This week, PWE announced Agents of Yesterday, the next full expansion for Star Trek Online that has a back-to-its-roots or even — dare we say — vanilla feeling. It’s become a surprisingly polarizing announcement, as the focus of the update will be original series tie-ins and requisite time travel tropes in celebration of the franchise’s semicentennial, which is apparently aggravating opponents of the classic Kirk-and-Spock regime as well as actual trolls. If you’re really good, maybe next year you’ll get a Wesley Crusher expansion?
Don’t look at me; I’m a lightsaber girl.
Read on for the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions.
THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
Activision-Blizzard Q1 2016: Activision-Blizzard posts results ahead of WoW Legion, Overwatch - Activision-Blizzard's first quarter 2016 financial report just hit the internet, and the company is declaring "better-than-expected" financial results. "For the quarter ended March 31, 2016, Activision Blizzard's GAAP net revenues…
Star Trek Online announces its third expansion: Agents of Yesterday - [AL:STO]Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starships named Enterprise. Their continuing missions have been to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new…
Chronicles of Elyria moves past the 50% mark with a reward correction - It seems like it was just a couple of days ago when we were writing about Chronicles of Elyria hitting a funding milestone, chiefly because it was indeed just a…
Atlas Reactor switches from a free-to-play to buy-to-play model - [AL:Atlas]Trion has decided to launch Atlas Reactor as a buy-to-play game. "During Closed Beta, we’ve been figuring out how to best tune our Free to Play (F2P) game to create…
WildStar announces new class/race combos - The WildStar developers have heard the community's desire for additional class/race combinations in the game, and as a result Carbine is working on getting these in for a future patch.…
Get a look at World of Warcraft’s new Stormwind park - Has the creation of a park in an MMORPG ever caused such excitement? When World of Warcraft: Legion arrives at the end of August, it won't just bring new lands…
TERA adds new Hello Kitty mounts, outfits, and pets - [AL:TERA]You enjoyed the last round of Hello Kitty merchandise in TERA. This fact is not under debate. You will enjoy more Hello Kitty merchandise in TERA. The pink is overwhelming…
Marvel Heroes’ Captain America: Civil War promo is live (so get your free hero) - It's time to get your free Iron Man or Captain America in Marvel Heroes! As part of its massive Captain America: Civil War promotion, Gazillion has unleashed promo codes that will…
Check out a prototype mission in City of Titans - Developing a game is about developing lots of moving pieces and then finally putting them all together after the fact. We've seen a large number of the pieces being placed…
Massively Overthinking: The sandbox MMORPG disconnect - This week's Massively Overthinking was inspired by a reader who decided to go by Sandboxless in Seattle when he penned this note of frustration to us. [prspeak]I have been playing MMOs for…
Riders of Icarus starts selling founder’s packs and releases gameplay trailer - Planning ahead for those hot summer months? Why not schedule a vacation in the sky, complete with dragons, aerial combat, and all the free-to-play sampling that Nexon has to offer?…
Pantheon’s Visionary Realms hires more developers - The Pantheon team is a bigger one today, as Visionary Realms has announced that it's taken on five new members for the development team -- a new social media manager, a…
EverQuesting: The gaffe of gating EverQuest II’s content behind a sub - With last week's release of GU100 in EverQuest II, an interesting conversation reared its head again -- a not necessarily flattering one for Daybreak. While I am as excited as the…
Perfect Ten: The final minutes of beloved MMORPGs - "This is how the world ends," T S Eliot wrote in his famous poem, "not with a bang, but with a whimper." That might well describe the concluding moment of…
Chronicles of Elyria roars past $422,000 in its Kickstarter campaign - Two days into its Kickstarter campaign, Chronicles of Elyria is hardly slowing from its sprint out of the gate. The fantasy MMO sandbox has cleared $422K on its way to…
China gets the Warcraft movie two days before everyone else - Want to be among the first in the world to see the Warcraft feature film? Then you best be buying a ticket to China. BBC reports that the country will…
EVE Online player uses patch trick to dominate the PLEX market - Among the patch notes for EVE Online's recent Citadel expansion release was a fairly innocuous increase in the fees for listing items on the in-game market from a minimum of 0.25%…
PSA: ArcheAge is retiring inactive names on May 10 - [AL:Arche]If you like your character name in ArcheAge and you haven't logged into the game for a while, you might want to put a visit to the game in your…
EVE Online is free-to-play on Steam for the weekend - It's been a long time since EVE Online launched (like, at least a week), and the game is still getting regular updates and improvements. This weekend, as part of the…
Flameseeker Chronicles: Weighing in on the Guild Wars 2 WvW poll - The first WvW poll is about to close and the votes have been flying in during the last few days, driving home that Guild Wars 2 fans all over have been…
Black Desert’s second Mediah update brings new pirate events, cash shop buyables - Mediah part two launches in Black Desert today, bringing with it several class fixes, monster adjustments, the temporary removal of specific North American channels, and a ridiculous number of new…
Dungeons and Dragons Online gives out three free quests for Update 31 - [AL:DDO]Free players and subscribers, let there be no division between you today, for Dungeons and Dragons Online is going to treat all the same with Update 31: Gnomework. The patch, which…
Chronicles of Elyria Kickstarter hits nearly a third of its funding in less than 24 hours - What do you get when you promise an MMORPG with aging, permanent death, offspring, and a destructible world? Apparently, you get $270,000 of funding pretty quickly. The Chronicles of Elyria…
Black Desert’s most common hacking tool appears to be bundled with a keylogger - Vigilante justice rarely works out in the long run. Delivering pain to match pain just creates an unceasing, spiraling cycle. But with all of that philosophy said, it's hard not…
Hyperspace Beacon: SWTOR’s heist-themed ‘Profit and Plunder’ chapter stole the show, literally - I believe there is only one word to describe Chapter 13 for Knights of the Fallen Empire: cute. For the six chapters prior to this one, I’ve been walking around…
Here’s the Black Desert commercial that’s sweeping the airwaves - It's not every day that an MMO gets enough popularity and promotion to warrant a TV spot, so you'd be forgiven if you did a double-take at seeing Black Desert…
Chronicles of Elyria’s Kickstarter is now live - The Kickstarter for Chronicles of Elyria has just gone live. Soulbound Studios' goal won't surprise anyone as the company told followers in March that it would seek a relatively modest $900k. The…
Daybreak scrambles new servers after DC Universe Online’s huge Xbox One launch - Here's a sentence I never thought I'd be typing: DC Universe Online might actually be too successful for its own good. Since the game's launch on Xbox One last week, Daybreak…
Crowfall’s castle siege video is appropriately brutal - Crowfall's latest Siege Perilous footage is brief, but it digs into the flashier parts of castle sieges, with catapults loosing their missiles, explosions knocking people off walls (and those walls…
Why Brad McQuaid chose Pantheon over reviving Vanguard - Brad McQuaid's name is linked to many things, most recently Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and most infamously with Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. In an MMO.it interview with the developer…
The Nostalrius team on hopes for a legacy World of Warcraft server - For those who can't get enough information about what led to the creation and maintenance of the Nostalrius World of Warcraft server, the site Buffed.de sat down and spoke with…
League of Legends bans popular streamer for troll behavior - [AL:LOL]Once upon a time, there was a popular streamer for League of Legends who went by the handle of Tyler1. His streams were popular due to the fact that he…
Stardew Valley announces co-op multiplayer and console ports are coming - Have you been sucked into the charming microcosm of farming, dating, and crafting that is Stardew Valley? This retro-designed indie title is one of the big breakout hits of 2016,…
Rumor: Warcraft movie tix may include WoW for free in some regions - French World of Warcraft website Mamytwink.com is reporting that the purchase of Warcraft movie tickets through French cinema maven Kinepolis will be accompanied by a number of bonuses in World…
The Secret World assembles a new game trailer - It does appear that Funcom is making a big marketing push with The Secret World lately. Last week the studio activated an ongoing 10-day trial, tomorrow The Park launches on consoles, and…
Overwatch’s Winston: Are you with us? - Overwatch's Winston should probably not quit his day job, but you gotta love him anyway. Blizzard has a new Overwatch trailer out today featuring our favorite gorilla badass making a…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 63: Leisure suit Larry
Battle Bards Episode 74: Black Desert Online
The Stream Team: Adopting ARK’s puppies and capturing centipedes
The Stream Team: Hotfooting it to Heidel and giving away Black Desert codes
The Stream Team: Lost in The Secret World’s labyrinth
The Stream Team: Dipping into Dreadnought’s closed beta
The Stream Team: May the Fourth (and free cartel packs) be with you in SWTOR
The Stream Team: Rebuilding EverQuest II’s ancient Stein of Maggok
The Stream Team: HEX’s harrowing dream dungeon
AND FROM OUR FRIENDS AT BLIZZARD WATCH
Visiting WoW Legion’s class halls is a minor inconvenience and that’s great
Warcraft movie prequel novel Durotan now available
WoW Legion’s Demon Hunter background and story
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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