New World has dominated the MMORPG headlines – and really all gaming headlines – this week as Amazon’s new AAA MMO finally launched around the world, with massive queues that still persist in spite of the doubling of servers and improvement to server capacity as transfers still aren’t ready. Nevertheless, on Saturday, the game saw 913,000 concurrency on Steam as people piled in to play what Jeff Bezos rather mildly called a “success.”
Meanwhile, LOTRO’s Fate of Gundabad and Elder Scrolls Online’s Deadlands got launch dates, Activision-Blizzard got settled with one of the agencies investigating its labor criming, WoW Classic got plans for a fresh start, and Neverwinter got a battlepass.
Read on to catch up with the very best of this week’s MMO news and opinions today as every Sunday (since 2010!) in Massively Overpowered’s Week in Review!NEW WORLD
New World is live around the globe as some queues cap at 25K and concurrency passes 700K - Amazon's New World is officially live everywhere now as the West coast servers have just gone live, and it's blown way past its beta concurrency records by kind of a…
Hands-on: Does New World hold up in the midgame and beyond? - You know how you're granted a look at a new game, whether it's through an open beta or a demo or a preview event, and you have to kind of…
New World, Day 2: Where Amazon’s new MMO stands on queues, concurrency, servers, and transfers - It's been almost 24 hours since the final region of New World went live, and those have been an interesting 24 hours, as anyone who saw our coverage yesterday knows.…
Massively Overthinking: Initial impressions of New World - Amazon's Queue World - uh, I mean, New World - is finally upon us. In fact, I imagine that it's been hard to avoid news about it this week, as…
New World, Day 4: New servers, long queues, transfers next week, and Jeff Bezos weighs in - We're guessing the engineers at Amazon Games aren't getting much sleep right about now. Since the launch of New World on Tuesday, the servers have been slammed with the typical…
Working As Intended: Brute-forcing the MMO industry - If you're a music fan, and you probably are since you're a human, you've probably come to grips with the sense that somehow the music you grew up with felt…
New World stops people from rolling on full servers, posts capacity list, and hits 800K concurrent - Those hoping to get some good playtime in with New World this weekend need all of the strategic aid that they can get, what with the servers literally overflowing with…
THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
WoW Factor: The disjointed state of World of Warcraft - Right now, it feels like World of Warcraft is kind of a mess. This is not exactly a surprise. It's also not exactly helped by the fact that patch 9.1.5…
LOTRO Legendarium: Fate of Gundabad is shaping up to be the full expansion that LOTRO needs - Right before all of the news this week got sucked into the gravity well of the launch of a certain MMO, Lord of the Rings Online made headlines by finally…
Lord of the Rings Online’s Fate of Gundabad launches November 10 – preorders have begun - Standing Stone Games has finally taken the wraps off the Fate of Gundabad expansion for Lord of the Rings Online in today's big preorder hoopla. [AL:LOTRO]The studio posted an outline…
Elder Scrolls Online’s Deadlands DLC launches November 1 on PC, hits 19M players - During its big reveal stream this afternoon, ZeniMax Online took the wraps off off multiple content and event additions for The Elder Scrolls Online that will finish out the year.…
Activision-Blizzard says it’s settling with the EEOC, committing $18M to victims and charities - Last week, we covered the revelation that multiple federal agencies, including the US Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, were investigating Activision-Blizzard in the wake of…
Interview: Cryptic untangles Neverwinter’s new battle pass experiment - Earlier this month, we learned that Cryptic is planning a multi-tiered battle pass for Neverwinter. Echoes of Prophecy will serve as the content campaign with three milestones as usual -…
Raph Koster says nobody wants a metaverse with ‘Fairyland butting up against World War II’ - In his ongoing blog series on the metaverse, MMO developer Raph Koster has been digging through the technical challenges of how to build it (and he is very much building…
Blizzard is launching new WoW Classic fresh-start servers for its ‘Season of Mastery’ - On a previous MassivelyOP Podcast, we joked about whether WoW Classic needed its own Classic version. Apparently, that's not too far off from what you're getting, as Blizzard announced today…
Tamriel Infinium: Anatomy of Elder Scrolls Online’s quests - An amazing thing happened on my way to the MMO variety store: I got completely sucked back in to Elder Scrolls Online. It did not come at a convenient time,…
Union organizers call Activision-Blizzard’s $18M EEOC settlement a ‘slap in the face’ - Monday night, we reported on a planned settlement between Activision-Blizzard and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC was one of four state and federal agencies investigating and/or suing…
Vague Patch Notes: The problem with flight and flying maps in MMOs - The other night, I found myself inevitably funneled into a mistake. There wasn't much I could do about it, sadly;Â Guild Wars 2 had decided that I was going to go…
World of Warcraft continues to cut abusive emotes in upcoming update - Even as World of Warcraft players grapple with the high drama that is PictureGate, there's another part of the game that's being phased out as well: emotes. Blizzard announced that…
Elyon, having dropped its B2P plans, is now selling cosmetics and October 17 headstart access - If you can pry yourself away from New World for a minute, you might recall that Elyon was also originally planned to launch this week, and it turns out to…
Perfect Ten: It’s time to end all dragons in MMORPGs - If a genie ever appeared to grant me three wishes, I would not hesitate. I would not be selfish by asking for more wishes or focus on my own well-being.…
Why I Play: Returning to Guild Wars 2 and exploring elite specs after nine years - I have a strange history with Guild Wars 2. I fell hard for the pre-launch hype, and when it finally arrived, I loved it and played heavily... for a couple…
Massively on the Go: Pokemon Unite mobile is a good port but better update - So Pokemon Unite is now mobile and cross-platform. Who'd have thought a traditionally Nintendo-only IP would do this? The update and dev team letter we mentioned is live as well, and in some…
Choose My Adventure: DC Universe Online just ended up making me love City of Heroes more - Third verse same as the first. If nothing else, DC Universe Online is consistent in how its leveling game works, though there were a couple of wrinkles that I experienced…
Not So Massively: Age of Empires IV is a thoughtful love letter to the past - Folks who grew up gamers probably all have a few games or franchises that just defined our childhoods. For me, one of those franchises is Age of Empires. It showed…
Wisdom of Nym: What the removal of high-quality items means for Final Fantasy XIV crafting - Anyone who has read my column here for any substantial length of time probably knows that one of my biggest axioms is to wait and see. There are lots of…
First Impressions: Revisiting memorable locales in Diablo II Resurrected - What a time to be alive. I can't believe I'm playing a remastered version of one of my all time favorite PC games. And what's doubly surprising is that I'm…
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.
