World of Warcraft had quite a week: It began Shadowlands’ alpha, opened a Classic test server, and took heavy subscriber casualties over the last few months. We’ve also just begun a re-look at all of WoW’s expansions, starting with The Burning Crusade this week, so stay tuned for more!
Plus we got a peek at the new Funcom launcher, FFXIV dropped its next shiny thing, we fretted over New World, said a final farewell to Project Nova, and side-eyed Daybreak.
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
Visions of N’Zoth boosted World of Warcraft subs, but it’s lost tons since WoW Classic’s 2019 peak - SuperData's January 2020 games industry revenue rankings are up, with only mild shakeups since December 2019. On the PC side, Red Dead Redemption 2 dropped from the list, as did Call…
Into the Super-verse: How City of Heroes welcomed me into MMOs - As we approach the first anniversary of City of Heroes' revival on the rogue server circuit, I wanted to take this opportunity to share a testimony with you about how…
Vague Patch Notes: Phantasy Star Online 2 might be in a better place than you think - A couple years back (this being the definition where "a couple" means "I can't remember precisely how many"), I was talking with a friend about Phantasy Star Online 2. This,…
New World details its semi-instanced player housing system - Amazon knows the best way to make me set aside my worries about New World: a dev blog on player housing. Will it work? Let's find out. "Player Housing is…
Square Enix has canceled most of its Final Fantasy XIV and FFXI PAX East festivities over the coronavirus - Whether or not you think the Coronavirus scare is overblown, it's been impacting launches, ports, and conventions for the last month. The latest such impact hits MMORPG players specifically, as…
Perfect Ten: Dead MMOs resurrected via rogue servers - Last December, the Massively OP 2019 Awards gave its "Best Trend" nod to the rise of rogue servers in the MMO genre. Preservation of long-since deceased MMORPGs is a topic…
WoW Factor: The World of Warcraft expansion tour – The Burning Crusade - So it seems pretty likely at this point that we are going to keep going through the various World of Warcraft expansions with Classic servers for a while now. It's not certain…
Massively Overthinking: How essential are hardcore gamers to an MMO’s health? - Last week, there was a positively eyebrow-raising thread on the Guild Wars 2 subreddit that tied neatly into the overall MMORPG meta discussion many bloggers and gamers have been having…
Interview: Pearl Abyss on Shadow Arena’s Black Desert origins, esports, audience, and more - [AL:SA]Along with battle royale fans and Black Desert players, we've been keeping an eye on Pearl Abyss' Shadow Arena, the one-time battle royale mode in Black Desert that was plucked…
Jukebox Heroes: Ten MMOs that strongly support their soundtracks - It's one thing to put a lot of music in your MMORPG or even to release that launch-day album. It's another thing entirely to throw the full weight of support…
Global Agenda officially died back in 2018 and (almost) nobody noticed - Back in 2017, we lumped Global Agenda in with other titles that seemed to have vanished. Why haven't we heard from them? What's going on? Are these MMOs DOA? At…
Chaos Theory: Guide to love and heartbreak in Secret World Legends’ latest event - If I made a New Year's wish upon a falling star, it wouldn't be far-fetched to think getting new content in Secret World Legends could be said wish. What better…
Blue Protocol is going to be free-to-play on launch - Those of you eagerly following news about the upcoming cel-shaded Blue Protocol may be happy to know that the game now has a planned business model. Those of you with a…
The Soapbox: Why does it feel like I don’t have time for an MMO when I really do? - This guest Soapbox was commissioned through MassivelyOP's Patreon program and is authored by Steve "Sray" Blouin, a name our longtime commenters will surely recognize from his participation in our community…
Funcom is rolling out a launcher for all its games, including Conan Exiles and Secret World Legends - It's no secret that Norwegian games developer Funcom has been upping its profile in the online gaming world, building on its long-running base of MMOs with new games of its…
Black Desert is getting crossplay support for Xbox One and PS4 on March 4 - It turns out that Pearl Abyss wasn't quite finished with the huge Black Desert rollouts, even after a 2019 that saw the PC game come to PS4, Xbox One, and…
World of Warcraft: Shadowlands has an encrypted alpha build out now - Blizzard would probably like it if people stopped talking about how the latest World of Warcraft patch is not very good, or how Warcraft III: Reforged is also not very good. In…
The Daily Grind: Are you concerned about the launch of Amazon’s New World? - Not quite a year ago, when Amazon took New World out of alpha and back to the drawing board, I posed almost this exact question for our readers. Now, it's…
Blizzard appears to have quietly launched a WoW Classic PTR - We're all very accustomed to the test realm for World of Warcraft usually showing off every facet of a patch well in advance, sometimes taking long enough that the patch at…
PlanetSide 2 boss hedges on existence of PlanetSide 3 in new interview - It's a bit out of date, since it refers to the launch of Escalation as if it were happening today (MMO players have known about the delay for quite a…
Google Stadia is coming to more phones as its head of gamer experiences literally says, ‘This is fine’ - Here's the good news for Google Stadia fans: The game-streaming service is coming to more mobile devices. Those of you not wielding an obsidian monument to the clutching and all-consuming…
Dungeons and Dragons Online’s next Hardcore League and new permadeath server are here - Dungeons and Dragons Online is having a good 2020, first with its 64-bit client and Alchemist class - and now with the return of the Hardcore League. [AL:DDO]Last year, Standing…
Guild Wars 2 rehires a former programmer, drops PvP patch and season next week - You know what I don't love? Chronicling how more Guild Wars 2 devs have left the building. So I'm not going to do that. Instead, let's talk about a new…
Jack Emmert isn’t sure Daybreak will publish his next MMO, says DCUO is as big as it was four years ago - In January, Daybreak finally announced the fruits of its "realignment" that we'd been covering since last summer: It was splitting off new substudios for the DC Universe Online, EverQuest, and…
Leaderboard: Are you still interested in Amazon’s New World, knowing it won’t be reverting to a FFA PvP MMO? - There's been a big ol' ruckus about New World across Reddit the last day or two, ever since the closed alpha resumed. You know how these things go: Someone posts…
CCP confirms the death of Project Nova, will keep future games quiet until closer to ready - Yesterday, as part of our coverage of Pearl Abyss' Q4 2019 financial report, we broke the sad news that CCP Games' Project Nova had been more than merely shelved indefinitely:…
Flameseeker Chronicles: What Eye of the North means for Guild Wars 2 - Guild Wars 2’s Icebrood Saga has so far been filled with plenty of nostalgic callbacks to the original Guild Wars’ Eye of the North expansion. Perhaps the most striking appearance…
Final Fantasy XIV patch 5.2, Echoes of a Fallen Star, is live today - It's time! After a wait that may have felt longer than usual but was actually entirely normal, Final Fantasy XIV's latest patch is available for players to enjoy right now.…
You can link your Neverwinter and Star Trek Online accounts to Steam as of today - Beginning today, Perfect World Entertainment is finally enabling account linking between Steam and Arc, its proprietary platform for distributing all of its MMOs here in the west. "We know one…
The Survivalist: Is Conan Exiles done with free DLC – or are we getting a true expansion? - While Funcom's latest investor note focused mainly on DUNE, there was a little tidbit of big import nestled in there about the current IP-based survival game, Conan Exiles. Trust me,…
Blackwing Lair’s first kill in WoW Classic happened less than an hour after the raid went live - Technically, there was another race for a world first clear last week in World of Warcraft, specifically in WoW Classic with the opening of Blackwing Lair. Unfortunately for the onlookers,…
Saga of Lucimia may be moving toward a hybrid business model - While the topic of lockboxes, cash shops, and business models isn't anything new -- which is an understatement -- Saga of Lucimia's team is exploring these issues as it deeply…
Not So Massively: Imagining a true MMORTS - MMOs and RTS are two of the genres of game I play the most. Given that, you'd think I'd be a big fan of MMORTS titles, but I've yet to…
Pearl Abyss had a strong Q4 2019, but CCP’s EVE-spinoff Project Nova is officially canceled - South Korean gaming giant Pearl Abyss is on the rise once again - and unlike many of its mobile-focused competitors, PC MMORPGs and the west accounts for a respectable chunk…
Acti-Blizzard games vanished from GeForce NOW over a ‘misunderstanding,’ Nvidia says - Last week we reported on the sudden removal of Activision-Blizzard titles from GeForce Now, the streamed games service offered by Nvidia, with barely an explanation other than a request from…
Wolcen muddles through ongoing online server issues to mixed reviews and an active playerbase - The optional co-op (co-optional?) ARPG Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, which released on Steam last week, has had a bit of a rough go of it. In fact, the most recent…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
The MassivelyOP Podcast will return this week!
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.
