So here we are, ready to embark on the first real week of January 2025, and… oh, what’s that? Tomorrow’s a snow day? Well, so much for getting back to normal! Good thing we have MMOs to play, and we’ve been dipping into quite a few of them: We’ve delivered first impressions of Corepunk and Pantheon, examined Throne & Liberty, offered a guide on starting Warframe, talked about our 2025 gaming resolutions, and consumed popcorn watching Ashes of Creation’s sideshow.
Plus, we finished up our annual awards with our picks for MMORPG of the year, MMO expansion of the year, most anticipated MMO, indie MMO of the year, and biggest surprise, plus our lifetime achievement award.
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
First Impressions: Corepunk offers equal parts charm and tedium - Corepunk's a game I've had on my radar for many years. It's suffered through many delays as its then-Ukrainian-based developers faced a level of hardship most of us can't imagine,…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: MMO Expansion of the Year - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the MMO Expansion of the Year, which was awarded to Guild Wars 2's Secrets of the Obscure last year.…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: MMORPG of the Year - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the MMORPG of the Year, which was awarded to Lord of the Rings Online last year. Longtime readers will…
Lord of the Rings Online explains why it announced the new 64-bit servers early without all the details - The recent furor over Lord of the Rings Online's surprise -- and partial -- announcement that new 64-bit servers are coming to the game with transfers resulted in a riled-up…
Vague Patch Notes: How Throne and Liberty actually got my attention - Leading up to the release of Throne and Liberty, I was not particularly enthusiastic about the game's prospects on a whole. The reasons for this are pretty clear: The game…
MMO Hype Train: Pantheon Rise of the Fallen was not ready for early access - It's absolutely surreal to see that, despite the odds against it, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen actually released -- albeit in early access -- in 2024. Seeing as how I…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: Most Anticipated MMO - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the Most Anticipated MMO, which was controversially awarded to Nightingale last year. This award can be frustrating since many…
Ashes of Creation influencer flames out by making accusations Intrepid calls ‘false and defamatory’ - Whenever YouTubers, content creators, or influencers decide to drop a game that they'd hitched their entire online brand to, it can often have a ripple effect across the community for…
End-of-year Eleven: The best value MMOs at the top of 2025 - So here we are again, at the transition for another year, and let me tell you that I am glad this column went a little bit later. It is not…
Warframe of Mind: Here is how to actually get started in Warframe - Warframe has one of the best tutorial setups of all time. Seriously. The first mission is great, and it immediately throws you into a questline in which you are exploring…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 MMO Lifetime Achievement Award - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards for one more special award. Readers will remember that a few years ago, we decided to institute a lifetime achievement award specifically to…
The best MassivelyOP MMO live streams of 2024 - Thanks to the efforts of MOP's MJ and MOP's Chris - sometimes MOP's Larry too! - the MassivelyOP stream Team puts out around 500 MMO and MMO-adjacent streams every year,…
MassivelyOP’s Weirdest MMO Stories of 2024: The baby bump curse of vengeance - Today we're continuing our traditional countdown of MassivelyOP's weirdest MMORPG stories of the year, that year being 2024! Coming in at #2 on our list is… Tarisland's baby bump curse…
Sci-fi MMORPG Vendetta Online released a whopping 44 updates last year - When you're casting about for a space sim, don't think that Star Citizen and EVE Online are the only games in town. Vendetta Online's been star trekking along since 2004…
Mobile MMO Eterspire drops a content patch and adds a premium service - Did you get a cool new phone or tablet for Christmas and want to fill it up with some games? Here we are to remind you that Eterspire exists, a…
Pantheon Rise of the Fallen takes a victory lap after a milestone-filled 2024 - Last year was an unsurprisingly big one for Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, which means that Visionary Realms is understandably going to feel pretty good about its accomplishments in its…
Final Fantasy XI plans more solo play support in 2025 following its survey of the playerbase - The most recent adventurer survey for 22-year-old Final Fantasy XI got over 13,000 responses from players, and the development team has shared the results. In addition to illuminating that players…
11 year-old MMORPG Royal Quest resurfaces on Steam after a four year-long shutdown - Have you ever heard of Royal Quest? It's OK if you haven't because this one likely flew under the radar even when it was new. Originally from developer Katauri Interactive…
The Daily Grind: What’s the most expensive MMORPG right now at the top of 2025? - Your kneejerk answer to this morning's Daily Grind is probably going to be Star Citizen, and I get that urge. But in reality, most of what people are paying into…
Massively Overthinking: Our MMO goals and resolutions for 2025 - Every year when we post this traditional Massively Overthinking roundtable, at least one person on staff dithers because not every one does "resolutions." We get it. Treating commitments to random…
Persist Online stumps for FFA PvP as an essential storytelling and gameplay driver in its open world - Stop us if you've heard this one before: The only way that players can tell truly dynamic stories in an open MMO world is by making it possible for them…
Embers Adrift closed out 2024 with a quality-of-life patch and two new raid bosses - With full free-to-play -- including subscriber perks -- continuing in Embers Adrift as the studio gets a handle on its payment processing, the throwback MMO closed out 2024 with a…
Black Desert observes seven days of mourning after Korean airline crash, postponing New Year’s events - One of the truly horrifying and sad events over the holidays happened when a South Korean airline crashed upon landing in Muan, killing 179 people on board. As the country…
The best MassivelyOP community Daily Grinds of 2024 - In just another month or two, we're coming up on MOP's independence day, marking 10 years since we went indie, and nowhere is that more numerically obvious than in our…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: Indie MMO of the Year - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the Indie MMO of the Year, which was awarded to Project Gorgon last year. All indie MMOs, crowdfunded or…
Happy New Year to all the uplifting things in MMOs, 2024 edition - So last night, as is tradition, we posted our list of all the reasons we can't have nice things in MMOs and torched them with a flamethrower. OK, the flamethrower…
Goodbye to all the reasons we can’t have nice things in MMOs, 2024 edition - Listen, I'm not going to pretend 2024 was great. It wasn't great in the real world, and it wasn't great in the games industry - especially the MMORPG industry. Thousands…
Choose My Adventure: All of the MMOs you made us play in 2024 - This past year was full of ups and downs. You could arguably say that about any year, sure, but I felt it much more acutely this year on both a…
MassivelyOP’s 2024 Awards: Biggest MMO Surprise - Welcome back to Massively Overpowered's formal end-of-the-year awards! Today's award is for the Biggest MMO Surprise, which was awarded to SWTOR's move to Broadsword last year. This category is meant to…
The Daily Grind: Which MMORPG has the brightest future heading into 2025? - Consider this end-of-the-year Daily Grind a sort of hopeful counterpart to the "stormiest future" fauxward, as instead of talking about the MMOs we're worried about, we're talking about the ones…
Ubisoft shooter XDefiant issues an immense final update ahead of its June 3 sunset - When multiplayer and MMO titles shut down, they can either go out with a bang, go out with a whimper, or in the case of Ubisoft's arena shooter XDefiant, they…
Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV’s Summoner has always been a problem - Over the course of Final Fantasy XIV's run, we have encountered a lot of primals. There are the seven who    are fought in the main story of the…
Superhero MMO project City of Titans shows off gameplay improvements after a quiet 2024 - It's probably not the best sign when a developing MMO barely pokes its head up to make any sort of fuss over the course of an entire year (and sadly…
The Daily Grind: Will you Kickstart any MMOs in 2025? - It's actually been several years since we had a pure MMORPG blow up on Kickstarter, but we've certainly seen survival sandboxes and mini-MMOs do well. Heck, in 2024, the biggest…
THIS WEEK’S CASTS & STREAMS
Massively OP Podcast Episode 499: The holiday mailbag explosion
The best MassivelyOP MMO live streams of 2024
The Stream Team: Taking the new Deadeye class out for a quick spin in Black Desert
The Stream Team: The Madness of Crowds in Dungeons & Dragons Online
The Stream Team: Jumping blind into Path of Exile 2
The Stream Team: A new year means trying a new game with a friend in Marvel Rivals
The Stream Team: Mounting up in AdventureQuest 3D to leave the old year in the dust
The Stream Team: Sneak Out is a perfect time to penguin
The Stream Team: Rockets and rain in Planet Crafter
The Stream Team: Continuing the quest for gigantic silverware in 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.
