The first week of the year may be quiet for MMOs, but we’re not: This week, we bottled hype for Final Fantasy XIV’s impending patch, went back to Classic Guild Wars, and aired our concerns for World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls Online, and Lost Ark.
Meanwhile, we delivered the first of two 2023-kickoff roundtables (including our state-of-the-site report!) as well as our debrief for all of our 2022 annual awards!
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
WoW Factor: Why is Dragonflight’s crafting not going over well? - For a long time, World of Warcraft has suffered in the crafting department. Basically every single expansion for the game has promised overhauls and restorations of crafting to a position…
Tamriel Infinium: Elder Scrolls Online faces an uphill battle in 2023 - Let me tell you, it is a strange time to be returning to Elder Scrolls Online. After a strong stint in the game last spring, I took a break around…
EVE Online says lowsec murder and ship production are up since Uprising - In its first producer's letter of 2023, CCP Games is once again talking up EVE Online's active players, but if you're hoping for an actual number, you won't be getting…
New World details another round of server merges happening on January 10 - At this point it's not really surprising when New World shifts its number of servers up and down - scalable server services is part of Amazon's whole deal, after all.…
Cyberpunk 2077 class action lawsuit is finally settled for $1.85M - Remember when Cyberpunk 2077 was poised to be the next huge thing in CRPGs? And then all it seemed to do was give Keanu Reeves a paycheck and royally tick…
MassivelyOP’s Weirdest MMO Stories of 2022: LOTRO’s new mascot - Today we're concluding our traditional countdown of MassivelyOP's weirdest MMORPG stories of the year! Coming in at #1 on our list is… LOTRO'S PET ROCK With the release of Before…
MassivelyOP’s complete 2022 awards debrief and annual recap - As we did in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, today we're going to recap our annual awards and other meta articles from the end of 2022. We gave…
Final Fantasy XIV posts its preliminary patch notes for Gods Revel, Lands Tremble - The date has almost arrived for Final Fantasy XIV's first major patch of the year, and that means it's time for the traditional preliminary patch notes for patch 6.3! And,…
Microsoft walks back constitutional rights complaints in re-filed response to FTC antitrust lawsuit - Microsoft caused plenty of eye rolling and head shaking when it filed its response to the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust lawsuit, claiming among other things that both the processes of…
Pantheon Rise of the Fallen’s first monthly pre-alpha test runs for 24 hours on January 28 - Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen pledged that it would be running pre-alpha tests every month starting in 2023, and it is holding fast to that promise at least in the…
Massively Overthinking: Hopes and fears for MMOs in 2023 - As 2022 drew to a close, we spent our Massively Overthinking roundtables discussing our predictions for 2023 as well as our goals. Now, we're going to talk about our hopes…
Early access life sim RPG My Time at Sandrock tests its multiplayer mode January 12 - If you love those cozy life sim RPGs like Animal Crossing and Rune Factory, you're perhaps familiar with My Time at Sandrock, an in-development early access sequel to Pathea Games'…
Global Chat: Would Secret World have done better if it had been set in the 1920s? - Thanks to a recent piece by MMO Folklorist, I learned something that I had never known about The Secret World: Apparently, in early development the game was to be set…
Final Fantasy XIV updates its preview site for Gods Revel, Lands Tremble with more content - With Final Fantasy XIV's next major patch just around the corner, the game's special site for the update has been expanded to cover things included in the interim patch 6.35…
Vague Patch Notes: Embracing limited-time content modes in MMOs - Today's column was inspired by a discussion in work chat about limited-time game modes - specifically, the idea of something like that in World of Warcraft. Not something as ultimately…
Mad World pads the time before its 2023 launch with loads of videos and armor previews - What is happening over at Mad World developer Jandisoft? It's hard to tell, as the things coming out of the studio appear to be nothing more than armor previews, a…
Leaderboard: What was the best *new* MMO of 2022? - The downside of making both old and new games be eligible for MMO of the Year is that it can be pretty hard for brand-new MMOs to compete with the…
Lord of the Rings Online’s Shadowfax server advances into Vales of Anduin - One of Lord of the Rings Online's smallest servers took another step toward rounding out the game map this week. On Wednesday, Standing Stone Games quietly advanced the Shadowfax legendary…
For Science: New research tries to link game choices, soft skills, and career paths - I suspect most long-time MMORPG gamers can point to a useful skill, contact, or experience in gaming that helped them in their careers or lives at some point, or maybe…
MassivelyOP’s Weirdest MMO Stories of 2022: EverQuest II’s prison server - Today we’re kicking off our traditional countdown of MassivelyOP's weirdest MMORPG stories of the year! Coming in at #3 on our list is… EQ2 permabanned everyone on its 'prison server'…
Black Desert PC launches the first Arena of Solare season, tweaks animations, and asks to see your dog - "May I see a picture of your dog?" That's kind of the question that the PC version of Black Desert is asking during one of its events this week, as…
GeForce CES showcase offers extra gameplay footage from Throne and Liberty, The Day Before, and Party Animals - Normally we're not one to highlight Nvidia talking up its GPU hardware and software features, but we're making an exception in the case of a GeForce Beyond presentation at CES…
End-of-Year Eleven: The top MMOs to watch in 2023 - You know how some people like to push this narrative that "MMOs are dying?" If that were actually true, then my job to round up all of the up-and-coming titles…
Leaderboard: What was the most overrated MMO of 2022? - A funny and incredibly predictable thing happens in the comments of our Most Underrated award every year: Somebody, usually several somebodies, informs us that in fact, what we think is…
Embers Adrift adds Exile Freehold outdoor dungeon - If one of your New Year resolutions was to jump headfirst into a tough-as-nails indie MMORPG and challenge yourself to survive in a world that wants you dead, then Embers…
Microsoft’s ZeniMax QA just formed the largest games industry union in the country - Just before the holiday break, workers at Microsoft's ZeniMax Media - including Elder Scrolls Online's ZeniMax Online Studios and Bethesda itself - announced their intent to unionize as a group…
The Game Archaeologist: PlaneShift, the poster child of open-source MMOs - As the character creation screen fades out, a dark vista fades into being. The fledgling adventurer looks around at dim shapes and sinister movements -- the underground realm of Yliakum.…
Choose My Adventure: Guild Wars delivers a shock to the system after months in the sequel - We're starting the new year of Choose My Adventure by hopping in to an older game, the original Guild Wars. I'm honestly not too surprised by the results here, especially…
Final Fantasy XIV’s Naoki Yoshida teases the future of the game entering 2023 - It's a new year once again, and this year Final Fantasy XIV fans have fan festivals and the expected announcement of the game's next expansion coming. Heck, the first major…
Leaderboard: What’s the most vulnerable Daybreak MMO in 2023? - Picture this: It's 2015. Sony just sold off SOE, and it reformed as Daybreak and began purging games, hard - around 20 to date, to say nothing of all the…
Square-Enix’s Yosuke Matsuda is still all-in on blockchain and NFTs even after 2022 - You might think that after watching the steady erosion and collapse of blockchain and NFTs in general and in the gaming space after 2022, the obvious conclusion would be to…
Wisdom of Nym: Ways for Final Fantasy XIV to make more use of old zones - So Final Fantasy XIV has some zones, huh. Now, this in and of itself is neither an issue nor a problem. There are a lot of spaces to explore, and…
Not So Massively: Why I’m not playing Lost Ark - Back at launch, I played Lost Ark quite heavily for some time, eventually racking up over 100 hours in the game and generally enjoying myself as I did. When I…
Bellatores goes silent for a half-year after receiving $33.3M investment - Normally, an up-and-coming MMORPG enjoying a $33.3 million windfall would be nothing but good news. But in the case of Nyou's Bellatores, it's more concerning. As we reported earlier this…
Star Citizen heralds 2022 as a year of growth, touches on 3.18’s features and update plans for 2023 - At the close of 2022, CIG's Chris Roberts put out another chairman's letter that looks back at Star Citizen's last year and ahead to the current year, noting plenty of…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 403: Roundtable and state of the site
The Stream Team: Further adventures in Guild Wars’ old Ascalon
The Stream Team: The Peril of Planar Eyes in Dungeons & Dragons Online
The Stream Team: Experiencing some PvE dragon riding in Century Age of Ashes
The Stream Team: Zapping Guild Wars 2’s Zhaitan
The Stream Team: Gunning down the nanobot menace in the Synced open beta
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.
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