I think we all know that MMO developers save their top-tier festival material for the one-two punch of Halloween and Christmas. And while that makes the latter part of the year exciting, the event fun tends to dry up during the summer months.
Oh, studios do their best to whip up summer festivals of all types — some involving fire, some weddings, and some beach parties. But are any of them actually, you know, good? I always feel so underwhelmed with summer holiday events in MMOs. Perhaps the only one that stirs me to participation is Star Trek Online’s Risa beach thing, and that because it’s an easy way to earn a free Tier 6 starship.
So I’ll toss this to you this morning: Are there any actually good, fun, and engaging MMO summer festivals?
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Warframe events have some nice cosmetic, decorative, and gear rewards. I snagged some enjoyable loot from the recently completed Dog Days summer event, including a skin that makes lethal projectile weapons appear as a super-soaker watergun.
We’ll see if this gets me past the TSA airport checkpoint.
Midsummer in LotRO is the worst. If you’re bad in navigationg around (like me) the layout of Minas Tirith just sucks and every quest feels like a monday at work after summer vacation.
The only holiday festivals I really enjoy occur around Thanksgiving and Christmas and that is mainly cause they’re usually cozy little events that reinforce the “most wonderful time of the year” aesthetics of the time.
That is a shame, because it is too hot to go outside, so give me reasons to stay in the AC.
NO
I sincerely don’t care.
I dislike temporary content, and in particular real world time limits for getting some piece of reward; if there’s a limit to how long I can enjoy it, or a requirement that I complete a set of tasks before a certain date in order to get a reward, it mostly prevents me from enjoying it. So, for me to be able to enjoy a summer festival, or any in-game festival at all, it would require figuring a way to allow me to turn it on for me, including being able to get any festival reward, at any time of the year.
Incidentally, that is why I can enjoy seasonal events in many offline games; removing the pressure to play the event and get its rewards before a certain date allows me to enjoy them for what they are, and in offline games I can almost always trigger those events outside their regular dates (or at the very least get their rewards) by using cheats and mods. Among the games I do this are No Man’s Sky, Astroneer, Animal Crossing, and Sims 4.
Festivals in MMO’s never really clicked with me in general, summer or otherwise.
They are either too repetitive or grindy to be any fun. Or just aimed at an aspect of an mmo I have no interest (Midyear Mayhem PvP event that is currently running in ESO for example).
Doesn’t matter what rewards are on offer if the underlying gameplay loop isn’t fun for me I am not interested and won’t waste my time on it.
Yeah, the ones where it causes me logout of my MMO, turn my computer off and go outside of my apartment…
…I also quite like the one in FF XIV where I can acquire a pink yukata with nominal effort. <3
Festival of the Four Winds in GW2. Though, only half of the Festival is summer-related. Throwing water balloons at a fire effigy… definitely wish i could do something similar IRL and cool down this heat lol.
I liked the summer festival in LotRO before it migrated to Minas Tirith, but now it’s just frustrating.
Other than those two games, I can’t think of a summer festival in-game that is particularly good. Midsummer Fire Festival in WoW is laughable, but none of their festivals are great anyway.
EQII’s Tinkerfest is one of the bigger holidays in a very crowded calendar. This year it runs from July 23 through August 5. It’s a holiday that happens in summer, though, rather than a holiday that celebrates summer.
Scorched Sky, currently running and ending on July 8, would be more like the actual “summer festival” since it’s all about fire worship. That’s a much smaller event.
GW2 runs the Festival of the Four Winds in late July-early August. That’s a very big event by GW2’s holiday standards but again it’s a festival that takes place in summer, not one that celebrates it, so I guess it depends what you mean by a “summer festival”.
Festival of the four winds absolutely is a summer festival to celebrate summer. Well, half of it is. Not the queens jubilee part lol. You throw water balloons at a fire effigy on an island. Though, i do think they missed the mark on conveying that its a summer fest, it definitely is intended to be.