It wasn’t the best week for MMORPG fans. PWE downgraded Torchlight Frontiers into the not-an-MMORPG Torchlight III, Astellia Online’s Steam launch was hampered by a DLC refund bungle, and Camelot Unchained devs announced a second game using the same engine, the co-op PvE Colossus, to howls from some of its long-suffering backers. Plus, we speculated on the fate of the Dune MMO now that we know it’s not a real MMO either.
On the bright side, Guild Wars 2 launched Shadow in the Ice to positive reviews, Star Trek Online dropped star-studded new content for its 10th anniversary, Phantasy Star Online 2 hits NA beta next week, and at least MMO players don’t have to feel bad about the absolute trainwreck that is Warcraft 3 Reforged.
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
Interview: Camelot Unchained’s Mark Jacobs just announced a new game called Colossus - Camelot Unchained studio City State Entertainment has been teasing something big for a while now. This morning, CSE's Mark Jacobs told backers to tune in for this afternoon's stream, as…
Torchlight Frontiers launches this summer as Torchlight III – and it’s not an MMO now - [AL:TL3]So here's one nobody quite got right in the 2020 predictions: Torchlight Frontiers is changing its name to Torchlight III, with a summer launch planned. Notably for MMO fans -…
First impressions: Warcraft III Reforged is someone’s monkey’s paw wish - Let me start with something that is, I feel, pretty indisputable:Â Warcraft III is a pretty great video game. Even taking away its impact on gaming and the various modifications and…
Flameseeker Chronicles: First impressions of Guild Wars 2’s Shadow in the Ice - The prologue and first episode of Guild Wars 2’s The Icebrood Saga did a lot of setting up, but weren't very satisfying. Episode 2: Shadow in the Ice, which is…
WoW Factor: What if Shadowlands is also real bad? - At this point, we're all kind of settling in for the long winter's nap and also the spring's nap and at least most of summer's nap for World of Warcraft. If…
Interview: Barunson on the state of Astellia Online as it launches on Steam today - Astellia Online was big news throughout 2019, as Barunson sought to bring the South Korean MMORPG westward but with careful attention paid to so-called western sensibilities, like disdain for pay-to-win…
The Game Archaeologist: The rise of Guild Wars - In early 2005, World of Warcraft mania was rising exponentially, month over month. But even as Blizzard's MMO juggernaut barreled toward its full strength and knocked opponents out left and…
Perfect Ten: Tabletop RPGs that would make fun MMOs - Sometimes you have a deep and current reason for writing a column, something that is actively happening in the world of MMOs that requires a response, or a deep and…
Phantasy Star Online 2’s North American Xbox One beta begins February 7 - Get out your "it's happening" gifs or maybe just your "thank goodness, some good news today" signs: Sega formally put a date on Phantasy Star Online 2's western closed beta,…
Lawful Neutral: Examining DDoS attacks and their impact on MMOs - When I was younger, used to play with LEGOs with my cousins all the time. We'd spend time creating huge houses and vehicles that could fly and have big battles.…
Tamriel Infinium: The biggest surprises from Elder Scrolls Online’s Dark Heart of Skyrim reveal - Earlier this month, The Elder Scrolls Online unveiled its 2020 plans for the Dark Heart of Skyrim at a live community event. Some of the information had been predicted well…
MMO Cartographer: Exploring Villagers & Heroes, our indie MMO of the year - "Gee," you say to yourself, "I sure wish there were a good cross-platform MMORPG I could play on my phone and PC. One that doesn't play itself. Maybe an indie…
Desert Oasis: Hands-on with Black Desert’s new Guardian awakening - Wow, that was fast. Kakao and Pearl Abyss just released the Guardian last week, and we're already gearing up for awakening her. Just take a peek at the Black Desert…
EverQuesting: Building a story brought me back to EverQuest II - Before we start: Yes, I know about the Daybreak news. And yes, I have some thoughts and questions about it. I considered tossing aside my current EverQuesting plans until later,…
Astellia Online is working on a fix for the Steam DLC configuration that’s making refunds impossible - If you tried to pick up Astellia Online on Steam yesterday for its launch, you like noticed a few things. First, Steam was struggling and a lot of games were…
Massively Overthinking: The undeath of the MMORPG genre - Last week, there was a provocative thread on the MMORPG subreddit that subverted the tired idea that the genre is "dead." It's not, u/Selphea argued - but it is undead.…
DC Universe Online’s next release swoops into the Birds of Prey comic series - [AL:DCUO]Daybreak - sorry, Dimensional Ink - has just announced DC Universe Online's next big thing: The content drop is called Birds of Prey, and it's releasing in April on PC…
Kentucky high school athletic commission bans Fortnite from high school esports competition - The Kentucky High School Athletics Association (KHSAA) has officially called for the removal of Fortnite from high school esports competition, expressing concern at the shooter's inclusion in a state that…
Fight or Kite: MMO PvP needs to be memorable or it’s not worth the bother - The best combat-related moments I’ve had in gaming were always surprising feats or wild encounters with other players. They weren’t always victories, but those were the best ones. Running from…
The Daily Grind: So how do you feel about Torchlight Frontiers becoming Torchlight III? - I have to be honest: The change in Torchlight Frontiers has me pretty disappointed. It's not like I'm a huge fan of the prior games anyhow, but there was a…
Dauntless studio Phoenix Labs acquired by Singapore-based games company Garena - With 20 million players and multiple platforms under its belt, Dauntless is a hot property in the gaming world. So it should come as no surprise that Phoenix Labs announced…
Jeri Ryan and Sonequa Martin-Green headline Star Trek Online’s Legacy Update and new episode - Yesterday's leaks about a new Star Trek Online episode starring some big-name franchise stars have now been proven true, as today PWE and Cryptic announced the long-running MMO will be…
Choose My Adventure: Comparing the cash shops of Black Desert Mobile and Villagers & Heroes - I had originally intended this piece to focus on playtime in Villagers & Heroes, but I didn't get in enough to do it justice, so that'll have to wait. The…
Online tactical CCG Duelyst is officially shutting down in February - There will soon be one less online CCG for people to enjoy as of February with the official closure of Bandai Namco's Duelyst, which will go dark at 6:00 p.m.…
Blizzard revamps and rereleases Warcraft III Reforged today - Nobody tell my husband, but Blizzard is officially dropping Warcraft III Reforged today, so you can relive your real-time strategy childhoods all over again. Launch is this evening at 6…
ARK: Survival Evolved has now delayed the Genesis DLC to February 25 - When I went back digging through our ARK: Survival Evolved content, I was absolutely shocked that the last big announcement was for the Genesis DLC - in August of last…
Wisdom of Nym: What’s with all the secrecy around Final Fantasy XIV patch 5.2? - We've got a little while before we get some solid answers about what's going on with Final Fantasy XIV's next major patch. At this point, I honestly don't expect to…
League of Legends Chinese pro esports league suspends events over spreading coronavirus - If you've somehow missed all the news about the growing coronavirus epidemic, we'll forgive you - it's been a wild news week in the world outside of gaming. But in…
US Court of Appeals upholds decision that a RuneScape player’s muting did not violate free speech - The 3rd Circuit US Court of Appeals has effectively squashed any further action by one Amro Elansari, a RuneScape player who claimed that Jagex's muting of him in-game was a…
Rumor has it that Electronic Arts is doing something with Knights of the Old Republic - Attention all hands; this is not a drill. Or maybe it is because, well... rumors are what they are. But the current rumor is that Electronic Arts is doing something with…
The Survivalist: So Funcom’s DUNE will be a survival game, not an MMO - Remember back in February of last year when we learned that Funcom inked an exclusive deal for at least three games based on Frank Herbert’s DUNE universe? One of those…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 257: Daybreakup
Battle Bards Episode 161: Dragon Quest X
The Stream Team: The sunset of Rend
The Stream Team: Aw rats! It’s a Neverwinter Lunar New Year event
The Stream Team: Starting the adventures in Temtem’s early access build
The Stream Team: Where are those AQ3D werewolves?!
The Stream Team: Bring on the Borg Insurgence in Star Trek Online
The Stream Team: Path of Exile’s Ranger danger!
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.
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Good things, we enjoy take time. Patience is a precious commodity. Just, wait a bit folks we’ll see-Hope.
Sorry man, i’ve been waiting for a while now.
Forgive me if i’m a bit skeptical that this particular industry can throw something decent at my way.
Ain’t happening.
Not even plural. Just one would be nice
We need CD Project Red and Rockstar Games in MMO genre
A rockstar mmo could be godlike or dumpster fire. Hard to call
It is easy for them to do, actually – build a huge GTA world spanning over several cities, let people to play as any in-game organization or join any existing ones. Be a gang member or police officer or EMT or a repair shop owner or a business corporation member or a bank owner or a prostitute ;-)
Just give players the tools to do that and let them play roles and create their own stories and famous characters like some Twitch streamers did when they played on GTA RP servers.
This would have the potential to be an incredibly popular whitelist server for serious RP. Problem is that it would mostly be limited to being that. Balancing all those roles to support the non-RP min/max playstyle of the typical MMO player sounds almost impossible. Let alone making them fun from that perspective.
Not necessarily impossible, it would just have different gameplay type ;-) You could still do things just like in other MMOs where you kill NPCs and loot them so you can buy upgrades for your gear (mostly cosmetics) or weapons or your car, or larger housing, or buy your business where you could hire NPCs or live players if you don’t want to RP as worker there. You can even have “dungeons” where you have to do things similar in games like Division where you have to, for example, kill some NPC bandit instead of a boss. Go into instanced hideout with a group of other players, where weapon stats would matter and armor stats would matter.
And PvP would work just like it works in EVE, only you will have both NPC police and limited amount of players who can work as police officers.
I’ve considered it but then if we jump to the end of the equation, it’s basically Identity. Not only do you have to figure out how to make rping as a mailman fun but how do you code all of the depth into each random element in the game.
I think what’s needed is an ai on the top layer, procedurally generating the world and it’s contents and somehow also generating new mechanics for the roles. If the world can’t be memorized or mastered by those who Dev it, that should be a game that the players can count on for more than 6 months
The MMO market is notoriously against any kind of predatory monetization schemes and that’s pretty much what most Rockstar games are. I mean people complain that lock boxes are gambling, and you literally enter casinos in their games. As MMO games they would just be one massive dumpster fire.
Yes, absolutely this. A Cyberpunk MMORPG with a scale of EVE Online and similar ruleset. It could easily beat number of subscribers of any MMORPG in history and could sustain it for a very long time if it would have a freedom of forming your own corporations and fighting over large territories, be a bounty hunter or a mercenary or whatever you want.
Du is on track to be that
It’s ok, now that CU announced Colossus, we’ll have two inexistent MMOs instead of one.
Bonus c:
In fact Torchlight Frontiers UPGRADED to non-MMORPG as it always should have been :P Torchlight 2 shined most with mods and good linear progression.
I don’t necessarily agree with this, but some of these games shouldn’t be massively in the first place because there’s no good reason for it. They should be “play with your friends” or small pug groups and then if you want to tack on a few open world components or different modes like pvp or survival, fine.
For me Torchlight Frontiers went from a 100% ignore it because it’s a F2P Perfect World Entertainment online game to Torchlight 3 I’ll watch from curiosity for a few months to a year and see how badly PWE monetization screws things up and if it’s more in vein with Torchlight 2 then give it a buy.
To be fair to Perfect World (I actively paused typing those words in that order), they published Remnant: From the Ashes, which is a single/multiplayer RPG with gear progression etc, and not only is it at a good price point, it’s also 100% free of microtransactions. So we’ll have to see. Hopefully it was profitable enough for them to do something similar with Torchlight 3.
PWE’s Hob and other Torchlights have only price tag just like Torchlight 3 will have ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The thing is I don’t trust them to only have a price tag. A lot of game companies are going to start rolling games out as initially B2P, then somewhere down the line they introduce cash shop mechanics once the hype over their release is over around the 2-3 month mark. So for me a lot of games from companies I particularly don’t trust are always going to be a wait and see.
My strategy of staying out of games before they announce a soft launch or launch date just seems to be continuously reinforced as time goes on.
Saved over 600$ in last 2 years
…and occasionally a good hug. :(
How can we turn the last few minutes of Mrs. Doubtfire into an mmo