After wrapping up PAX East – and chronicling our experiences with Pantheon, Ship of Heroes, ESO Summerset, and Ashes of Creation – we dived straight into EVE Online’s annual Fanfest, where this year CCP Games announced the Into the Abyss expansion as well as progress on Project Nova. Stay tuned for more! In the meantime, read on for the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions.
THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
EVE Fanfest 2018: EVE Online’s upcoming ‘Into the Abyss’ expansion sounds incredible - [AL:EVE]While player capsuleers are undoubtedly the most powerful force in EVE Online, there are some pretty scary NPCs lurking in the depths of space. One of those threats has just…
EVE Fanfest 2018: EVE Online FPS Project Nova is coming ‘in months, not years’ - When CCP Games first made the leap into the first person shooter market with DUST 514, things didn't exactly go to plan. The game was released as a PlayStation 3…
EVE Fanfest 2018: Two EVE players were married by the space pope. Yep. - Of all the fascinating things the EVE Online community has embraced over the game's almost 15-year lifetime, perhaps the most bizarre is space pope Max Singularity. The character of the space…
Massively Overthinking: The best of PAX East and GDC in 2018 - 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…
Final Fantasy XIV confirms its next major patch in late May - [AL:FFXIV]If you were watching the most recent Final Fantasy XIV live letter, we can only hope you speak Japanese. It would be pretty hard to follow otherwise. But the official…
Guild Wars 2 used client-side spyware to aid its latest purge of potential cheaters - [AL:GW2]ArenaNet's just gone on a purge of potential cheaters in Guild Wars 2. "Yesterday we suspended 1,583 accounts for a period of 6 months," Gaile Gray wrote on the forums.…
RIFT: Three more ‘content milestones’ in 2018, progression server’s lifespan extended - [AL:Rift]Trion Worlds is stepping up its communication game this week, first with a post on the imminent plans for RIFT's progression server and then slapping down a huge developer Q&A…
Romain ‘Tilty’ Amiel departs Funcom and Secret World Legends - [AL:SWL]Secret World Legends players are in for a shock: Game Director Romain Amiel is moving on from Funcom. MMO vets will recall he's been a fixture at the studio for…
The Game Archaeologist: Lineage - If we judged MMOs by their numbers alone -- and I'm not suggesting we do so -- then the original Lineage would be the crowing rooster strutting about the hen…
PUBG Corp’s infringement lawsuit against NetEase may not be completely ridiculous after all - Last week, we wrote about how PUBG Corp is suing NetEase (and NetEase is threatening to sue everyone) over alleged copyright infringement in regard to the battle royale genre and…
WoW Factor: Updating data in the wake of Battle for Azeroth’s release announcement - Hooray, we have a release date for World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth instead of just a release window! And contrary to what many skeptics (myself included) expected to get,…
Conan Exiles begins the countdown to launch with a new trailer - Fourteen months after hitting early access, Funcom is getting ready to launch Conan Exiles for real. Ahead of the May 8th release, the studio has posted up a brand-new teaser…
Star Trek Online recruits a dozen Deep Space Nine actors for this summer’s expansion - [AL:STO]The final Deep Space Nine cast members reprising their roles for Star Trek Online: Victory is Life were announced today, bringing the total up to an impressive 12 voice actors…
The Survivalist: ARK Survival Evolved’s early early access vs. launch - When a game is being created, you usually expect that development to move the title in a positive direction and make it better, right? The state of the game when…
Choose My Adventure: Getting started in Ultima Online - The interesting thing about this installment of Choose My Adventure is that it's probably the only time I could ever do this particular title. Not because it's going away anytime…
Destiny 2’s second expansion, Warmind, launches May 8, or whatever - [AL:D2]Gone are the days when Bungie would put out teases and trailers for its expansions, apparently. Last night, it practically stealth-announced Destiny 2's next big thing in the middle of…
Skyforge launches Overgrowth expansion and kicks off anniversary event - [AL:Sky]Spring is here, plants are growing, and Skyforge has germinated an expansion for players to harvest right now. Overgrowth is live in the game, bringing a new class and some…
Old School RuneScape prices are going up in June - If your preferred sort of RuneScape is the older variety of schools, we're sorry to inform you that the price is going up. On the bright side, you'll be happy…
PAX East 2018: An interview with the big griffon statue - Everyone knows that the various people portraying characters at PAX East are just there to portray a character. That's not who they really are. Just because an attractive young woman…
Tamriel Infinium: Understanding Elder Scrolls Online’s Mephala and speculating on Summerset - [AL:ESO]Let me teach you how to understand Mephala the Webspinner. Maybe that's misleading; she's a Deadric Prince, and who can really understand the motivations of a god, especially one as…
The 2015 ArcheAge class action lawsuit continues, snarled in arbitration appeals - Waaaay back in 2015, a group of ArcheAge players filed a lawsuit against Trion Worlds over the Patron perk mess. Veteran MMO players will recall that Trion's original pitch for…
Perfect Ten: Why trend-chasing doesn’t work at all for online games - Video games have always been a remarkably insular field; that's the nature of development. Someone produces Super Mario Bros, and a few years later Sonic the Hedgehog sounds like a…
Radical Heights has only barely topped LawBreakers’ all-time player count - It's important to note that Radical Heights has only just been sent out into the wild, and its surprise launch was less "highly anticipated" and more "utterly unexpected." Comparisons after…
Steam Spy is done for – unless Valve reverses course - Did you like having a clue how well games were really doing in terms of population on Steam? That might be coming to an end. Valve announced new privacy-oriented changes…
Lord of the Rings Online celebrates its eleventh birthday - [AL:LOTRO]Not that Hobbits need much of an excuse to throw a party, but it just so happens to be Lord of the Rings Online's 11th birthday this month. That means…
Leaderboard: Are you still playing Secret World Legends? - I've always been curious about you folks who forgave Funcom for 2017. I'm not sure that, were I a hardcore old-school Secret World player, I could so easily let slide…
NetEase threatens to sue everybody who cloned its battle royale clones - On Friday, we covered PUBG Corp's lawsuit against NetEase, which alleges that the Chinese company has infringed PUBG's copyrights in its overt battle royale clones - there's a whole itemized…
Guild Wars 2 has completely overhauled gathering tools with glyph upgrades and wardrobe implementation - [AL:GW2]A couple of weeks ago, a nasty patch bug borked up harvesting tools in Guild Wars 2. Hardest hit were the endless-use versions that run a thousand gemmies in the…
PAX East 2018: Hands-on with Pantheon Rise of the Fallen - Those who have read a fair amount of my work will know that nostalgia is something I tend to rail against pretty hard. I'm a big advocate for constantly spot-checking…
PAX East 2018: Catching up on Legends of Aria’s improvements since the last PAX - When I saw Legends of Aria last year, right after it had dropped the Shards Online name and expanded to be a full-fledged MMORPG, it looked pretty good. Not spectacular,…
PAX East 2018: Frostkeep’s MMO Rend has come a very long way in just one year - My experience with Rend last year felt a bit like stepping into a faerie circle and slipping into another world, sneaking up to a rather secret meeting in a restaurant…
PAX East 2018: Hands-on with the surprisingly solid combat of Ashes of Creation - This year's PAX East featured a lot of games early in their testing phase, but Ashes of Creation was one that had splurged for a very large booth toward the…
PAX East 2018: Hands-on with The Elder Scrolls Online’s Summerset - [AL:ESO]One of the fun parts of this job - or one of the odd parts, depending on how you prioritize things - is how you can agree with absolutely every…
Having given up on LawBreakers, Boss Key is launching battle royale game Radical Heights tomorrow - Last week, we wrote about the de facto maintenance-moding of LawBreakers, as Boss Key admitted the game wasn't making money, not even enough to justify going free-to-play. At the time,…
PAX East 2018: Guild Wars 2 game director Mike Zadorojny on Path of Fire, monetization, and more - [AL:GW2]It's not every day that you walk into a building dominated by an enormous griffon, the enormous statue replicating the mount in Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire. You could,…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 165: Step into the Morninglight
The Stream Team: A first look at Radical Heights
The Stream Team: A big boss beat down in ARK
The Stream Team: As the sun sets in Secret World Legends’ South Africa
The Stream Team: Friday the 13th in AdventureQuest 3D
The Stream Team: World of Tanks celebrates seven years and looks better than ever
The Stream Team: Replica rocket races in Star Trek Online
The Stream Team: The final days of EverQuest II’s Bristlebane festival
The Stream Team: Solving SWTOR’s Chapter VI story puzzles
The Stream Team: Pondering The Elder Scrolls Legends’ new puzzles
AND FROM OUR FRIENDS AT BLIZZARD WATCH
A first look at WoW’s Kul Tiras Feral Druid form
Blizzard is experimenting with using an AI to moderate its games
Battle for Azeroth’s creepiest quest involves a tea party, rhyming, and Smoochums
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.
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