Square-Enix raised eyebrows this week with the announcement of Final Fantasy XVI – and the revelation that FFXIV’s Naoki Yoshida will be attempting to work on both games. Of course, we don’t know whether the new game is an MMO just yet, but that just makes room for lots of speculation in the meantime.

Meanwhile, we weighed in on WoW’s Shadowlands, Guild Wars 2’s Sunqua Peak, Conan Exile’s Isle of Siptah, and LOTRO’s mini-expansion, capping it all off this weekend with a peek into Elder Scrolls Online’s Markath.

THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES

WoW Factor: No, Shadowlands is probably not going to be terrible - I've noted many times at this point that World of Warcraft does not seem to have done a great job with Shadowlands, at least from what we've seen so far. A little prison…

Final Fantasy XVI is announced with Naoki Yoshida of Final Fantasy XIV as producer - Surprising absolutely no one, Final Fantasy XVI is going to happen! Yes, it turns out Square-Enix is continuing its flagship series, we're all shocked. The reveal today took the form…

Flameseeker Chronicles: Hands-on with Guild Wars 2’s new Sunqua Peak fractal, live today - While Guild Wars 2’s Cantha-centric End of Dragons expansion may not be coming until next year, players eager to visit The Empire of the Dragon can get a taste of…

LOTRO Legendarium: Is LOTRO getting greedy with its fall content update? - Boars. Beets. Battlestar Galactica. OK, let's talk about one of those things, at least in a roundabout way, because there's no escaping the fact that Standing Stone Games stirred up…

The Survivalist: First impressions of Conan Exiles’ Isle of Siptah expansion - Framed. Convicted. Exiled. Now, shipwrecked? What do the fates have in store for me next? Perhaps this Isle of Siptah will be my redress. Wait, what was that sound... Say…

Elder Scrolls Online’s Markarth DLC launches November 2 for PC, November 10 for console - As promised, ZeniMax has just dropped a ton of info about Elder Scrolls Online's next update during its year-end preview event stream. We knew the next DLC - the last…

First Impressions: Craftopia is an enjoyably laid-back but extremely unrefined bit of survival sandbox gaming - You start by blowing up the world. Literally – a button is pressed and then the entire planet explodes. But that’s OK because you’re then whisked away by some extremely…

The Soapbox: The joys of MMO collecting - I’ve often sat and pondered exactly what it is that I enjoy about the MMO experience. After all, being educated about your own likes and dislikes can lead to a…

Wisdom of Nym: Speculating on the newly announced Final Fantasy XVI - So, uh... hey! Final Fantasy XVI! That's a thing we learned about yesterday, huh? I'm sure we're all shocked that Naoki Yoshida's very specific dismissal of rumors about him and the title…

Jukebox Heroes: LOTRO’s Great Wedding soundtrack - One reason why I keep highlighting Lord of the Rings Online patch soundtracks in this space is that the studio actually makes an effort to post its music out there.…

Leaderboard: To which WoW expansion era will you send your Shadowlands alts first? - One of the more intriguing things about World of Warcraft Shadowlands, at least for me, is the game's new leveling system. While brand-new accounts will have to play a tutorial…

Massively Overthinking: How to deal with cheater scum in MMORPGs - I'm sure it was a random coincidence, but last week two different Star Wars Galaxies emulators posted about steps they were taking against cheaters and RMT purveyors: SWGemu banned 65 accounts…

World of Warcraft caps off its Afterlives with a look at Revendreth - Despite the appearance, the Venthyr of Revendreth in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands do not really vant to dreenk your blud. They vant to make you a better person because you were kind of awful in life,…

Echo of Soul is sunsetting yet again, this time on Steam, and no it’s not giving refunds - We return now to the confusing story of Echo of Soul, which as we've previously chronicled has at least a million versions and has sunsetted them approximately half of them.…

PlayStation 5 targets November amidst buying frenzy, while Facebook trots out the Oculus Quest 2 - Expect everyone in the gaming world to be a bit console-crazy this week -- and console-insane come November. Not only is Microsoft launching the Xbox Series X on November 10th,…

EVE Online’s Depths of the Abyss is live as CCP updates policies and World War Bee 2 endures - EVE Online has lots going on this week, from patches to policies to drama. Let's dig in: First, this week's patch, Depths of the Abyss, is fully live now, with…

Wikipedia is now an MMO (according to Wikipedia itself) - Anything online with a community can be considered an MMO if you play it correctly. That might sound like a joke (due to it being a joke), but consider that…

Desert Oasis: Black Desert Mobile is not just a mobile copy of Black Desert - Last week, I taught my freshman classes basic email etiquette. In a time of distance learning, it's an important skill to teach. We looked into why etiquette matters, writing professionally,…

Apple argues Epic’s lawsuit is ‘part of a marketing campaign’ to ‘reinvigorate interest in Fortnite’ - The Epic/Apple legal drama continues as this week Apple's filed its response to Epic's request to force Fortnite back on the Appstore, and you may want to pick up some…

Perfect Ten: 10 amazing hidden quests in World of Warcraft - Finding quests in World of Warcraft is not exactly what you would call "difficult," as the game famously stuck giant floating exclamation marks over quest givers and slapped notations all…

First impressions: Hands-on with Dauntless’ new Mission hunts and the Terra Escalation - There's another big content update on the way to Dauntless on September 17th, and this one has a few new poisonous tricks up its sleeve. This update is all about…

PAX Online 2020: Pantheon, Ashes of Creation, Amazon, and Crowfall devs on the future of online games - What could online gaming look like going forward? That was the overall topic discussed by a number of devs as part of in a panel at PAX Online 2020, which…

Lord of the Rings Online says it’s ‘close’ on re-opening server transfers that have been offline since 2019 - For players who have characters stranded on dead or undesirable worlds in Lord of the Rings Online, the question of when Standing Stone Games will be able to re-enable server…

Conan Exiles’ Isle of Siptah expansion launches today as Funcom celebrates 10M users - It's expansion day for Conan Exiles as Isle of Siptah officially launches. You might be tempted to quibble over the use of the word "expansion" over DLC, but you should…

Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV’s second Ishgard season is a touch underwhelming - In the days of my youth, you usually got introduced to a new band via the radio. (The radio was like YouTube, but no video, only for music, and it…

Star Wars Squadrons just premiered its new CG trailer - Much of the noise about Star Wars: Squadrons has been made about the game's narrative beats in its single-player campaign and it looks like that drum will continue to be…

Camelot Unchained’s Mark Jacobs streams refund payments from inside the City State Entertainment office - There's been another stream from Mark Jacobs regarding Camelot Unchained, but it might not be quite the content some would expect of a livestream. For one, the stream is live…

Torchlight III promises a date for final data wipe and launch ‘soon’ - So the last patch for Torchlight III took a little while to arrive, but you can rest easy knowing that launch approaches! A date for that fabled actual launch will…

Path of Exile’s Heist expansion officially launches this afternoon - It's expansion day for Path of Exile as Grinding Gear Games goes all Oceans 11 with the release of Heist for PC and Mac players. As we've covered at length,…

No Man’s Sky teases ‘the beginning of something new’: New update Origins, launching next week - No Man's Sky studio Hello Games has a bit of a habit of casually announcing major expansions out of the blue and crashing its own website. Today being what it…

The US government is now probing Epic and Riot in relation to Tencent’s data security - Remember back in August when the Trump administration made noise about trying to ban WeChat and Tencent from transactions with folks in the US? It caused a big ripple at…

Conan Exiles’ producer explains healing and food tweaks, outlines update plans for the Isle of Siptah - I haven't read many of the Conan the Barbarian books, but I'm reasonably sure that whenever he was brought low in a fight, he didn't suddenly pull a drumstick from…

Krafton spins Bluehole off as an ‘independent subsidiary’ to handle TERA and Elyon - The corporate reshuffling that's been going on ever since En Masse Entertainment announced that it was closing is producing interesting developments this fall. Krafton, which owns PUBG and TERA, announced…

THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS

Massively OP Podcast Episode 288: ArcheAge again

Battle Bards Episode 177: Gone with the wind

The Stream Team: In SWTOR, ‘gotta catch ’em all’ refers to droids

The Stream Team: Shipwrecked on Conan Exiles’ Isle of Siptah

The Stream Team: Calling on Karthwatch for help in Elder Scrolls Online’s Greymoor

The Stream Team: Preparing for a first Heist in Path of Exile

The Stream Team: Standing a Ghost of a Chance in Dungeons and Dragons Online

The Stream Team: Gone fishing in AdventureQuest 3D

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.