If I were a conspiracy theory sort of human, I would certainly be watching the Reddit meltdown with great interest, as the CEO of the company appears intent on destroying what’s left of the platform’s social and financial value and its most loyal volunteers – which affects even the MMORPG genre, since so much MMORPG discourse has migrated from local forums to global Reddits, often in spite of protests from actual players.
Meanwhile, we celebrated Marvel Heroes, Embracer announced cancelations and layoffs, Blue Protocol launched in Japan, EVE Online and SWTOR both saw new updates, Lord of the Rings Online teased its new class and race, and that glowing haze of embers you saw in the sky all last week was just the Magic to Master dumpster fire continuing to burn.
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
Into the Super-Verse: What made Marvel Heroes so special? - This month we mark a particularly sad anniversary in the MMO space: The 10th anniversary of the launch of Marvel Heroes. By all rights, this game still should be going…
Lord of the Rings Online announces River Hobbits, Mariner class, and stat squish - A Friday Q&A session with Lord of the Rings Online's executive producer turned into a treasure trove of exciting information for the MMO's fans. Rob Ciccolini confirmed a new race,…
Reddit CEO remains unfazed by blackout protests, calls organizing moderators ‘landed gentry’ - This week saw a pretty significant lashing out from the vast majority of Reddit, as multiple subreddits, including several that serve MMORPG communities, went completely dark as part of a…
Embracer (Gearbox) announces major restructure with layoffs and canceled games - Just three weeks ago, Embracer Group - the megacorp that owns gobs of properties, including Gearbox, which governs Cryptic and a bunch of MMORPGs we care about - admitted that…
Funcom has unceremoniously axed Advisors of Rubi-Ka, Anarchy Online’s player volunteer program - Unfortunately, we've got another blast of bad news out of Funcom this afternoon - a studio not exactly known for properly maintaining its old properties. This time, the victim is…
WoW Factor: Age vs. World of Warcraft vs. player retention - In my time, I have gone from being a young man to an old man on the interwebs. I have gone from being a hyper-enthusiastic 13-year-old scraping time on the…
Vague Patch Notes: So why didn’t crowdfunded MMOs save the genre? - The past few weeks we've been following this freakin' thing because... well, obvious reasons. But that has me thinking about crowdfunding in general, because we've gone in an interesting trajectory.…
Star Citizen is creeping up on $600M in crowdfunding, outstripping many AAA titles’ budgets - It's time for our semi-annual (semi-monthly? semi-regular?) look at the funding page for Star Citizen, and once more we're seeing the cost of keeping the alpha in an alpha continue…
Activision-Blizzard shareholders propose a measure that guarantees non-interference with organizing workers - The shareholders of Activision-Blizzard are about to come together to vote on a variety of company proposals, and one of those proposals might raise a few eyebrows, as if adopted…
Post-Gamigo Fractured, back home with Dynamight, is finally reopening testing June 22 - It appears the long-running Fractured drama might truly be over as Dynamight Studios is getting back to its test plans. Readers will recall that Fractured is a Kickstarted sandbox that…
Chronicles of Elyria dev insists it will ‘return as a full-fledged MMO in no time’ - Speaking of crowdfunded MMOs that ended up being a major disappointment (and the subject of a backer lawsuit), Chronicles of Elyria apparently hasn't given up the ghost yet. In a…
Massively Overthinking: Does whaling ruin MMOs? - Last week, I was chatting with a MOP reader (hi Bryan!) in our comments about Lord of the Rings Online's business model - both models, really. It has the basic…
Chrono Odyssey continues to drip-feed details of its classes, creatures, and mechanics - Npixel's upcoming MMORPG Chrono Odyssey continues its "hurry up and wait" stance in terms of information details, with its biggest info drop coming via a trailer last month. Even so,…
Desert Oasis: Black Desert’s Land of the Morning Light design makes perfect practical and aesthetic sense - In the last edition of Desert Oasis, I barely scratched the surface of Black Desert's Land of the Morning Light expansion. I've still got so much to say about the…
Why I Play: Six things that thrill me about Marvel Snap - At this point, I've now played more Marvel Snap than I have of my last digital card game obsession, Hearthstone. Since getting into it last November, I've clocked at least…
Forgotten Realms’ Ed Greenwood helms Neverwinter’s 10th anniversary events, starting today - A week ago, we noted that Neverwinter was already gearing up for its 10th anniversary, and Cryptic is not letting this one slide under the radar. Today, the studio announced…
Blue Protocol, celebrating Japanese launch, still plans a western beta later this year - The Amazon team responsible for Blue Protocol's upcoming Western release continues to be a day late, as last night the team released a message about the game's Japanese launch from…
Gameforge’s DMCA filing took the Magic to Master Kickstarter down, alleging stolen Metin2 assets - We return to the bizarre and spiraling story of Magic to Master, an old Korean MMORPG brought to Kickstarter by Hungarian studio Laniatus. We're not going to do a full…
The Magic to Master mess devolved into DMCA abuse as Laniatus promises launch ‘regardless of Kickstarter’ - We've been trying real hard not to have to write about this game again, but here we are back touching base on the Magic to Master saga, the slow rolling…
Tarisland offers its first preview of the MMO’s classes starting with the High Elf Mage - Tarisland has once again put forth yet another video, only this time it's not about the setting or the world or even the game's elves; it's about the Mage class.…
Perfect Ten: Thoughts on Star Wars The Old Republic’s impending move to Broadsword - My relationship with Star Wars: The Old Republic is best described as "complicated." The game launched at a time when I was still pretty early in my career, and with…
Desert Oasis: First impressions of Black Desert’s Land of the Morning Light - Long-time Black Desert players know about a little town on the northwest corner of the map. It's the city of Port Ratt, and for years, it's been a pretty neat…
Wurm Online’s corporate owner plans a game rebrand and a new integrated cash shop - Who had "Wurm Online shakes things up in a big way" on their 2023 MMO Bingo card? Nobody? That's what we thought. In an industry that keeps on surprising, we…
Amazon Games’ Bill Trost vacates creative director position to become lead designer for Ashes of Creation - The name of Bill Trost will likely strike familiar to older vets of the MMORPG genre. He was one of the original design leads for EverQuest, was also the creative…
Black Desert’s Land of the Morning Light expansion officially launches today - It's launch day for Black Desert's massive Land of the Morning Light expansion. "Land of the Morning Light invites players to a new region inspired by the Joseon period, Korea’s…
Court grants FTC temporary restraining order to block Microsoft/ABK merge ahead of ongoing lawsuit - Yesterday, we reported on the FTC's appeal to the US District Court of Northern California to block Microsoft's buyout of Activision-Blizzard. The FTC maintained that it had seen press reports…
Lost Ark’s Elgacia continent and latest abyssal dungeon arrive tomorrow with the June patch - We're just one day away from Lost Ark's June update, so naturally Amazon is pulling out all the stops on previewing the content - and maybe feeling a little bit…
Fight or Kite: Tower of Fantasy might be your Blue Protocol stopgap - Good news, everyone! No wait, it’s bad news: Blue Protocol’s global release was delayed a while back. It's a real bummer because I’m a huge anime nerd, and I was…
Choose My Adventure: Settling into Age of Conan’s uncomfortable routine - Today's Choose My Adventure column is about the groove. I think some folks know what I mean in relation to MMOs (or even gaming in general). It's that moment when…
Overwatch 2 discusses the Invasion update’s PvE missions – and the price you’ll have to pay to keep them - PvE is finally coming to Overwatch 2 with the release of the Invasion update on August 10th, but the latest post from the game has unveiled a very large string…
Pax Dei discusses alpha test plans, monetization, building mechanics, and blending PvP with PvE - Most of the time when a game puts out an FAQ, it's generally not too helpful or full of interesting information. That certainly can't be said about the recently released…
EVE Online launches its Viridian summer expansion today [Update: It’s live!] - EVE Online's big summer expansion is finally here, and CCP Games is hoping that players will embrace its theme of "Express Your Identity." [AL:EVE]The Viridian expansion to the long-running space…
Star Wars: The Old Republic launches Old Wounds today with new story content - We're going to warn you ahead of time that anyone with at least a cursory knowledge of Simon and Garfunkel will be absolutely intolerable making jokes about the newest Flashpoint…
Skull & Bones will finally hit closed beta in August after at least half a dozen delays - It's looking like maybe Ubisoft's Skull & Bones' sixth delay might have been its last, as Ubisoft finally announced this afternoon at Ubisoft Forward 2023 that the pirate MMO's closed…
Wisdom of Nym: Has Final Fantasy XIV had less stuff to do each patch in Endwalker? - Just to make a point, I am going to start off this column by answering the question factually, and the answer is "no." Final Fantasy XIV has had the same…
Tower of Fantasy is coming to PlayStation without cross-platform play – and the devs aren’t happy about it at all - It's not every day that you see a game studio openly frustrated with its own publisher, so gather the kids around the computer screen to witness this historical moment. So…
Lord of the Rings Online boss is ‘very psyched’ about possible big lag fix - Everybody's number one complaint with Lord of the Rings Online is, of course, server performance and lag. And it's to this end that Standing Stone Games' engineers have been working…
Dune Awakening video shows off its five pillars of design: ‘Play the way you want to play’ - With Dune: Part 2 coming to movie theaters later this year, excitement for this long-running franchise is pretty high. That's especially true when you stack Funcom's Dune Awakening on top…
All your favorite MMORPG subreddits went dark over Reddit’s ruinous anti-app plans - Discord must be loving this: All the big MMORPG subreddits have been flagged private right now in protest over Reddit's planned API switcharoo, with many Reddits directing gamers to Discord…
Diablo IV plans 13-page patch while players advocate for missing features - With some of the launch week insanity already dying down in Diablo IV, the dev team took time to sit down for a "campfire chat" with the community about next…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 425: A disturbance in the Force of SWTOR
The Stream Team: Trying out the Storm Blast powers for real in City of Heroes Homecoming
The Stream Team: Dungeons & Dragons night begins its first adventure
The Stream Team: Talking Star Trek Online’s Unraveled with devs
The Stream Team: Backseat Streaming runs The Dragon Lair in Guild Wars
The Stream Team: Running through the Fall Guys gauntlet
The Stream Team: Guild Wars 2’s Mordremoth world summit
The Stream Team: The Covetous Courtier in Warframe’a Duviri Paradox
The Stream Team: Re-learning the Dark Knight class of Final Fantasy XIV
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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