We’re in that lovely space between the holidays and the end of the year, but believe it or not, there was still MMO stuff happening this week! We fretted over Elder Scrolls Online’s new cadence, dug into LOTRO’s 2025 roadmap, cherished Warframe’s storytelling, gave impressions of FFXIV’s 7.15 patch, blinked at WoW players trying to make the plague happen again, clapped for Corepunk finally coming back online, and counted out the big MMO crowdfunding news of the year as well as our favorite expansions.
Plus, we’ve been continuing our annual awards, delivering our picks for best business model, best not-so-massively game, best crafting, story of the year, best classic MMO, best housing, and worst business model. And of course, we’ve been regaling our readers with our year in review series and Golden Yachties. In other words, you’ve got a lot to catch up on!
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
Tamriel Infinium: I’m no doomer, but I’m worried about the future of Elder Scrolls Online - If alarm bells were faintly ringing over Elder Scrolls Online owing to events transpiring early in December, now they're blaring klaxons with the release of the 2025 roadmap. No matter…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: Not-So-Massively Game of the Year - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the Not-So-Massively Game of the Year, which was awarded Baldur's Gate 3Â last year. The games eligible for this…
End-of-Year Eleven: The top MMO expansions of 2024 - Around the Massively OP office, the common consensus is that 2024 ended up being the Year of the MMO Expansion. After all, we got so, so many of them, with…
LOTRO Legendarium: Digging into LOTRO’s 2025 roadmap and new server panic - There's nothing like being far away from home on a late-December vacation only to get the notice that, hey, Lord of the Rings Online dropped its 2025 roadmap! That was…
Warframe of Mind: Appreciating the opaque nonsense of Warframe’s storytelling - Back in 2018, I played Warframe for the first time as part of Choose My Adventure, and I knew that it was going to take me some work to get…
Tree of Savior to merge its Brazilian and North American servers together - It feels as though it was just yesterday -- but in actuality, it was last August -- that Papaya Play opened up a special Brazilian-located server for its MMO Tree…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Golden Yachties: Best worst post - MassivelyOP's not-so-serious end-of-the-year awards continue today with our award for the Best worst post. The Golden Yachties series is our run of fauxwards, named in honor of somebody we've long…
Massively on the Go: Pokemon GO’s January dough - Pokemon Go's Dual Destiny season continues in January, and Niantic's starting the year with some new(ish) pokemon it's teasing. Some are genuinely new, like Fidough, but I'm guessing mystery Dynamax 'mon…
Make My MMO: The biggest MMO crowdfunding stories of 2024 - Welcome to a Very Special end-of-the-year edition of Make My MMO, the MassivelyOP column where - most weeks - we keep track of the crowdfunded MMOs in our genre, in…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: Best MMO Housing - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the Best MMO Housing, which was awarded to Villagers & Heroes last year. MMORPGs eligible for this award may…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: Best Classic MMO - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the Best Classic MMO, which was awarded to Final Fantasy XIÂ last year. We've been running this award since…
The great and majestic One Shots Awards of 2024 - Forget all of those other Massively OP awards you've seen cross your desktop for the past few weeks -- we all know that there's only one award post that truly means…
Publishing of Tower of Fantasy Global will revert to Perfect World in 2025 - It looks as if Tencent's Level Infinite is going to be passing the Tower of Fantasy football back to its home company, as the publisher announced that the multiplayer RPG's…
Riot Games tries to rebuff report that Arcane TV series was a ‘financial miss’ for League of Legends - It's pretty easy to assume that animated shows are trying to sell toys and games to people; that's been a thing for a very long time now. However, Riot Games'…
Final Fantasy XIV dev discusses over-streamlined battle content as the Heavensturn New Year’s event returns December 31 - [AL:FFXIV]If you follow the wider discourse of the Final Fantasy XIV community, you probably have run into some people complaining that battle content in the MMORPG has become a bit…
Vague Patch Notes: My favorite five MMO columns of the year edition - So I don't usually do these for a couple reasons. For starters, they always feel kind of like self-promotion, an activity that I am famously terrible at beyond the bare…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: MMO Story of the Year - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the MMO Story of the Year, which was awarded to the Activision-Blizzard/Microsoft merge last year. This isn’t an…
WoW Classic players manage to recreate the infamous Corrupted Blood event - One of the most notable community-sparked events of vanilla World of Warcraft in 2005 came back again in 2024. This would be the Corrupted Blood plague, where players figured out…
A look back at the MMO and gaming science topics of 2024 - If you've been reading MassivelyOP for a while, you probably know that we like science kind of a lot around here, and there's no getting around the reality that it…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: Best MMO Crafting - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the Best MMO Crafting, which was last awarded to Final Fantasy XIV way back in 2020. We retired…
The Game Archaeologist’s ultimate MMO archives, 2024 edition - While MMORPGs constitute a shifting, ever-evolving market, their history remains surprisingly evergreen. That's what history is: Facts and stories stamped and preserved for our learning and edification. Also, there's something…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Golden Yachties: Most embarrassing MMO announcement - MassivelyOP's not-so-serious end-of-the-year awards continue today with our award for the Most embarrassing MMO announcement. The Golden Yachties series is our run of fauxwards, named in honor of somebody we've…
Choose My Adventure: Wrapping up Victory is Life and wrapping my head around a new ship in Star Trek Online - Well, this final Choose My Adventure for this year has certainly been a journey. For a couple of reasons. First, I've gotten through the other side of the Victory is…
War Thunder nerds have once again posted classified hardware docs to argue for game vehicle balance - Would it even be Christmas if the community management team of War Thunder didn't have to clean up another classified document leak from its official forums because someone was using…
Shroud of the Avatar lead dev joins another new studio, this time as ‘chief velocity officer’ - Remember when gamers noticed how Shroud of the Avatar and Catnip Games' Chris Spears was quietly forming a new game studio to put together a battle royale RPG known as…
Conan Exiles players were murdered nearly 10M times by werehyenas, according to Funcom’s 2024 stats - Whenever you're playing Conan Exiles, the obvious response to someone shouting, "Werehyena!" is to point and then say, "There hyena!" It's a laugh riot. And then you are mauled by…
Fight or Kite: Multiversus is actually still incredible – but it’s not without some missteps - I’ve been waffling on what MMOs to play in this upcoming holiday break since I’ve got a handful of long-term games already in session. It's probably because - as I’ve…
LOTRO promises more details about upcoming 64-bit servers in January - As Standing Stone Games' dev team spins down for the holidays, one final 2024 LOTRO stream came out of the studio last week tidying up the news and events in…
Wisdom of Nym: The highs – and lows – of Final Fantasy XIV’s patch 7.15 stories - Technically, Final Fantasy XIV's patch 7.15 contains one piece of ongoing content... insofar as you're going to keep turning in custom deliveries to Nitowikwe for several more weeks, and then…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: Best MMO Business Model - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the Best MMO Business Model, which was awarded to Final Fantasy XIV last year. The award is intended…
Greg Street talks about Project Ghost’s central city and its interplay with classes and missions - Fantastic Pixel Castle's Greg Street decided this past weekend to waft out a random Twitter thread about his developing MMO project Ghost, and once again his mind is turning back…
Once Human’s new achievements are powered by cash shop currency – obviously, players aren’t happy - News about what's next for survivalbox Once Human was pouring out of NetEase's Starry Studio last week to the point that a bit of eyebrow-raising new monetization that landed with…
Throne and Liberty addresses pain points of overwhelming dailies and janky combat - It's not just the end of the year for Throne and Liberty; it's also the end of the MMO's launch year here in the west. To mark the occasion, Globalization…
Corepunk hands out mount cosmetics instead of restoring lost items - Earlier this week we checked in on Corepunk to follow up on earlier server crashes, finding that servers have been mostly restored (albeit with a slight rollback) and that new…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
The MassivelyOP Podcast in review, 2024 edition
The Stream Team: Exploring the newly added Feybreak island in Palworld
The Stream Team: Gassing the great beacon riots of DDO’s Stormreach
The Stream Team: Comparing MMO Yule Logs for Christmas
The Stream Team: Christmas Eve capers in Guild Wars 2’s Wintersday
The Stream Team: Taking on Warframe 1999’s tank
The Stream Team: Post-Christmas construction in Kallax
The Stream Team: Year-end terraforming in Planet Crafter
The Stream Team: Closing out a year of Final Fantasy XIV adventuring
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.
