Lord of the Rings Online dominated headlines this week thanks to a week and a half of outages with feeble communication indeed. But the rest of the genre was busy putting on quite a show, as Star Wars The Old Republic surprise-launched on Steam and SEGA announced a sequel/update of sorts for Phantasy Star Online 2 coming next year. We also opined on No Man’s Sky and entertained rumors about the new Fable title being an MMO.
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
Hello there! Star Wars The Old Republic just officially launched on Steam - Remember back when EA refused to put much of anything on Steam, lest it compete with its own Origin platform? Those days have fast been coming to an end, and…
LOTRO Legendarium: What we have here is a failure to communicate - If this year has taught us anything, it's that clear and boosted communication is vital to handling a crisis. Having information and a message is one thing, but getting it…
SEGA announces Phantasy Star Online 2 New Genesis for 2021 - If Phantasy Star Online 2's long-awaited arrival on western devices this past spring didn't light your world on fire, then maybe you'll be happier with Phantasy Star Online 2: New…
SEGA clarifies what exactly Phantasy Star Online 2’s standalone revamp is - Yesterday's big Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis announcement left pretty much everyone confused about what exactly it is. A do-over? An expansion? A completely new standalone game that inexplicably…
The Nintendo ‘gigaleak’ included plans for a Pokemon MMO from 2004 - If you hear what sounds like a thousand dogs sniffing at something this weekend, it's because there was an apparent massive leak of Nintendo development assets full of source code…
Perfect Ten: Ten reasons Fallout 76 is good, actually - Here's the thing about criticism: It isn't mutually exclusive with appreciation. You can like something that you also criticize -- and your head won't explode, nor will you be burned…
Gaming television network G4 will apparently return in 2021 - Back in 2002, G4: TV 4 Gamers was born, mining a previously untapped market of people hungry for gaming-related programming in the days when the Xbox and PS2 were at…
Lord of the Rings Online returned to service last night, with fresh outages and lag - We return to the ongoing Lord of the Rings Online saga this morning, as Standing Stone Games' MMOs have entered their 10th day of issues. Around 7:30 p.m. EDT last…
Vague Patch Notes: No Man’s Sky is the real reboot success story - Whenever an MMO of any type has a launch that resembles the Nedelin catastrophe, people start talking about what the studio should do to get things back on track. Inevitably,…
Apex Legends boss addresses developers suffering work-from-home burnout and crunch - The Apex Legends subreddit had a little tire fire this past Friday as a result of a Glassdoor review of developer Respawn Entertainment that was shared. In the review, the…
Wurm Online officially arrives to Steam starting today - As of 1:00 p.m. EDT today, Steam users are able to snap up Wurm Online on the platform. As in the full sandbox title and its playerbase, not the standalone…
World of Warcraft warns that ‘time runs short’ to prepare for Shadowlands - Time is running short to get ready for World of Warcraft: Shadowlands -- or so Blizzard would have you believe. While there is no set timetable yet for Shadowlands' pre-patch…
Rockstar addresses GTAO and Red Dead Online content droughts with vague previews - Rockstar hasn't had the best summer, what with SuperData dinging GTAO for its lack of major content leading to revenue dips and gamers protesting as clowns in Red Dead Online…
Rumor: The next Fable may be an MMO - Could the Fable series be heading in a massively multiplayer direction? A blazing hot rumor is searing its way through the internets this week that suggests that the newest Fable…
Massively Overthinking: Contemplating the never-ending summer of not-E3 - A couple of weeks back, I was reading a piece on RPS that jokingly lamented the way the game reveals of this summer have gone down. "NotE3 is never going…
SuperData June 2020: Valorant had the ‘biggest launch ever for a free-to-play PC title’ - It's time for our monthly check-in on how the games industry is doing according to SuperData's numbers, and don't worry - they're all still making bank thanks to the global…
Desert Oasis: Black Desert’s outlook in the lead-up to Crimson Desert - I've played nothing but the Black Desert season servers in the last month. It's such a fresh breath of air, and it's something I didn't even know I wanted. There's…
Final Fantasy XIV updates its Reflections in Crystal site as it passes 20 million registered players - It was easy to miss amidst all of the other news contained in yesterday's live letter from producer and director Naoki Yoshida, but Final Fantasy XIV's staff was happy to…
Nexon’s UE4 crossplatform MMO V4 is officially live for PC, Android, and iOS players - We've had an eye on the hard-to-search-for V4 since August 2019, when news of Nexon's next Korean MMO first reached our shores. And the game hasn't delayed on its journey…
LOTRO and DDO say they’re ‘making progress’ on the nine-day server crisis, but the community isn’t having it - The server crisis that has been plaguing both Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online for over a week now may have some hope of resolution. The…
Check out this magnificent unicorn man that we never got to see added to PWE’s MOBA Gigantic - As I wrote in an op-ed before, I miss the heck out of Gigantic, the so-called "shooter MOBA" developed by Motiga and released by Perfect World Entertainment that was shuttered…
Final Fantasy XIV has cancelled its Japanese Fan Festival scheduled for December - This probably comes as no surprise to anyone, but Final Fantasy XIV will not be hosting any fan gatherings this year. The North American Fan Festival scheduled for November had…
More Ubisoft employees recount a culture of sexism that propped up offenders and informed game design decisions - The fact that Ubisoft executives have made the studio an unsafe place to work has already been well chronicled, but a new report from former Kotaku writer Jason Schreier, now…
Final Fantasy XIV’s patch 5.3 gets a trailer along with more patch details ahead of August 11 - Patch 5.3, Reflections in Crystal, arrives in Final Fantasy XIV on August 11th after an unusually long delay. But if you need to see a trailer to feel like this…
Hi-Rez’s squad-based multiplayer shooter Rogue Company enters paid beta on EGS - Last time we peeked in on Rogue Company, the multiplayer shooter coming out of Hi-Rez's internal First Watch Games label, we were given a lot of promises of what the…
Choose My Adventure: Accidentally going to Hell and other Dungeons and Dragons Online misadventures - I’m only level 3 and already Dungeons and Dragons Online has elected to whup my ass. By the barest margin, the polls said to pick up quests from the Gatekeepers…
Not So Massively: Online ARPGs are the pizza of gaming - I spend a lot of time thinking about online ARPGs these days. It's always been a genre I've enjoyed, and since taking over the Not So Massively column last year,…
Wisdom of Nym: What content in Final Fantasy XIV is optional? - So here's an interesting question with an answer that continually shifts: What content is optional in Final Fantasy XIV? If you're a big fan of the game, like myself, you'll…
Warframe of Mind: A history of TennoCon reveals, from The War Within to Heart of Deimos - I don't know about you, but there was a certain sadness hanging in the air on July 11th as I sat home instead of in the convention center in London,…
Warframe releases TennoCon 2020 schedule, with free Hydroid Prime and hand cannon for viewers - TennoCon 2020 is right around the corner, and thanks to the all-digital format for this year, all Warframe players and fans across the globe can participate in all the offerings…
Ashes of Creation’s Steven Sharif gives an impromptu talk on the game’s mechanics - So a funny thing happened during a Summit1g livestream on Saturday. The streamer was checking out a recent LazyPeon breakdown video for Ashes of Creation, when who showed up but…
The Elder Scrolls Online is pulled from Stadia Pro’s lineup, causing players to cry foul - Back in June, The Elder Scrolls Online first announced that it would be arriving for free on Stadia Pro, with the only asterisk being that it was limited to certain…
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.
