Final Fantasy XI had a busy week with a November patch, that “includes changes to foes in Normal and Intense Ambuscades, a new battlefield and more. Square-Enix also announced a new event coming late November, named Vana’Bout — an amazing co-op campaign where players from all over the world can work together to accumulate enough points for special items as a reward for clearing special Record of Eminence objectives.”
But it’s still in maintenance mode. Totally.
And this is just the beginning of the rest of the news! Read on for a roundup of other smaller MMO news stories and videos from this past week in this edition of The MOP Up (and if you don’t see a news story that we should have covered, drop us a tip)!
Wargaming helped to drum up $1M from World of Tank bundles to buy ambulances for Ukraine. “A total of 90 thousand bundles were purchased, with players from 115 countries participating.”
War Thunder said that it’s banned 4,139 accounts for botting and cheating.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is selling preorders for its physical deluxe edition. This includes a physical copy of the game, the soundtrack, a map, fabric patches, a poster, digital goodies, and 32 stickers. It’s all about the stickers.
Funcom is releasing Dune: Spice Wars on Xbox this November 28.
It’s Reaper Season in Skyforge, with 20 levels of rewards for you to earn.
Even though Unity’s last quarter saw a healthy 69% year-over-year increase, the studio announced even more layoffs to “be leaner, more agile.”
Ankama put out Waven’s 0.13.1 Update with light balancing, bug fixes, and “correcting undesired behaviors.”
RuneScape is activating a brand-new quest and boss battle on November 20th: “Take a stand against Zemouregal and protect your Fort and the rest of Misthalin. Confront the undead hordes and face down the combined might of Zemouregal and Vorkath in a deadly final duel!”
Hero of Aethric celebrated its first anniversary since 2022’s early access launch.
WalkScape walked down its to-do list to get this ARG title ready for a closed beta. “As you can see, we’ve made significant progress in the last two weeks. We have added a lot of content and completed cloud saving, character creation, and made progress on NPC shops. Additionally, we have added the ability to create more than one character.”
“Neowiz has announced that it has invested $17 million in Polish developer Blank Game Studios,” Games Industry reports. “Through the investment, the Korean firm has acquired a 21% stake in the game maker.”
Minimalistway sent us this impressive six-hour documentary about the making of EVE Online:
SMITE’s 2023 Season of Worlds is up and kicking:
Embers Adrift’s creators had fun talking up the new alchemy system:
Get caught up on why big trees are such a major deal in World of Warcraft:
Lost Skies showed a brief clip of a ship sailing through the clouds:
After we posted our timelapse clip last Friday, somebody complimented us on the footage, but asked us to show a ship flight clip next. Well @Ramuh47, who are we to say no?! Footage is early pre-alpha and not representative of final gameplay.#lostskiesgame #gamedev #WIP pic.twitter.com/AkNNX250B1
— Lost Skies (@LostSkiesGame) November 15, 2023
The MMO industry pumps out more and more news every year – no site could possibly cover everything. That’s why we gather together all the extras every week in The MOP Up, our a weekly compilation of MMO info we don’t want lost in the cracks of time. Send us your news bits through our tips line!
