Most MMO players who thought World of Warcraft should have housing also never expected it to happen, largely because, you know, the devs kept saying so – but it is happening now, as this past week Blizzard announced that the game’s next expansion, Midnight, will indeed finally include player housing. Twenty years past due, perhaps, but we’ll take it.
Meanwhile, we’re gearing up for Guild Wars 2’s Godspawn, SWTOR’s GU 7.6, and WoW Classic Classic.
And if you’re among the folks looking for a new social media home, we’re on Bluesky and Mastodon!
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
Warcraft Direct: World of Warcraft Midnight has player housing, WoW Classic Pandaria in 2025, and WoW Classic Classic - Friends, today is not-BlizzCon, which is to say that Blizzard decided not to hold a BlizzCon event in the year when World of Warcraft is turning 20 years old and…
Guild Wars 2’s Janthir Wilds: Godspawn update arrives November 19 – plus we’ve got roadmap updates - Don't let Guild Wars 2's performance in NCsoft's Q3 financials get you down: The next chunk of the Janthir Wilds expansion is just around the corner. It's called Godspawn, and…
WoW Factor: Home is where the heart is, even in World of Warcraft - It has been a curious sensation these last few months, looking at World of Warcraft: The War Within and not wanting to play. That might not sound weird, but... it…
WoW Factor: Thoughts on World of Warcraft getting housing and Classic Classic fresh start servers - With no BlizzCon this year and a pretty full and constantly updating roadmap for World of Warcraft unfolding (including this month's 20th anniversary activities), I wasn't expecting any huge bombshells…
Here’s everything you need to know about next week’s WoW Classic Classic launch - With yesterday's surprise announcement that WoW Classic is launching "Classic Classic" fresh start realms next week on November 21st, plenty of questions were raised about what these new servers will…
Star Wars The Old Republic confirms GU 7.6 for early December but delays its story launch for quality reasons - Remember back in September when Star Wars: The Old Republic developer Broadsword said it would share more about Game Update 7.6 in November? Well a lot of that sharing was…
Blizzard insists World of Warcraft’s housing won’t just be Garrisons 2.0 - So World of Warcraft is getting player housing, and this announcement was so big that nobody seems to remember or be talking about anything else from last Wednesday's Warcraft Direct…
MMO Hype Train: Into the Echo and the wish for a time travel MMO - Are there any MMO projects that you suspect only you remember and care about -- but everyone else has forgotten? I feel that way about Into the Echo, an interesting indie MMORPG…
Fallout 76 celebrates six years of failure, triumph, and bobbleheads - Happy sixth anniversary to Fallout 76, which released on November 14th, 2018! When it originally came out six years ago, Fallout 76 went from being incredibly anticipated and overhyped to…
Whatever happened to the relaunched sandbox MMORPG Legends of Aria Classic? - This week appears to be the kind of week where we flip through the old albums and see why there hasn't been anything major cropping up. This time around we're…
Retro RPG Sea of Stars adds couch co-op with its newest patch - If you've played Sea of Stars before now, you know that the game is definitely built in no small part on reminding you about games from the SNES era in…
Phoenix Labs is introducing transparent lockboxes to Dauntless - Last week, Dauntless promised that it would summarize the features of its revamp-filled Awakening update in a follow-up to its recent progress report. That synopsis has now come online, which…
MMO Business Roundup: Embracer Q2 2024, Steam toxicity, and GOG’s game preservation program - Welcome back to another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news. Business business business! Embracer Embracer - the failson megacorp we keep an eye on because it's been busy slow-shuttering…
Skull & Bones Season 4 brings new threats, a new ship, and a parrot November 19 - For all of the pirate-y things that the multiplayer world of Skull & Bones offers, the one thing that's been missing all this time is that most ubiquitous of accessories:…
Stars Reach says it ‘heard you loud and clear on graphics improvements’ - Last week's Stars Reach trailer captured a lot of attention - so much that studio Playable Worlds decided to focus this week's dev blog on explaining why it's putting out…
Nexon vows to add jiggle physics to The First Descendant, preps S2 for December - Once upon a time, there was a hero shooter that was legendary for the horny art it received. When the sequel came out, the horny art stopped. Was this a…
Massively Overthinking: What are the great ‘popcorn games’ in the MMORPG genre? - MOP reader Elenie recently put the concept of "popcorn MMOs" back on my radar thanks to a comment about Neverwinter being an MMO many folks want to play only lightly.…
Post-Proving Grounds, Pax Dei is already planning another crafting and gathering rebalance - So, how did Pax Dei's Proving Grounds update go last week? Well, you can probably guess by the fact that Mainframe Industries has put out a series of memos that…
Guild Wars 2 unveils Mount Balrior, its first proper raid in five years - So if you're looped into the Guild Wars 2 scene, you already know that the second big chunk of the four-part Janthir Wilds expansion is coming to the game next…
Fight or Kite: Age of Empires Mobile is a gacha-encrusted, overmonetized monstrosity - I’ve always been a bit of a fan of the Age of Empires IP despite not being MOP’s resident RTS gamer. That’s an honor bestowed to Tyler F.M. Edwards, whose…
Vague Patch Notes: Going solo isn’t a problem in MMORPGs - So I'm wrapping up a month of talking about how MMORPGs are by necessity social games. These are games in which you need other people around, and if you don't…
Path of Exile apologizes for botched account update that took the game offline yesterday - Earlier this week, Path of Exile studio Grinding Gear Games announced that it was planning a fresh patch with important changes to account management ahead of Path of Exile 2's…
Astroneer’s first-ever DLC, Glitchwalkers, has arrived with a freaky new planet in tow - Astroneer is a beloved multiplayer sandbox around here, but even we were surprised back in September when System Era Softworks announced Glitchwalkers - its first formal DLC in seven years.…
Nightingale promises a focus on deeper systems and has ‘zero intention’ to shut down - Obviously no multiplayer game studio wants to shutter their game, but after two rounds of layoffs at Inflexion Games, it's obviously hard for Nightingale fans to not harbor that concern.…
Say hello to Ruckus, the team behind your new favorite co-op smash-and-grab survival game - If you're wondering who's making all that ruckus this morning, rest assured it's Ruckus Games: It's a new studio put together by former devs from Bethsoft, Gearbox, Riot, Blizzard, Epic,…
Sea of Thieves is ‘fixing’ Safer Seas by making it… less usable for leveling - Look out, Sea of Thieves has laid out a cunning trap for you! It's called a developer update for the week, and it's in video form and just below, featuring…
Star Citizen launches a new multi-stage Save Stanton event to pad the time until alpha 4.0 - There's going to be some time between now and when alpha 4.0 arrives to Star Citizen. So what are players supposed to do in the meantime? Why, defend the Stanton…
Guild Wars 2 just launched on the Epic Games Store – here’s the new trailer - Yesterday, when ArenaNet laid down Guild Wars 2's roadmap for the next few months, the studio teased that the game would be coming to the Epic Games Store later in…
Perfect Ten: Why I still love Final Fantasy XI today - You know what's really funny to me when I think about it for more than five minutes? Final Fantasy XI is, at this point, older now than I was when…
Elder Scrolls Online releases U44 on console as ZeniMax Workers United goes on strike - Elder Scrolls Online console players are finally getting their crack at the unexcitingly named Update 44 today as the update that's been live on PC since October finally rolls out…
PvE co-op survivalbox Aloft confirms its early access launch for January 15 - We've been following the development Aloft for a little while now; it's the upcoming co-op survival sandbox that involves exploring floating islands and transforming them into flying homes, all with…
Pearl Abyss Q3 2024: Black Desert declines, EVE Online flattens, Crimson Desert dithers - Pearl Abyss - minus Pearl Abyss America head Jeonghee Jin, who left for NCsoft America this past summer - released its Q3 2024 financials this week, and it's a mixed…
Nexon Q3 2024: DNF Mobile and MapleStory propel Nexon to record-high revenues - Nexon is celebrating its Q3 2024 financials this week - and we do mean celebrating, as the company claimed "record-breaking quarterly revenue" of ¥135.6B - around $877M US. Nexon owes…
Overwatch 2 launches Overwatch Classic, Diablo IV says way too many of y’all are playing Spiritborn - Blizzard fans eagerly awaiting the Warcraft Direct showcase later today already have plenty to tide them over thanks to two big drops from the company last night. First, Overwatch 2…
EG7 Q3 2024: EverQuest, LOTRO, and Palia gave Daybreak its best quarter all year - The quarterly financials avalanche continues this week with Enad Global 7, better known to MMORPG fans as the company that bought Daybreak and then kinda got taken over from the…
Choose My Adventure: Roaming the wild frontier is the quintessence of Red Dead Online - When my best friend Britarnya started to get deep into her Red Dead Online cups, she was mostly just riding around the game's prairie looking for trouble or running into…
Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen launches into early access on December 13 – plus it’s coming to Steam - On December 13th, it will be go time for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen players who have eagerly awaited the official early access launch of this crowdfunded MMO. This afternoon,…
Neverwinter’s 30th module – Return to Pirates’ Skyhold – launches November 19 - Given all the layoffs at Cryptic this fall as its MMORPGs transition to Deca Games, you might be wondering what's next for said MMORPGs. Well, we've got some good news…
NCsoft Q3 2024: NCsoft teases Aion 2 for 2025, says Throne & Liberty sales ‘surpassed internal projections’ - It's been one hell of a quarter for NCsoft - and we mean that for every interpretation of the phrase. As readers might recall, in its Q2 2024 earnings report…
Final Fantasy XIV’s first post-Dawntrail content update, Crossroads, is officially live - "Our journey will never end" is a lyrical refrain from a few songs in Final Fantasy XIV, and that proves to be true once more as the MMORPG has officially…
Ubisoft faces proposed class action lawsuit over shutdown of The Crew - In spite of Ubisoft's attempts to mollify angry gamers over its shuttering and subsequent removal of The Crew by confirming offline modes for the series' other two titles, the problem…
EVE Online’s Revenant expansion has officially launched – its 50th major release since 2003 - EVE Online is getting a big jolt of content and activity today thanks to the release of the Revenant expansion, which - if Wikipedia's list of major updates and expansions…
Wisdom of Nym: Things I want from Final Fantasy XIV that I fully expect to never get - The fact that I want something in Final Fantasy XIV does not make it a good idea. There are dropped threads that the game has never picked up that might…
Nintendo’s patent lawsuit against Palworld studio is hunting for an injunction and $66K - The middle of September saw the megahit monster collecting survivalbox Palworld rouse the boundless litigious ire of Nintendo when the latter slapped the former with a Japanese patent lawsuit. Information…
Corepunk updates its website, reopens pre-orders, releases Episode 2, and debuts a new early access trailer - This week was a particularly busy one for the MMOARPG Corepunk, as developer Artificial Core has put its nose to the grindstone to make a host of updates to the…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 493: Landing on Brighter Shores
The Stream Team: Coping with a lack of Monster Hunter Wilds by playing Monster Hunter World
The Stream Team: Restoring the sanity of giants in Dungeons & Dragons Online
The Stream Team: Backseat Streaming goes on a Don’t Starve scavenger hunt in Terraria
The Stream Team: Multiplayer MechWarrior 5 Clans action with a friend
The Stream Team: Wrapping up Guild Wars 2’s current Janthir Wilds story
The Stream Team: Astroneer Glitchwalkers is live!
The Stream Team: Taking the first walk through Final Fantasy XIV’s latest alliance raid
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.
