It’s the end of an era for the EverQuest franchise, as this week Holly Longdale, the longtime franchise head only recently installed as the leader of Daybreak’s new Darkpaw Games substudio, announced she was already leaving. Bet-placing on where she’s headed begins… now. Plus, Marvel announced a new MMO, City of Heroes’ rogue servers raised eyebrows, Cryptic killed off its cross-game chat, Guild Wars 2 prepped its new-old content, and Ashes of Creation finally put down Apocalypse, at least temporarily.
Meanwhile, the novel coronavirus continued forcing the cancellation of gaming industry events, driving NCsoft West and Bungie employees to work remotely, even delaying the Blue Protocol beta schedule.
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
Holly Longdale exits Darkpaw Games, bidding farewell to EverQuest and EverQuest II - Daybreak Games may have spun into separate studios, but it's still Daybreak, and that means it's still burying its surprise news on a Friday evening. Holly Longdale, head of the…
Cryptic is killing off cross-game chat in Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, and Champions Online - One of the best features of Cryptic's MMOs over the years was the fact that players could communicate cross-game in a unique multi-server global chat, allowing friends in different guilds…
Vague Patch Notes: Why PvP is a cheap way to fill out a game’s content compared to PvE - It feels like about four years ago when I laid down the first in a semi-regular series of columns I see as "useful notes" columns, the sort of thing that's…
Guild Wars 2’s Visions of the Past: Steel and Fire content lands March 17 – here’s the trailer - [AL:GW2]During PAX East this year, Guild Wars 2 may not have been granting interviews or talking to media about the state of the game, but it did drop a teaser…
Ashes of Creation’s Apocalypse ends its beleaguered early access - Ashes of Creation’s Apocalypse battle royale spin-off is going dark, according to a post on the game's site last night. "On Tuesday, March 10, 2020 at 11:00 a.m. PDT, the…
City of Heroes’ Homecoming just outlawed video of their rogue servers - Eyebrows in the air this morning, as the largest group of City of Heroes rogue servers, Homecoming, just announced that they'll be cracking down on players who post new streams…
WoW Factor: The World of Warcraft expansion tour – Cataclysm - In my mind, Cataclysm still feels kind of recent. I don't know exactly why. It came out closer to World of Warcraft's launch than the present day, and we've been living with…
Choose My Adventure: Black Desert should have gotten MMO of the Year - I can admit when I'm wrong. It happens often enough, that's for damn sure, and part of learning from a mistake is admitting that one was made in the first…
Blue Protocol’s Japanese closed beta has been delayed nearly a month over coronavirus - We've previously noted how some MMOs and MMO-adjacent titles, from EVE Echoes to Path of Exile, had seen delays and setbacks thanks to the spread of the coronavirus, but this…
LOTRO Legendarium: Five ideas for special servers in Lord of the Rings Online - At PAX East recently, Standing Stone Games teased some details of Lord of the Rings Online's future. I'm going to hold off on talking about this for now in the…
Warframe of Mind: Celebrating seven years with free styles, weapons, and a contest - Is seven a lucky number? It is for Warframe, which is turning seven years old this month. Actually, I think you could argue that every year has been lucky for…
Revelation Online announces Skyward World expansion with new raid, tutorial, and weddings - [AL:Rev]Revelation Online is having a bit of a moment. Not only is MY.GAMES celebrating the MMO's third birthday here in the west, but it's just announced a new expansion called…
Gamigo has finally brought back RIFT’s birthday events for Carnival 2020 - [AL:Rift]Does this count as an anniversary celebration for RIFT? Maybe? Close enough? We'll take it! Yes, we've ribbed Gamigo a few times this week for seemingly missing the fact that the…
Interview: Saga of Lucimia on funding, development, launch, and business models - Upcoming MMORPG Saga of Lucimia has been somewhat dark over the last year as its developers hunkered down to develop rather than hype. But in 2020, the team has returned…
LOTRO’s future includes River-Hobbits, Mission feature, and a new type of server - The folks over at MMO Central have posted a couple of interviews with Standing Stone Games that sheds some additional light on Lord of the Rings Online's future. There's some…
Massively Overthinking: How could MMOs combat endgame rushing? - Rushers, content locusts, world-firsters: Whatever you want to call them, these folks are both a boon and a bane for MMORPGs. They buy the boxes, drive the hype, bring people…
Kickstarted cyberpunk MMO Zenith’s pre-alpha is now slated for March 21 - Last fall, Zenith came out of nowhere to raise over a quarter of a million dollars on Kickstarter. Its tiny team - the three-person Ramen studio - initially asked only…
Frontier tells Elite Dangerous fans there are ‘no plans’ to return GalNet and other lore initiatives to the game - (This post has been updated at the end.) Over the course of February, we covered a growing thunderstorm in the Elite Dangerous community about - wait for it - lore.…
Another World of Warcraft: Shadowlands encrypted alpha build is out now - When is the start of World of Warcraft: Shadowlands testing? Well, on a small scale it seems to have already happened, since the latest encrypted alpha build is itself an alpha…
For Science: Academics blast APA’s updated resolution on games and aggression - My Twitter feed was on fire about three things today: politics, coronavirus, and violence in video games. The last entry there is all because the American Psychological Association published a…
Perfect Ten: Pet peeves of doing MMO journalism - In many ways, Massively Overpowered is a dream (side) job for us. We get to write about something we love and have it published for crowds of people to read.…
Tamriel Infinium: The lore behind The Elder Scrolls Online’s Falmer - If you’ve played through the Elder Scrolls series, particularly The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, you’ve no doubt encountered a bleached-skin underground foe more akin to goblins than to men or…
The coronavirus has shut down another six gaming and tech events - Another day, another round of gaming and tech event cancellations over growing fears of the spreading coronavirus. Epic Games, which had already exited GDC even before that was canceled, has…
Black Desert patches in crossplay for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4 - If you were hoping that today's crossplay patch for Black Desert would allow all platforms to group together under one banner, you would be wrong... by a small margin. PC players…
Bethesda showcases Fallout 76 Wastelanders’ chatty NPCs in a panel - Last week, we were told an awful lot about the dialogue system and NPC interaction that's arriving to Fallout 76, but now we're being shown that thanks to a video…
Star Wars Galaxies Legends celebrates four years online, teases next year’s goodies - Happy fourth birthday, Star Wars Galaxies Legends! The most popular NGE rogue server for SWG has been marking its fourth anniversary with a new collection for players to earn. While…
Black Desert’s ominous O’dylitta update is launching ‘later this year’ - [AL:BDO]Remember back at E3 and Heidel Ball last year, when in the midst of the hoopla around Black Desert's Shai and Great Expedition expansion Pearl Abyss mentioned that the O’dyllita…
City of Heroes Homecoming players have racked up over 47 million hours - You know the old adage that superheroes and statistics go together like... well, nothing? That is, unless you're a stat-themed crusader. Actuarial Man or something? Anyway, today we're going to…
New World lays out its argument for three-sided PvP - Don't count New World's PvP side down-and-out just yet. Amazon Game Studios made a strong case this past week for why the MMORPG's faction system will draw in players from…
Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV patch 5.2 in review – the story - The funny thing about big Final Fantasy XIV patches these days is that because the smaller material gets a bit more spread out, we also wind up not really being…
Google Stadia apparently has offered insufficient incentives for devs on the platform - So why exactly is Stadia - a major platform launched pushed by Google of all the companies in the world - floundering so badly? The answer may surprise you if, like,…
Not So Massively: First impressions of Wolcen, a familiar but fun ARPG - Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem isn't a game whose development I followed super closely, but I'd seen it on Steam aways back and thought it looked interesting enough to add to…
PAX East 2020: Marvel Future Revolution is Netmarble’s new open-world mobile MMO - Yesterday at their panel at PAX East 2020, Marvel and Netmarble announced a new mobile open world online RPG, Marvel Future Revolution. Ahead of the reveal, we met with representatives…
Fallout 76 studio is grumpy more people didn’t PvP - Do you ever get the impression that Bethesda doesn't quite understand its own game audience? That's probably not going to be helped by a new interview in which Pete Hines…
Riot Games’ multiplayer FPS Valorant is officially unveiled with new screens, details, and gameplay footage - Looks like the cat has been officially released from the bag. Valorant, the CSGO-like multiplayer FPS that was hitherto known as Project A, has been officially unveiled with some new…
Massively Uplifting: DragonCon announces official charity, more studios support Australian wildfire relief - This past month has been filled with its share of dark news, not the least of which is the coronavirus that is plaguing the world. But don't let that bleakness…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 261: PAX yay, GDC nay
The Stream Team: Getting used to the layout of ARK Genesis
The Stream Team: Warframe’s special anniversary alerts start tonight
The Stream Team: Ready for DDO’s Redfang
The Stream Team: Onderon hunting (datacron) party in SWTOR
The Stream Team: A Black Desert birthday
The Stream Team: RIFT turns 9!
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.
