Korean powerhouse Pearl Abyss dropped a bombshell this week by announcing multiple new MMORPGs, including Crimson Desert, a full-scale AAA MMO due to hit beta next year.
Meanwhile, at ExileCon this weekend, Grinding Gear Games announced Path of Exile 2, which is sort of an enhanced Path of Exile, along with gobs of new content and a mobile version too. We’ve got even more reports from the con coming this week, so stay tuned!
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
ExileCon 2019: A look at Path of Exile 2, the Metamorph league, Conquerors of the Atlas, and mobile - So much happened on stage at ExileCon 2019, Path of Exile's inaugural fan convention! What started with a visit from the great beast hunter Einhar entertaining the crowd ended with…
ExileCon 2019: Diving deeper into Path of Exile’s Conquerors of the Atlas expansion - December tends to be a bigger content release in Path of Exile , and 2019 will be no different. (2020 will be even bigger if that's when PoE 2 hits!)…
ExileCon 2019: Grinding Gear announces Path of Exile 2, Path of Exile Mobile, and Metamorph - (We've updated the end of this post with the big news from the keynote!) Path of Exile is about to reveal its future. From the future. Because it's Saturday already…
G-Star 2019: Pearl Abyss fully reveals Crimson Desert, Plan 8, Shadow Arena, and DokeV - Late last night, Pearl Abyss took the stage at Pearl Abyss Connect ahead of G-Star to officially unveil a staggering four new online games that it is adding to its…
Final Fantasy XIV is coming to Xbox One, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer vows - At the London Microsoft presser today, Square Enix announced a crapton of its games are headed to Xbox Game Pass. None of them is an MMORPG, so unless you're a…
Dark Age of Camelot is officially going free-to-play today with Endless Conquest - We've been talking about it for a few years now, but it's officially happening today: Endless Conquest marks Dark Age of Camelot's first foray into the free-to-play world. Dark Age…
Desert Oasis: Getting hyped for Pearl Abyss’ Crimson Desert - Curbing my enthusiasm is something I constantly work on, so when the announcement for Crimson Desert made its rounds, I was both excited and cautious. I knew this was just…
WoW Factor: A brief history of flight (in World of Warcraft) - Flight has been a part of World of Warcraft as long as the game has existed. No, not just flying mounts, even though you could argue that has been, too; flight masters…
J. Allen Brack says the Blitzchung incident ‘exposed some immaturity’ in Blizzard - It's a bit long in the tooth now with BlizzCon well behind us, but the Esports Observer published an interview with Blizzard's J. Allen Brack this week, and yes it…
The Alliance has a fully staffed and functional spaceship in World of Warcraft and never uses it - Who doesn't like a nice big spaceship? The Alliance in World of Warcraft, apparently. A recent article on Polygon points out that in Battle for Azeroth, the Alliance has a gigantic spaceship…
Massively Overthinking: Do MMO betas rob you of launch joy? - I use to think of betas as being unpaid labor for video game companies, but maybe I've been going about it all wrong. On Kotaku last month, Mike Fahey argued…
Player counts for survival sandbox Rend have hit severely anemic levels - The multiplayer survival sandbox Rend pretty much depends on lots of people being active at any given time, what with its factional structure and reliance on players working together to…
Tencent made bank in Q3 2019 thanks to mobile – not PC – games - While companies like Blizzard are seeing severe revenue drops this quarter and other MMO companies are trudging along, Tencent is having a rather up moment. The Chinese megacorp's third quarter…
EVE Online is officially live in South Korea - For far too long, the only way for residents of South Korea to experience the loop of mining for minerals to support pointless military aggression before eventually getting killed for…
Gameforge’s Kingdom Under Fire 2 has officially launched today in NA and EU - Developer Blueside and publisher Gameforge are dropping Kingdom Under Fire 2 for western players today, treating us to a new entry in a franchise that hasn't been tinkered with much…
Vague Patch Notes: MMO grind is good (except when it isn’t) - Some of my fondest memories of World of Warcraft involve Adam Sandler and the Badlands. My wife and I had a pretty steady tradition made out of the reality that as…
Sorry about the Red Dead Redemption 2 issues, please enjoy a new Apology Poncho - If you were hoping that the extra wait for the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC compared to its console launch would result in a polished and bug-free…
NCsoft Q3 2019: Another flat financial quarter as NCsoft pumps money into NCWest - Given the strange financial quarters that Blizzard, Funcom, Square-Enix, and Nexon had, you're surely wondering how NCsoft fared. And the answer is... about the same as usual, actually. In its…
Guild Wars 2 details Whisper in the Dark’s Essence Manipulation mastery track mechanics - Gonna be honest, I am really excited to see this dev blog that went up on the Guild Wars 2 website today, not so much because of the subject matter…
Blizzard says it’s listening to Diablo 4 feedback on items and stats - If you're grumpy about the way Diablo IV's items and stat system was shaping up, you're apparently not alone - and there are enough of you that Blizzard is listening.…
Asheron’s Call would’ve been 20 years old this month, but the community isn’t dead - Ah, Asheron's Call. We miss you. You'd have been 20 years old this month, celebrating your antique status with the likes of Ultima Online and EverQuest. But alas, you were…
Perfect Ten: Counting Fallout 76’s many post-nuclear flubs - I'll admit that I was the first one out of my seat, applauding wildly, when Fallout 76 was first announced at Bethesda's E3 showcase last year. I had been wanting…
Dungeons and Dragons Online’s Update 44 launches with new dungeons, areas, and mounts - New places to explore! New dungeons to delve! The ability to ride a horsey! It's Update 44 and it's live in Dungeons and Dragons Online today! Yay horsies![AL:DDO] Update 44…
First impressions: Overwatch on the Switch is mostly just Overwatch Mobile - Before Blizzard's bit of October unpleasantness, I was genuinely excited for the Switch release of Overwatch, though somewhat confused since it's clearly so late in the game's lifespan. While some…
Kritika Online returns in the west as Kritika:REBOOT today with some big changes - It's a happy week for western fans of Kritika Online as the game has landed once again on our shores. Publisher En Masse closed the action MMO down earlier this…
World of Warcraft: Classic has all servers down to one layer now - If you're still salty over the addition of layering to World of Warcraft: Classic, you have picked an odd hill to die upon. But you're also now without anything to be…
Flameseeker Chronicles: The best of Guild Wars 2’s Living World soundtrack - One of my earliest impressions of the Guild Wars franchise, before I even owned it, but had only played it at a friend’s house, was not its gameplay or story,…
Check out the trailer for next week’s Guild Wars 2 episode, Whisper in the Dark - Next week is poised to be a big one for Guild Wars 2, as the first full episode of the current Icebrood Saga is set to drop on November 19th…
Funcom Q3 2019: Amid revenue drop and Tencent stock buy-up, Funcom is working on multiple new games - It was going to be hard for Funcom to top its 2018 financials, given that it rolled out Conan Exiles last year but has spent most of this year publishing…
RuneScape is rethinking its monetization after UK report on one player’s alleged $62K spend - RuneScape is a pretty old game, but it has a new way of doing business as a free-to-play MMORPG with various microtransaction models and monetization hooks. That said, Jagex has…
EA Spouse was 15 years ago, and not much has changed in games development - When it arrived back in 2004, EA Spouse felt like a wakeup call. But now it's easy to mark how long it has been since that infamous posting, and Game…
Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV patch 5.1 in review, part 2 - There are some things that I am just not qualified to comment on extensively when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV. Generally speaking, this mostly covers things like high-end progression content,…
Black Desert Mobile launches globally on December 11, hands out Black Desert for free for pre-registering - Black Desert Mobile, aka the tiny version of Black Desert, has officially gotten its full global release date. What's more, those who pre-register for the mobile game will get a…
EverQuesting: Contemplating content and communication on EverQuest II’s 15th anniversary - You've no doubt heard of the quinceañera: It's the Mesoamerican coming-of-age celebration, a giant gala commemorating a girl's move to adulthood at age 15. While EverQuest II doesn't celebrate this way…
Superdata says in-game spending is down thanks to gamers’ leeriness of monetization schemes - This news will very likely elicit replies of "well, duh" from many, but now there are numbers from Superdata to back it up: Overall in-game spending is down over the…
Not So Massively: Overwatch 2 is what Overwatch should have been from the start - Much to my own surprise, the announcement that most excited me at BlizzCon this year was not from any of the franchises I usually care about. It was Overwatch 2.…
Crimson Oasis: Speculation on Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss’ new MMORPG - Lasst week, we reported on what looks like Pearl Abyss' power move to overtake the MMO market. With three MMOs and a Shadow Arena re-release, the Korean megacorp is playing…
The Elder Scrolls Online introduces new cash shop pet that increases your inventory and raises some eyebrows - Generally speaking, The Elder Scrolls Online has some pretty good and adorable pets, but all they really do is just look cute. The latest addition, however, has a bit of…
Diablo IV lead developer confirms cosmetic microtransactions will be in the game - So, just how will Blizzard make sweet, sweet money off of Diablo IV? Expansions, surely. A cash shop, apparently. And that cash shop will feature cosmetic options, according to lead…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
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.
