EG7-owned Daybreak Games, the company formerly known as SOE, admitted it’s sold off the entire PlanetSide IP as of January; apparently, it was worth $5.9M to somebody, though we don’t know who it is, and we don’t know what the future of PlanetSide 2 will be.
Meanwhile, SWTOR’s next patch is en route, Skull & Bones officially launched, Throne & Liberty apparently did so poorly in Korea that NCsoft is obfuscating its revenues, and we got our hands on both Nightingale and Pantheon.
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
It looks like the ‘noncore IP’ Daybreak sold for $5.9M is PlanetSide after all - Yesterday, when we covered EG7's Q4 2023 financials, we highlighted the company's disclosure that Daybreak had sold a "noncore IP" for $5.9M, a move that would supposedly improve the company's…
First Impressions: Nightingale’s survival and realmwalking blend could make it a stand-out in the sub-genre - Our regular readers know that the survival sandbox sub-genre is suddenly getting very crowded in very short order, which means that the upcoming gaslamp survivalbox Nightingale has to make some…
Progress Bar: Inside the latest 24-hour pre-alpha test of Pantheon Rise of the Fallen - This past Saturday was when Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen elected to open up its floodgates and let a whole bunch of people into its latest pre-alpha test. And I…
EG7 Q4 2023: DCUO’s delayed latest-gen console launch hurt Daybreak’s revenues last quarter - While bigger games companies continue to flail, EG7 actually managed to grow last year, as its latest investor report demonstrates, with overall revenues up over 9%. However, Q4 2023 itself…
Behaviour’s puzzle MMO Islands of Insight has officially launched on Steam - Last year, we caught wind of a new MMO - and yes, Behaviour Interactive and Lunarch have indeed flagged it as an MMO on Steam - called Islands of Insight.…
NCsoft Q4 2023: Guild Wars 2 is a bright spot for NCsoft as Throne & Liberty stumbles - NCsoft's Q4 2023 financials weren't the perk-up that investors surely wanted to see: The Korean gaming giant reported a 31% drop in revenues in 2023 compared to 2022, a 20%…
Crowfall owner Monumental hit with layoffs while eyeing blockchain - The question of Crowfall's existence has been an unanswered one for quite some time ever since the game was purchased by Mythgard publisher Monumental in 2021, followed by the game…
Diablo IV lands on Xbox Game Pass March 28, Sea of Thieves will expand to PS5 and the Switch - During the much-touted Xbox podcast this afternoon, we learned not just that only four Xbox titles will be set free for other consoles but that Diablo IV is enroute to…
WoW Factor: Steve Danuser was not really the problem with World of Warcraft - So I don't want to sit here and say "oh, things were going so great" before the news that Steve Danuser had actually left World of Warcraft a while ago…
Star Citizen’s live game director vacates position after nine years at CIG - We'll admit that this bit of Star Citizen news is ripe for speculation, and that speculation may be steered by how one feels about the alpha spaceship sandbox, but the…
SWTOR teases GU 7.4.1 Building a Foundation’s Copero Stronghold and Date Night romance content - The BioWare-turned-Broadsword team behind Star Wars The Old Republic is once again heading to Twitch to outline the game's immediate future, which includes GU 7.4.1 and Galactic Season 6: Building…
No Man’s Sky is temporarily free-to-play through Monday as Omega launches - If you already own No Man's Sky, then you're in for a treat today as the Omega update has launched for you. But if you don't already own No Man's…
Working As Intended: 10 City of Heroes Homecoming base builds you need to see - This winter, I've been obsessed with City of Heroes Homecoming's supergroup base builds, which as we've previously discussed here in Working As Intended are super accessible to brand-new characters -…
Embracer confirms layoffs of nearly 1400 people were part of efforts to ‘always maximize shareholder value’ - It's only mid-February but already we have a lead contender for most vile CEO quote of 2024: Embracer Group's third quarter fiscal report is out, and in it we're seeing…
LOTRO Legendarium: Rethinking LOTRO’s landscape soldiers - In December 2009, Lord of the Rings Online added one of its most unique side systems with skirmishes. Not only were these instances flexible in size and difficulty, but they…
Into the Super-Verse: So what can Homecoming do with City of Heroes’ Incarnates? - Last week I talked about the major issues that City of Heroes' Incarnate system introduced to the game, and the fact of the matter is that those issues all predate…
Global Chat: What are the top dragons in EverQuest? - If you were pressed to put together a top 10 list of the most famous and infamous dragons in EverQuest, which beasties would you include? The easy answer is to…
Extraction shooter Hawked has officially launched on PC and consoles - Billing itself as "the ultimate treasure hunt," extraction shooter Hawked officially released this week to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox. On Steam, reviews are already in the "mixed" bin, though the…
Palworld’s community manager suggests you just… play other games if you’re bored - It probably does not need to be restated that Palworld is an odd game. A very odd game, as it happens. But you don't need to be inundated into its…
Four Winds: Phantasy Star Online 2 offers some of the best social features in MMORPGs - I don't know about everyone else, but a huge part of MMOs for me is the fashion. My characters need to absolutely slay the runway before they can even think about even…
Nightingale’s latest trailer teases crafting, combat, and stunning player housing - With its early access release only five days away, gaslamp-fantasy survivalbox - sorry, "open-world survival crafting game" - Nightingale is dropping yet another trailer to entrance would-be players. And admittedly, if…
Skyforge devs promise that ‘development of Skyforge continues’ in spite of long silence - It's been a disturbing long time since we heard much out of Skyforge - it's been two months since a Discord update and a year since a peep on Twitter.…
Massively Overthinking: The last great year of the MMO genre - I was randomly reading an article about shitposting when I came across a phrase that haunts me. The author referred to 2015 as "what many people would agree was the…
Helldivers 2 will ‘never’ add a PvP mode in an effort to ‘reduce toxic elements from the community’ - Arrowhead Studios CEO and Helldivers 2 creative director Johan Pilestedt is once again making headlines for his bold statements about the popular third-person multiplayer shooter. Shortly after he talked about…
Pearl Abyss Q4 2023: Well at least EVE Online had a good financial year - Pearl Abyss, best known to MMO fans for Black Desert and CCP Games' EVE Online, has continued its humdrum financial performance in Q4 2023, with overall revenues of 84.4B KRW…
Haven is a co-op focused MMORPG being built by Blizzard, EA, and Turbine veterans - Merriam-Webster defines the word "haven" as "a place of safety [...] offering favorable opportunities or conditions," but one might argue that most MMORPGs aren't really about people coming together to…
Dune Awakening’s February playtest will apparently be the largest Funcom has ever run - "Many of you have been asking about betas for Dune Awakening," Funcom's latest video about the survival MMO says. So surely that means it's going to give some concrete details…
Guild Wars 2 previews pre-launch updates to its class weapons proliferation - Guild Wars 2 studio ArenaNet dropped a fresh dev blog last night on V-day to herald the impending launch of the game's new weapon proficiencies, slated for the game's next…
New World begins PTR testing of Season of the Guardian and its cooking overhaul today - It's PTR day over in Amazon's New World, as Season of the Guardian - or some of it, anyway - reaches players' test clients today. As announced earlier this week,…
Diablo IV releases its uber unique crafting system, tries selling portal effects for $30 - How much would you pay to get some differently colored portal effects in Diablo IV? Evidently Blizzard believes that fans will shell out $30 for them in a Dark Pathways…
Narrative director Steve Danuser quietly left World of Warcraft last fall - It turns out that World of Warcraft's narrative director left Blizzard last November and no one said anything about it. No, that doesn't mean fans or even the company failed…
Perfect Ten: The 10 phases of MMORPG pre-launch hysteria - One of my private theories about MMO players -- one I'm now making public -- is that we all have the collective memories of goldfish. It's the only way to…
Lost Ark is merging all of its NA and SA servers into ‘one enormous region’ this summer - Smilegate and Amazon apparently have more up their collective sleeve for Lost Ark's second birthday than events and freebies: Last night, Smilegate released a memo directly to the western playerbase,…
Star Wars Galaxies Legends dropped a massive player city upgrade (with roads!) for Valentine’s Day - Star Wars Galaxies rogue server SWG Legends is the home of the event we called the most cursed Valentine's Day event in MMOs as well as the winner of our…
Throne and Liberty reasserts a 2024 global launch as NCsoft releases a siege video - Here's a fun fact: Throne and Liberty is now over two months old on Korean servers. We'll absorb that information as we continue to wait for NCsoft's latest Lineage creation…
Not So Massively: Lightyear Frontier is a charming blend of survivalbox and life sim - Like many people, I spent a lot of last week downloading and trying demos on Steam's Next Fest. There was one I almost didn't even bother to download. Skimming Lightyear…
Wisdom of Nym: What the hey is up with Final Fantasy XIV’s Xbox pricing? - In another theoretical timeline, there's a place where Final Fantasy XIV really would have stepped in it when it subtly noted that the game's subscription on Xbox would require also…
Magic to Master goes crypto, ties down a publisher, and eyes a nebulous February early access release window - With all of the loud goose honking that came out of the gaming industry in 2023, it would be understandably easy to have forgotten about Magic to Master, itself being…
Daybreak’s DC Universe Online studio Dimensional Ink is the latest games team hit with layoffs - The culling of games industry employees continues through the beginning of this year: A list compiled by Kotaku that outlines the over 6,400 layoffs that have occurred across the industry…
Corepunk pushes its next alpha test into late April - So far, hybrid MMO Corepunk has taken its sweet time getting here -- and it doesn't look like that pace is going to change any time soon. Developer Artificial Core…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 457: Sailing into February with cannons blazing
The Stream Team: Stepping into the world of The Wagadu Chronicles
The Stream Team: The Final Vintage of Dungeons & Dragons Online
The Stream Team: Capturing critters and exploring the islands in multiplayer Palworld
The Stream Team: The final steps for a Guild Wars 2 Skyscale
The Stream Team: Mini Mo Mania for the 9th MOPiversary
The Stream Team: AQ3D adds mail in time for Heroes Heart Day
The Stream Team: Taking on the floating giant face as one of the tiny knights in Davigo
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.
