World of Warcraft announced its 9.2.5 patch this week: Dubbed Eternity’s End, it’s a bit light on content doesn’t have a timeframe yet, but it sure is pretty. The question is whether it’ll be enough to pull the game out of its present doldrums.
Meanwhile, we tried out the Lost Ark beta, chatted with Crowfall’s devs about its freemium update, cheered for Guild Wars 2, got the scoop on ArcheAge’s publisher switch, and took a spin on New World’s new PTS.
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!THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES
World of Warcraft has unveiled its 9.2 update: It’s called Eternity’s End - [We've updated the end with the recap and new images!] Blizzard abruptly announced yesterday that it would be unveiling the next content update for World of Warcraft Retail's Shadowlands expansion…
Not So Massively: Lost Ark is a promising MMOARPG with a poor first impression - Like many ARPG fans, I have long-awaited the Western release of Smilegate's MMOARPG, Lost Ark. Though the launch has been delayed to next year, I, alongside MOP's Chris, was recently…
Wisdom of Nym: Coping with the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker delay - Sigh. So by now even if you didn't watch the live letter, you've heard the bad news. Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker was just in sight, getting ever closer, and... then…
SWTOR’s character creation screen gets a makeover for Legacy of the Sith - All those Star Wars: The Old Republic players who will be flocking to make new characters with the flexible combat styles system next month are going to find that BioWare…
Interview: Crowfall’s freemium update, small-scale PvP, new players, and the future of the game - Another month has passed, and another meaty patch is coming to Crowfall. That's right, today we'll see the latest update (7.300) arrive on the live servers. We've hunkered down with…
Star Anvil’s Secret World tabletop game is coming in 2022 - Funcom may have largely given up on Secret World Legends, but this horror universe is continuing in an unlikely fashion: as a tabletop game. As we previously reported, Funcom gave…
New World announces server merges are ‘on the horizon,’ stays stubborn on mini-map issue - You may have fought angry specters, old gods, and even a raid boss or two, but you're really going to have to gear up to tackle New World's latest dev…
Vague Patch Notes: NFTs in gaming are a bad, dumb idea - This is going to be a little more ranty than usual. Apologies for that in advance, but... well, we're talking about NFTs. NFTs are bad. They're bad in every conceivable…
Blade & Soul’s Demonsbane update is live with more story, events, items, and a dungeon - Blade and Soul players can face some new story or a new dungeon and its challenging layers of increasing difficulty thanks to the Demonsbane update that went live as of…
NCsoft Q3 2021: Guild Wars 2 just had its best quarter in years - NCsoft's Q3 2021 financials are a story of good news, bad news. Let's do the bad news first: The Korean gaming giant reported a decrease in revenues, 7% since last…
Flameseeker Chronicles: Should Guild Wars 2 delete leveling? - Leveling is one of those things that you just have to have to count as an RPG, right? It’s expected. At this point, the concept of XP and levels has…
WoW Factor: WoW Classic’s Season of Mastery is starting to gall me - So here's a column that might be a bit more woolly than recent installments of this particular column. One of the thing that I've tried to do - with varying…
LOTRO Legendarium: The double-edged sword of being past the books - This past week, Lord of the Rings Online crossed another major milestone in its development as it released its eighth expansion, Fate of Gundabad. Long in coming, Gundabad wraps up…
Guild Wars 2 postpones second WvW beta, preps Echovald Wilds preview - I'm afraid there won't be a Guild Wars 2 WvW beta test this weekend, so rearrange your schedules. ArenaNet let everyone down gently on the official forums, referencing its October…
New World isn’t adding a minimap, but it’s tentatively allowing third-party map mods - Yesterday, we covered claims by the New World community that Amazon was banning players for using minimap mods - claims that Amazon strongly denied. But the studio also promised more…
Massively Overthinking: How hard should MMOs be? - This past summer, MMO dev Damion Schubert posted an epic tweet-thread about MMOs; in fact, we've already dipped into the part on "load-bearing" playerbases, and I said I would circle…
Gamigo continues the narrative tease for its in-development ‘uncertain folder’ MMORPG - Last week Gamigo decided that it would be neat to tease a new MMORPG through the use of videos that narrate "a world torn apart," which seems to be an…
Massively on the Go: Guide to Animal Crossing New Horizons’ Happy Home Paradise unlockables and bonuses - I suppose I should be thankful that Animal Crossing: New Horizons decided to launch its latest update early, as now I've had more time to focus on the late-night release of…
Star Citizen’s alpha 3.15 is live with new health and death mechanics plus lootable corpses - CIG has been making a lot of noise about the "Death of a Spaceman" and the "vision" of Chris Roberts in bringing more consequences to injury and death in Star…
Here’s how ArcheAge transfers from Gamigo to Kakao will work – expect land rushes - Last week, we covered the out-of-the-blue news that XL Games was moving western publishing rights for ArcheAge from Gamigo to Kakao. We say "out-of-the-blue" because Gamigo's own announcement admitted that…
Lineage 2M is launching on December 2 in North America and Europe - Those of you who were lamenting that there might be some small portion of your gaming day spent not playing some version of Lineage II will be happy to know that another…
MMO Business Roundup: Discord crypto mess, Unity buys Weta, Roblox Q3 2021 financials - Welcome back to another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news! Business business business... is this working? Discord: Well, Discord's gone and ticked off its own userbase thanks to a…
Perfect Ten: How MMOs explain away our infinite resurrections - Why? Why do we die in MMOs and keep coming back to life? Are we in a type of hell defined by endless combat and suffering, doomed to never escape…
PlanetSide 2 announces continued work on its new continent of Oshur after a three year-long delay - Do you remember back in 2018 when PlanetSide 2 announced it was working on a new continent? Do you also remember when that continent never materialized? We remember, and so…
Guild Wars 2 teases End of Dragons’ Echovald Wilds biome - [AL:GW2]One of the best-loved locations in Classic Guild Wars was Echovald Forest, the overgrown, gothic home of the Kurzick faction. Just based on concept art alone, we already knew a version…
New World’s test server opens today with void gauntlet, new quests, and trading post unification - It's another big day for New World: Amazon is opening up a public test realm to let players test out its coming content update. The PTR opens up today at…
Choose My Adventure: Avorion affirms that I am not a very good shipwright - Entering into Avorion for this month's Choose My Adventure column had me assuming a few things. First off, since this game was very much about building your own ship, I…
EverQuest II celebrates its 17th anniversary, hires a new tradeskill designer - Where were you back in November 2004 when EverQuest II first came on the scene? A lot of expectations were placed on this follow-up to EverQuest -- not to mention…
The Daily Grind: Would WoW be better off with a full reboot? - A couple of months ago, Justin and I were joking on the podcast about how what World of Warcraft really needed wasn't WoW Classic but a WoW Classic Classic -…
Neverwinter will soon sell tokens to unbind equipment - One of the immutable laws of MMORPGs is that bind-on-pickup or bind-on-equip gear, once used, can never be transferred or sold to another party ever again. It's stuck to you…
Developer Core Loop raises $12M to make an in-development blockchain MMO - This past Friday saw yet another link in the blockchain craze that seems hell-bent on subsuming MMOs get forged with an announcement that development studio Core Loop - a games…
League of Legends’ animated series Arcane rakes in rave reviews across the internet - It would appear that Netflix has another hit on its hands with the premiere of the League of Legends animated series Arcane, which made its first season debut this past…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 346: Endwalker, ArcheAge, Lost Ark, and New World
Battle Bards Episode 204: New World
The Stream Team: Star Trek Online Reflections giveaway
The Stream Team: Seeker droids seek Dreadseeds in SWTOR
The Stream Team: One last look at the Lost Ark closed beta
The Stream Team: Scouring for Scourge in Path of Exile
The Stream Team: 17th birthday celebrating in EverQuest II
The Stream Team: Securing spooky space squash in Astroneer
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.
