MMO Week in Review: Soulframe, Dragonflight, and Unity

Warframe’s Digital Extremes stole the MMO show this week, not with Warframe but with Soulframe, the company’s next MMORPG.

Meanwhile, World of Warcraft began Dragonflight’s alpha, LOTRO lost its producer, Guild Wars 2 posted its summer roadmap, Heroes of the Storm admitted its maintenance mode, Star Citizen showcases a folding chair, and Unity made enemies of everyone for no good reason at all.

THIS WEEK’S TOP STORIES

TennoCon 2022: Digital Extremes announces new fantasy MMO Soulframe - Warframe is a undeniably a sci-fi game. Players are even referred to as Space Ninjas. But what would happen if it turned fantasy? We shall soon see. Amid the closing…

TennoCon 2022: Warframe crossplay, cross save, and customizing Khal in Veilbreaker - An occupational hazard of attending cons: catching Iwantitnow-itis. This afflicts me after every TennoCon, be they digital or live. TennoCon 2022 was no different. Unfortunately, except with some rare exceptions…

TennoCon 2022: Werewolves in Warframe? - [AL:WarF]Warframe has a very blood oriented frame in Garuda, so the vampire aspect is touched upon. But what about werewolves? Where's a howling beast of fangs and (metallic) fur? Fans…

TennoCon 2022: Mount up and delve deep into Warframe’s Duviri Paradox - The path of a paradox is not a straight line. At the close of the 2019 TennoLive broadcast, Warframe players saw their first glimpse of the Duviri Paradox. Back then,…

TennoCon 2022: Warframe introduces new Khora Prime – and she’s live now - One thing Space Ninjas always look forward to is the announcement of a brand-new prime frame in Warframe. At last year's convention, the infested Nidus Prime was announced. And today,…

World of Warcraft’s Dragonflight alpha removes gendered body type text, briefly adds selectable pronouns - There are a lot of features present in the first alpha test of World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, but one feature that wasn't highlighted directly has come to light: the removal…

The Game Archaeologist: The origins of Blizzard, Mythic, Funcom, SOE, and BioWare - A good origin story always captivates me, especially when it gives me a new perspective on something I've come to appreciate over the years. I love looking back at actors'…

Lord of the Rings Online producer leaves Standing Stone Games after a little over a year - The Lord of the Rings Online community was shocked this weekend to learn that Oleg Brodskiy, more commonly known as "Raninia" on the site, left his position as the game's…

Sea of Thieves delays Season 7’s release to August 4 in the interest of applying polish and tightening tech - Last month saw Sea of Thieves make a whole lot of noise about Captaincy arriving to Season 7 - the game even made a whole musical number about the thing…

WoW Factor: Dragonflight’s talent trees don’t feel like a speedrun slam dunk - So we've seen some of the talent trees being unveiled for World of Warcraft: Dragonflight at this point. Five of the 12 extant classes have gotten previews, not counting the…

Star Citizen hypes up extra alpha 3.17.2 features in forum posts as it crests 4M created accounts - The weeks leading up to Star Citizen's alpha 3.17.2 release (whenever that may be) have been peppered with weekly hype posts by CIG, which highlight features of the patch that…

Legends of Aria cancels plan for new non-blockchain server, but Classic continues - Last December, Citadel Studios and Legends of Aria got bought out by a blockchain company that declared its plan was to reimagine the floundering Kickstarted MMO with all the crypto…

Massively Overthinking: Are you a cheater in MMOs or other games? - We recently got a press release about a pair of studies on cheating, and I hesitated to run it as a news article because the studies were sponsored in part…

Survivalbox MMO Chimeraland’s global launch is marred by performance complaints - So, we have good news and bad news for Chimeraland. The MMO, which originally launched overseas back in January, launched globally yesterday on Steam under the Pixel Soft/Level Infinite banner.…

Conan Exiles deep-dives its planned battlepass monetization system - When Age of Sorcery launches for Conan Exiles players later this year, it will completely upend the game's monetization model by switching from a DLC-based model to battlepasses and seasons…

Unity’s CEO says game devs who don’t include monetization in their design process are ‘f*cking idiots’ - Not since Square-Enix president Yosuke Matsuda's notorious letter about pursuing NFTs has someone in the games industry so spectacularly lost the plot that we're left reeling, but here we are…

World of Warcraft Dragonflight begins its first alpha test, previews the Azure Span and crafting updates - World of Warcraft has taken its very first step in bringing Dragonflight to the wider world. Today begins the expansion's very first alpha test phase as the studio makes its…

Vague Patch Notes: Yes, sandbox MMOs need tutorials and guidance, too - I'm going to make some sandbox fans a little miffed right here with my opening premise. Yes, your sandbox MMO needs tutorials and probably a main story or thrust of…

Albion Online’s elder statues wreak havoc on players for the MMO’s fifth anniversary - Albion Online has been teasing its fifth anniversary festivities all week, but as the day has officially arrived today, we're finally getting the full story. And this is definitely a…

Final Fantasy XIV makes plan for opening home world transfers while banning RMT accounts - If you want to transfer your home world in Final Fantasy XIV right now... well, you can't. This is not for no reason, either. Data Center Travel just opened, problems…

PlanetSide 2 launches its Surf and Storm update with underwater combat and a brand-new boat - It makes sense that PlanetSide 2 would want players to be having fun in the sun and in the water right about now. After all, it's summer up here in…

Guild Wars 2’s summer roadmap teases Steam, July 19 update, and next living world episode - As promised, ArenaNet has delivered Guild Wars 2's roadmap for the rest of the summer today, starting with the revelation that the third episode of the living world season one…

Daybreak Games files a new trademark for something called Myths and Monoliths - Fashion your fanciest tinfoil hats and put on your spectacles of assumption because we've got some trademark filing news to chew on. Daybreak Games put in a trademark filing last…

Perfect Ten: Weirdly specific tropes found in every fantasy MMORPG - If you take some weird, outlandish, or out-of-the-ordinary item and then saturate your life with it, sooner or later the bizarre becomes the accepted norm. So much so, in fact,…

The Soapbox: Fallout 76 absolutely needs better social tools to thrive - Unpopular opinion time: I have to say that Fallout 76... is kind of a great game right now. I know that the launch and ensuing year(s) of disastrous responses on…

City of Heroes Homecoming is testing a new bard-themed control powerset for i27p4 - Well this is convenient: Just as I was thinking about playing some City of Heroes, the Homecoming rogue server drops a juicy beta patch (Issue 27, Page 4) on the…

Fight or Kite: Love vampires and battle royales? Here’s what Bloodhunt brings to the table - The latest entrant into the world of BRs comes from the World of Darkness series Vampire: The Masquerade. Even though I’ve played a number of different tabletop games, somehow this…

Flameseeker Chronicles: What could Guild Wars 2’s fourth expansion be about? - Ever since ArenaNet's studio leadership came out early in the year and confirmed that planning has begun on a fourth expansion, players have no doubt been mulling over in their…

Game dev flips a panel into an anti-crypto attack, earning applause from attendees and ire from NFT sponsors - Many folks may not have heard of Mark Venturelli, a designer for the turn-based strategy title Chroma Squad and founder of developers Critical Studio and Rogue Snail, but his name…

Choose My Adventure: Boredom and frustration rear their head in V Rising - This week, V Rising decided to remind me why I deeply dislike survival sandboxes. It all started off pedestrian enough for the most part. Over the course of time, I…

Activision-Blizzard is using some of its $250M diversity fund to convert and ‘uplevel’ new game devs - If you can't hire them, then buy them or build them, right? Activision-Blizzard's already done some buying; now it's time for building, as last night the controversy-mired company announced a…

Wisdom of Nym: Variant Dungeons and Savage changes in Final Fantasy XIV patch 6.2 - I know I've said this many times and in a variety of contexts, but for all that there's a certain amount of expected content from Final Fantasy XIV at any…

Ubisoft plans to yank multiplayer from 15 more of its games this fall as devs scramble to preserve them - If your game library is full of Ubisoft titles, you may want to reevaluate which of them you'll actually be able to play come September 1st. That's because the studio…

Star Citizen showcases the creation of deployable items by making a folding camping chair - We'll get the big attention-seeking piece of this story out of the way: Yes, Star Citizen spent part of an hour creating a camping chair on stream. The point of…

Blizzard shifts Heroes of the Storm into maintenance mode, gives lizards to all - Quick: What's the one live service Blizzard game that nobody ever talks about, thinks about, or apparently plays? The correct answer is, of course, Heroes of the Storm, the studio's…

THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS

Massively OP Podcast Episode 380: A TERAble way to go

The Stream Team: The continuing adventures of a Guild Wars 2 neophyte Elementalist

The Stream Team: Seeking summer stuff in AQ3D

The Stream Team: Creating horrible monstrous abominations in Chimeraland

The Stream Team: Finding Celeste and freeing a dragon for the Neverwinter Undermountain finale

The Stream Team: Trove’s Sunfest arrives with a ducky floaty

The Stream Team: The lucky 13th Backseat streaming is Star Trek Online

The Stream Team: Randomly running around in the New World

The Stream Team: Going on a Guild Wars 2 Snargle hunt

The Stream Team: It’s raining raptors in the Exoprimal network test

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.