the movement, could there be a dark side to this rapid adaptation? That's the concern of some…

Overwatch Uprising event is live today - So it's not called Insurrection. It's called Uprising. English has a lot of words that mean the same thing, so we'll forgive the leakers. Yep, Blizzard's just confirmed that Overwatch's new…

THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS

AND FROM OUR FRIENDS AT BLIZZARD WATCH

Are you tired of demons in WoW yet? (Answer: Yes.)

WoW patch 7.2.5 notes, details on class changes

WoW 7.2.5 PTR coming soon with Black Temple Timewalking, tmog competitions

Every week, get caught up on the MMO genre’s latest news and Massively OP’s best content in our MMO Week in Review! Want more roundups of content? Try Friday’s Betawatch for MMO testing highlights, Saturday’s Make My MMO for MMO crowdfunding updates, and Sunday’s The MOP Up, which mops up all the little bits of news we didn’t cover anywhere else.