Elder Scrolls Online launched its big annual campaign, Elsweyr, into its headstart early access for PC players this week, and while the official launch – and entry of console players – isn’t until June, the rest of us can already join the cat people in banishing dragons from the skies.
Meanwhile, we got a peek at Path of Exile’s next big thing, ran down tips for City of Heroes players, hoped the KOTOR movie won’t suck, and previewed EVE Online’s and Final Fantasy XIV’s inbound expansions.
Read on to catch up with the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions today as every Sunday in Massively Overpowered’s Week in Review!THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
Elder Scrolls Online’s Elsweyr early access has begun - We're just two weeks out from the official launch of Elsweyr in The Elder Scrolls Online, complete with new zone, new Necro class, and of course, more dragons than you…
WoW Factor: Crazy speculation on turning back the clock for World of Warcraft - There's a game I like to play - wait, no, that's a lie. There's a game IÂ do play called "Oh, I Made Myself Sad." It consists of a very simple…
Path of Exile’s blast-from-the-past Legion League revamps melee and crushes complexity creep on June 7 - It's time once again to learn about the next big update for Grinding Gear Games' popular MMOARPG, which will launch for the PC on June 7th, 2019, and hit both…
Perfect Ten: Helpful tips for returning to City of Heroes in 2019 - With the (community-led) rebirth of City of Heroes in 2019, a rather interesting problem has arisen for this superhero title: Namely, players who never tried out this game before are…
City of Heroes: All the public servers we know of, plus Reddit’s launch and Homecoming’s name release - A new City of Heroes rogue server has joined the chat: Specifically, it's the Reddit-backed server, and it's called Pleiades. It went live at midnight last night running the beta…
Final Fantasy XIV releases job action trailer, benchmarks, and 16M player count ahead of Shadowbringers - The gates have not yet been thrown wide for Final Fantasy XIV's third expansion, Shadowbringers, but players can now see what's on the other side pretty clearly. Yesterday's Letter from the Producer…
Vague Patch Notes: On fans and fanboys in MMORPGs - When you play Final Fantasy XIV, you are going to be stuck playing one of an assortment of jobs, with no actual customization to distinguish your Ninja from any other Ninja…
Sources now confirm the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic movie – and it’s a trilogy - Back in April, we covered Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy's statements about the potential for a Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic movie. At the time, she confirmed Disney was…
Funcom is now working on seven new games with 15 total projects, according to Q1 2019 financials - In our Overthinking roundtable last week, MOP's Andy McAdams posted as one of his "unpopular MMORPG opinions" the assertion that "Funcom is one of the best MMO studios making games…
Guild Wars 2 is planning a big overhaul of attribute-selectable gear - For a flat-progression MMO that wasn't originally designed to be heavily focused on gear, Guild Wars 2 has certainly trended that way in recent years, to the point that it's…
LOTRO Legendarium: How LOTRO does Lord of the Rings justice - Oh. Oh no you didn't, Kotaku. You didn't just sit there, scratching your head for an easy post, and then write up an essay about how after 40 years no…
EVE Down Under: CCP drops EVE Online’s Invasion expansion trailer - CCP Games is out in force in Australia right now for the third leg of the EVE World Tour, and the topic of choice is of course EVE Online's Invasion…
Dauntless roars to a 4 million player opening – with queues to match - Who would have thought this of Dauntless? After a fairly standard beta testing period, this monster hunter RPG has launched to staggering success. Over four million players have shown up…
MMORPG Astellia launches preorders, plans June closed beta, and rejects gender-locking - Upcoming MMORPG Astellia pumped out a ton of information with the launch of its new website and preorders for the game last night. Game packages will run from $40 to…
Massively Overthinking: What are your favorite MMO ‘chores’? - A few months ago, The Outline ran a piece on Red Dead Redemption 2 titled I don't wanna do my video games chores, and holy heck did that ever resonate…
No, Elite enemies in World of Warcraft: Classic are not dealing too little damage - Remember how back in the earlier days of World of Warcraft every Elite was a vicious murder machine, leading to Bloodborne-esque dances of nearly dying every time one hit you? That's an…
Daybreak is porting DC Universe Online to the Nintendo Switch - This is an unusual place to be getting MMORPG news, but it looks to be legit: Comics website CBR is reporting that DC Universe Online is destined for the Nintendo…
Desert Oasis: In praise of the charmingly chaotic Black Desert community - One of my favorite dishes is dinuguan (dinu-goo-ahn). It's a pork dish covered in a sauce with the consistency of curry and the dark brown color of chocolate. In America,…
RuneScape announces its summer update, The Land Out of Time - Summer is swiftly approaching, and the folks at Jagex have just announced RuneScape's summer update. Titled The Land Out of Time, the update will send players to the eponymous "lush…
Not So Massively: Eden Rising provides a low-stress riff on survival games - Somehow I hadn't heard of Eden Rising until it launched out of early access as a free-to-play title, so to me at least it seems like it came out of…
League of Legends is destined for mobile, Reuters reports - Remember all the thinkpieces years back about the rise of the MOBA? The industry's been through several bubbles since then, between survival sandboxes and battle royales. That's gotta hurt those…
Anti-lootbox Senator claims gaming lobbyists are getting worried; Nintendo pulls mobile titles from Belgium over lootboxes - It's a day that ends in "y" and so that means some fresh lootbox-related news to share with you fine folks! First up is an interview with Missouri Senator Josh…
Black Desert’s Underwater Ruins expansion is live today, with Star’s End planned for June 5 - As promised, Black Desert's western PC version is under water this week, literally, thanks to the Underwater Ruins expansion that's just washed ashore as of this morning along with new…
Entropia Universe players invested the equivalent of $500,000 to own a space station - Virtual world MMO Entropia Universe is no stranger to bizarre news stories. We've covered investors divvying up the moon, selling unique weapons for over $50K, and even invisible clothing worth…
Newly announced MMO Eternal Magic has something ‘for the girls’ - Game developer Duoyi and distributor 101XP announced today that they're developing a free-to-play MMORPG that sounds far too good to be true. Eternal Magic, according to the website, contains epic…
Enter to win a Star Trek Online PC Command Dreadnought Cruiser bundle and Discovery starter pack - [AL:STO]With Star Trek Online's Rise of Discovery live and officially launched for PC, PWE has kindly granted Massively OP a bunch of goodies to give away in honor of the release! We've…
Choose My Adventure: My story begins to twist in Star Wars: The Old Republic - Who would have thought that two planets would bring change? I was wholly expecting some generally insular stories from Nar Shaddaa and Balmorra as I continued my guided adventure in…
The pieces needed to build a WildStar emulator have been posted online - Have any of you seen the movie Contact? It's a sci-fi film about an alien radio transmission that contains instructions to build an interstellar portal device (and it also happens…
Torchlight Frontiers’ new leveling system is deliciously old school - If you've been away from the Torchlight Frontiers alpha for a while, it might be worth giving this MMOARPG another look this week. Update 6 has landed, and with it,…
MMO Cartographer: Climbing the Tree of Savior - A friend of mine from one of my other hobbies recommended Tree of Savior to me a while back, but I was deep down in other games at the time,…
A side-by-side comparison of World of Warcraft’s graphics in Classic and Battle for Azeroth - Computers get faster and better with time. Graphics that require a decent GPU in 2011 can be displayed at much higher resolution in 2019 if you've upgraded your hardware at…
City of Heroes: Homecoming concurrency, Rebirth and Reddit’s i24 servers, and the future of basebuilding - I had wondered whether the slow-drip release of World of Warcraft Classic this week would dampen enthusiasm for other games' rogue servers and progression servers, but it doesn't seem to…
Ex-Cryptic Studios artist decries ‘harmful’ video game lockbox designs based on slot machines - A 3-D character artist who previously worked at Cryptic Studios on Champions Online and Neverwinter has come out swinging against lockbox mechanics, saying that they were directly and shamelessly lifted…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 221: Classic Warcraft flavor
The Stream Team: Little Shop of Oddities in AdventureQuest 3D
The Stream Team: Diving back into Dauntless
The Stream Team: Beginning Elder Scrolls Online’s Elsweyr adventures for real
The Stream Team: Let’s talk Path of Exile Legion
The Stream Team: Celebrating 11 years of Age of Conan
The Stream Team: What’s Conan (Exiles) without Schwarzenegger?
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 bits of news we didn’t cover anywhere else.
