It’s not every week that my editor marches up to me and demands that I cover virtual brothels as headlining stories, but this did in fact happen (thanks Bree!). It’s called quality journalism, people.
Kotaku recently reported on an exposé of Second Life’s Monarchy, the most expensive — and exclusive — brothel in a game of many, many brothels: “In this fascinating video by People Make Games, Quintin Smith takes a tour of The Monarchy and speaks with its owner, learning all about how the place actually works, what the clientele are after, the people who work there and the limitations of Second Life’s animation systems.”
I’m sure that guy had to wipe and reformat his hard drive afterward, because “honey, I was researching this for work!” excuse wasn’t going to hold up in matrimony court.
And this is just the beginning of the rest of the news! Read on for a roundup of other smaller MMO news stories and videos from this past week in this edition of The MOP Up (and if you don’t see a news story that we should have covered, drop us a tip)!
The upcoming Odin: Valhalla Rising shared the game’s first four classes (Warrior, Sorceress, Priest, and Rogue) and is trying to get out of the door later this year.
Path of Exile talked about creating the lore for the Conquerors of the Atlas storyline: “Unfortunately, because it was so busy, not all of our storytelling tools were implemented in time. The journals, which filled in the gap in time between the slaying of Kitava and the player’s first forays into the newly-conquered Atlas, were in the game files but wouldn’t drop at the end of fights as they were intended to.”
Otherland’s June events include double bits, double XP, and double SOMA.
Small patches? We got ’em for Neverwinter and Legends of Runeterra. Speaking of updates, Uncharted Waters introduced Lost Memories Chapter 3.5 with a new phantom monster named Azure Cetus.
The Warface franchise got a bit bigger this past week with the release of Warface: Breakout, a “tactical first-person shooter” on Xbox One and PlayStation 4.
Ultima Online has an update regarding housing: “The team has talked about this several times and we feel the best decision is not to turn off housing decay. It would impact everyone by not allowing housing to be placed, housing to be transferred, as well temporarily turning off house decay. The problem is if we did turn it off when the housing is turned back on all the status fast forwards to the point it should have been at when we turned them off.”
Defiance — what’s still running — is operating the Defiant Few community event through June 7th.
This week’s Dark Age of Camelot grab bag included queries about archery, guild housing, and absorption.
I hope you weren’t too invested in your Escape from Tarkov characters, because the most recent update just wiped all of them.
Rent yourself some free submarines in World of Warships and see how life is under the sea (now with dinglehoppers).
OnePlus and Epic Games have teamed up to make a Fortnite creative island with five 90-second minigames on it. Whee.
The Division 2’s latest patch is on the PTR and includes “balance for exotics, loot quality, and further adjustments to gear and weapons.”
According to VG247, Valve is getting closer than ever to launching Steam in China. There’s now an alpha version of the Chinese client that people are investigating.
In business news, mobile publisher NetEase is opening a secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Dauntless’ Nck Clifford wrote a post on GamesIndustry about building relationships with the game community: “Don’t wait until after your game has launched to start thinking about community. Hire a community manager now.”
Here’s what you should expect from GDC when it goes all-digital this summer thanks to COVID-19.
The official forums for Mortal Online 2 are now live, so you can plug into the forming community there.
“If you are familiar with the rituals and cycles that mark a year in the life of a Guardian, you must be curious as to when we’ll begin a conversation about what is next. We can’t put a date on that just yet, but we will very soon. That’s a promise,” said Destiny 2. Bungie did talk about the design of the Rasputin bunkers, though.
Go into the lore of Dauntless‘ Umbral Deeps with this short piece.
The MMO industry pumps out more and more news every year – no site could possibly cover everything. That’s why we gather together all the extras every week in The MOP Up, our a weekly compilation of MMO info we don’t want lost in the cracks of time. Send us your news bits through our tips line!
