New World is officially back on the map this week with the launch of Brimstone Sands that brought queues and new servers as players returned to the year-old MMO.
Embers Adrift also became the latest Kickstarted MMO to fully launch, though our previewer admitted that its mechanics won’t be for everyone.
Meanwhile, Halloween is in full swing across the MMO universe. Fancy a trip through a haunted house?
Finally, The Sims 5 is expected to have multiplayer, though whether it’s really The Sims Online 2 is still up for debate.
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
New World’s Brimstone Sands releases today with greatswords, improved beginner experience, and more servers - After months of rising population and renewed community interest, New World seems as though it's on the cusp of a genuine second chance. That's why today's Brimstone Sands content update…
First impressions of Embers Adrift, the Kickstarted MMORPG once known as Saga of Lucimia - Those who know me will attest that I am not an old-school MMORPG player by heart. Every time I thought about getting into EverQuest or Asheron's Call back around the…
WoW Factor: Thoughts on the two-pronged pre-patch rollout for Dragonflight - So we now know exactly how World of Warcraft is going to handle the Dragonflight pre-patch. We'll be getting the initial launch of systems but not Evokers or the special…
Perfect Ten: 10 MMO haunted houses to explore – if you dare…. - Happy Halloween! Or if you prefer, Happy Scare-Related Holidays featuring the Stylings of Ed Casbar and His Electric Teeth. It'd be the best of holidays if most people didn't have…
New World’s Brimstone Sands sees a peak of 65K players – and queues to match - So just how did yesterday's Brimstone Sands launch go for New World? That's what we're here to compile, but the answer to the question can be summarized in a single…
LOTRO Legendarium: 10 reasons to get psyched about Before the Shadow (that aren’t the new zones) - Standing Stone Games went and pulled a classic case of misdirection on all of us -- and I'm not complaining. While the studio had us almost laser-focused on the dual…
Nightingale explains how realm cards give players agency over procedurally generated worlds - Inflexion's upcoming Nightingale isn't going to be your typical survival sandbox -- and we're not merely saying that for the Victorian steampunk theming. The game promises several unique mechanics, one…
Leaderboard: Has the gaming community ‘beaten’ NFTs? - I have to give this article in Bloomberg a lot of props for being something you don't see very often: a piece touting the gaming community as doing something unambiguously…
Star Wars The Old Republic’s Galactic Season 3 is back online with new and adjusted rewards - After a bit of a delay caused by an unexplained issue, players of Star Wars: The Old Republic can finally get themselves a companion who looks like a protocol droid…
Elder Scrolls Online launches its Halloween event, finishes Stadia account conversion to PC - Trick or treat season has arrived to Elder Scrolls Online, but this year is definitely leaning more to the treat side of things for players of the MMORPG. The game's…
Four Winds: Lost Ark and the refinement of MMO item enhance systems - In the last edition of Four Winds, I promised I'd cover how three MMOs utilized item enhance systems to facilitate progression, and then I analyzed how this method of progression…
Tower of Fantasy arrives to Steam with its newly released Vera content update in tow - Starting today, players of Tower of Fantasy get to play in the sand and invite some new friends along. The Vera content update has officially gone live, bringing with it…
Vague Patch Notes: MMO quality and the bandwagon fallacy - Here's a fact that is objectively true but feels objectively false: There's no law stating that the best MMO of all time, to date, was ever one of the MMOs…
Lord of the Rings Online’s Before the Shadow begins public testing – with a few surprise features - Testing is now underway for Lord of the Rings Online's major fall release, as Standing Stone Games announced that it's put Update 34: Before the Shadow on the Bullroarer shard.…
Neverwinter announces Salvatore-penned Northdark Reaches module for November 8 - Cryptic has just announced the next module for Neverwinter: Northdark Reaches. It'll mark the game's 24th module and herald a two-part campaign written by no less than R.A. Salvatore and…
Albion Online’s upcoming Beyond the Veil update plans to improve the Roads of Avalon - If you're among the players of Albion Online who believe 2020's Roads of Avalon system needs some TLC, you're not alone. Developer Sandbox Interactive feels similarly and it plans on…
Black Desert PC opens the door to an alternate world with Abyss One: The Magnus - A door has opened in Black Desert, and only the bravest and boldest will step through. Or anyone who accidentally trips and stumbles in its direction, we suppose. It's not…
Massively on the Go: Pokemon Go’s Elite Raids entry event was yet another disappointment - Once again, Pokemon GO developer Niantic has proven it's more than capable of delivering disappointment with the game's events. The company's infamously poor communication was the first big hint at…
Old School RuneScape officially opens its fresh start worlds today - Old School RuneScape is not about to be left out of the fresh start worlds hullabaloo started by its successor. Today, players of the elder statesman MMORPG can effectively hit…
Diablo IV begins sending invites to its endgame-focused closed beta test - Is it a breach of NDA if Diablo IV fans scramble around excitedly online over being invited to the APRG's next test? Regardless of that question, the fact remains that…
Magic Online has made its formal move to Daybreak Game Company - One of the longest-running Magic the Gathering video games jumped ship this week to come under the command of Daybreak. Magic Online officially made the switch from decaf to Daybreak…
Blizzard Albany’s Diablo QA wins right to unionize as NLRB rejects Activision-Blizzard challenge - It's a good day for games industry workers as Activision-Blizzard has once again failed to suppress the burgeoning worker unions forming within the company: Last night the National Labor Relations…
World of Warcraft announces the Dragonflight pre-patch will roll out in two phases starting October 25 - As it was speculated, so it has come to pass: World of Warcraft's pre-patch for Dragonflight will roll out on October 25th. Or at least half of it will; the…
The next Sims game aka ‘Project Rene’ will apparently offer some sort of multiplayer - Longtime MMORPG vets have... let's call it history with The Sims franchise thanks to The Sims Online, which wasn't so much an MMO as an online human psychology experiment gone…
Fight or Kite: Hands-on with Nexon’s Warhaven – medieval arena mayhem with a touch of magic - Fast-paced action? Check. Melee focused combat? Excellent. Third-person perspective with a solid amount of room for skillful play? Sign me right up 'cause this one’s got my name on it.…
Microsoft lays off nearly 1,000 employees across the entire company, including at its Xbox division - Much of the discussion around Microsoft is unsurprisingly focused on its attempt to buy up all of Activision-Blizzard to the tune of $70 billion, but this story is about something…
Choose My Adventure: Getting into the routine with Lost Ark’s Machinist - The polling for last week's Lost Ark Choose My Adventure was pretty clear: stay in the lower levels and focus on the Machinist. I appreciate the sentiment here; I read…
Final Fantasy XIV patch 6.25 is live today with new types of dungeons and new quests - Are you ready for a new style of dungeon? How about helping a rabbit and a robot open a cafe at the end of the universe? Maybe you just want…
City of Heroes Homecoming has unleashed i27p5’s massive balance and powers level update - It's patch day for the Homecoming, the largest of the City of Heroes rogue servers. Issue 27, Page 5 is rolling out to the five live servers today. Here's what players…
Star Anvil’s Secret World TTRPG shares images of card decks and draugr as crowdfunding moves past $100K - The TTRPG for The Secret World being created and crowdfunded by Star Anvil Studios continues to roar along. As of this story's writing, the Kickstarter drive has blown past the…
Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV’s original Manderville Man - There are some divisive characters in Final Fantasy XIV, but in some ways Hildibrand Helidor Maximilian Manderville stands above all of them - not just because he is probably the…
Embers Adrift’s weekend launch actually went fairly smoothly - Despite the oddity of launching an MMORPG on a Saturday, the Embers Adrift team is no doubt breaking out the bubbly thanks to a relatively smooth rollout of this old…
Kickstarted MMO turned single-player visual novel Destiny’s Sword silently arrives to early access - Over the course of this month we've been tracking the movements of Destiny's Sword, particularly as the game decided to silently pivot away from its MMO promise into a single-player…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 393: Saga of the Chronicles of the Ember Shards of Aria
The Stream Team: Seeking some ghost hunts in Ghostbusters Spirits Unleashed
The Stream Team: An evening with Elvira in AdventureQuest 3D
The Stream Team: Wishing for wings in Neverwinter’s Spinward Rise
The Stream Team: Backseat Streaming takes a trip to New World’s Mourningdale
The Stream Team: Halloween hijinks and Variant Dungeon crawling in Final Fantasy XIV
The Stream Team: A Guild Wars 2 Mad King’s Clock Tower competition
The Stream Team: Veilbreaker with Excalibur during Warframe’s crossplay testing
The Stream Team: Something mysterious in Astroneer
The Stream Team: Hoping to pick some multiplayer fights in the retro-style FPS Prodeus
The Stream Team: Dual Universe window shopping and house hopping
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.
